So yeah, just like I said, spawn rape only occurs when one side has massive logistical failure. Defending or attacking a spawn point was a tactical move. I'm going to go ahead and guess I played more battles than you did, and spawn rape was relatively rare in the first place, given two non-fail organized sides in more or less the same timezones. When it did happen it was foremost because one team did not have enough equipment for all it's tickets, or no equipment at all. I'm still not getting this so-called "abuse" you're talking about, or the clans who "abused" it to do great, especially considering the initial land grab was fought against AI, who always had topped off equip/ticket ratio and often a full team of randoms. Spawn rape wasn't possible. Spawn rape only happened later on when two player sides would fight each other, and again, always due to logistical failure on one side. If you have a well equipped army of 2000 fighting against 100 (incidentally which battle was this) and the 100 have twice as many players, it's a logistical fail on your part.
Which one are you interested in: Pecores v. Nordmen of Fenada (2000 v. 191, 191 won, i was mercing for winning team), Nordmen of Fenada v. Those Grubby Serfs (i was defending), LLJK (before they temporarily lost their homeland) forget attacker but i was both defending and attacking in those fights, 22nd v. Roaming Ranger Company, Druzhina v. pretty much every templar fight near the end (defending), etc. etc. Yes, a few of those were equipment failures, but most was having more mercs show up than the other team and thereby getting 50:1 k/ds.
To give you an idea, after the first 1000 died in the pecores fight they ran out of equipment, but we had already killed 1000 with only 191 tags by attacking their spawn, not only this situation but in the other battle situations I described it wasn't really an equipment failure so much as 24 mercenaries might show up one one side and another 44 might show up on the other side, so that tags stopped mattering if you had more mercs showed up, you could spawn rape them and so having 200000 v. 100 might not even matter if the 200000 had only 2 merc and you had 60 with the 100. Toward the end of strategus there were a lot of deceitful tactics taking place to take advantage of this like deleting enemy team rosters just before the fight(chadz did a semi-fix i think for this), enemy team vote-kick/ban opposing players off if they ahd even 1 less player (win the 51% vote) so they would end up with far less players (chadz made this bannable offense), getting neutral people thata re actually in your clan but don't carry the clan tag for this and other reasons to apply for fights and then purposefully no-show so the team would be short-handed or attack at odd time periods so you know they couldn't hire enough mercs for a full roster and you would get your whole clan to show up. This also goes on and on and it came down to the fact that killing people as they respawn in order to represent all your tickets was a cheap way tow in.
Also, I found battle server pretty boring so I merced for almost every strategus fight I could sometimes as many as 10 a day (how i got to level 47) so yes I definitely mercd for more and greater variety of fights both attacking and defending and this was abused very often and was the worst feature of the old Strategus. Look at any other game with deathmatch mode and they have multiple spawn points to avoid this game abuse because its a cheap tactic that has nothing to do with medieval strategy but everything to do with the limitations of a game/computer to simulate a full battle. Near the end of strategus this actually was a widely complained about issue, its just faded over time with no strategus around.
Since we have to have spawn points, the main change is simply to have mutiple spawn points like most other games and fix this issue.
