[Add-on] Strategus Tool Belt (STB)

[Butan]

The crime feature was introduced to prevent people from afk'ing/turtling while retaining their defensive potential and interdicting more active players from taking and building something.

Everybody remembers afk factions with castles topping up to 10k soldiers and extreme amount of unused S&D. Crime does its job better than what we had before, it could be better but its better than what we would have if we removed it.
Of course the players found a way to circumvent it as much as they could with minimum effort, thats human.
So today we have the least defensible fiefs (villages) being turned into S&D stockpiles with 0 garrison, and castles/cities are at best medium trade hubs to prevent crime build up, and are specifically specced to be no-crime faction armoury. With only a couple solid and active people cycling fiefs and preventing any S&D stockpiling in the important garrisonned fiefs, you have a crimeless efficient empire.

This still forces minimum management from said empires, so taking more fiefs than you can manage means that you cannot garrison them efficiently and face being attacked and lose the grip on said fiefs.

[Sparvico]

This still forces minimum management from said empires, so taking more fiefs than you can manage means that you cannot garrison them efficiently and face being attacked and lose the grip on said fiefs.

Those are all very good points, the quoted one especially, however over here in NA we have more fiefs on the map than we can manage as an entire community anyhow. Crime in NA no longer prevents factions that don't have the required member count owning a bunch of fiefs, instead it just penalizes everyone because no one has enough members for the fiefs they own. Basically every fief monkey (the guy that manages the fiefs and buys s&d) owning two fiefs as it is. We don't have the population numbers to match the number of fiefs on the map, so we have to have more people than would be ideal managing their crime. This means more people have to trade (since it takes awhile for us to get money for horses, and moving large amounts of goods without them is ass) which leaves fewer people to go to war, from an already depleted player base.

Now the honest truth is we need way fewer fiefs in NA strat, but I figure removing crime might be easier. Either way would free up some people to go to war. As it stands most factions have around 5 people max that can march out in a campaign, and all their opponent has to do is turtle up in a castle or a city and send a few of them to EU to essentially grind the war to a halt. It makes being the aggressor in a war for anything more than one castle complete ass.

Given how incredibly stressful and unattractive being the aggressor in a war can be for the faction sizes that we have, is it any wonder trade simulator is the trending meta?

[Butan]

An alternative for crime that encourages activity and punish afkers would be nice if superior.

Do you stand alone on the fact that there is too many fiefs on NA for the current population or is it a shared opinion? Because there is already way less fiefs NA side.

[CrazyCracka420]

There are too many fiefs on NA side, the people moving characters around on the strat map are a lot less than previous strats, as is the merc pool for battles/sieges.

[Jona]

I'm fairly confident that the majority of NA would agree that there are too many fiefs on our side, as conflict over fiefs is what should drive most wars. Similar to RISK, the more land you have, the stronger you can become. In the current state of NA strat, all factions can stretch themselves incredibly thin, and even then have no need to fight over territory since everyone else will have more than they can manage already.

The issue is that NA strat and EU strat are tied together. If you were to chop off the entire desert and steppe from the NA side of the map in order to consolidate all the fiefs into the center region, then trade bonus would be shit and no one could get money. If you remove random fiefs spread throughout the map, then people will still have to spend days upon days marching across the map to get the full trade bonus, only now they would have fewer goods to take with them each way. Ideally, the NA side of things would have a smaller map, with increased trade bonus so that we need not travel as far to get 350+% bonus. But, since the EU and NA maps are joined quite literally at the hip, you can't simply alter the trade bonus formula for only NA. We're kinda stuck at the moment, and the only solution is to somehow separate the NA and EU maps so that they can be tailored to each region's needs.

[imisshotmail]

I would like the NA map to just be what the EU desert is currently. That amount of fiefs with that spread on flat land without mountains.

[Butan]

I would like the NA map to just be what the EU desert is currently. That amount of fiefs with that spread on flat land without mountains.

RIP Dwarves.

[Sparvico]

In the current state of NA strat, all factions can stretch themselves incredibly thin, and even then have no need to fight over territory since everyone else will have more than they can manage already.

That is another reason why NA needs fewer fiefs, what's the point of going to war when you already have more fiefs than you can manage well?

[Nebun]

That is another reason why NA needs fewer fiefs, what's the point of going to war when you already have more fiefs than you can manage well?

if u don't need those fiefs u have, give em to us

[Vovka]

care! its a trap!
he is waiting for a response from you like "Come and take them!" and then

Claims should be in the diplomacy section as well :P Regarding our fiefs that you want, come and take them!

[Vovka]

We are still in the process of being handed out the controls, when it is done we will feel our way in, see what we can do and how we will do it.

So when strategus become great again? How "soon" 

[Butan]

Still no access, waiting on great overlord chadz to notice us.
When he does, the aforementioned "first things on our list" should be done within a month, until then put your strategus account on frozen 

[Vovka]

Still no access, waiting on great overlord chadz to notice us.

Good, just I wanted to know for sure that the strat 7 does not happen  ty 

[Butan]

Play Strategus like there is no tomorrow dear Vovka 

[Latvian]

make butan king of strategus and let him do things to it