[Community discussion] What can be improved on Strategus

[WITCHCRAFT]

Making information transparent as possible on the strategus map is the most important thing to me. Having info of fiefs/armies displayed by default instead of mouse-over, night time settings, etc.

Mobile-friendly strat website would be the best quality-of-life improvement possible but that seems like it would be its own separate project and not really doable without a dev that has experience doing mobile layouts. Some people can just barely use the strat website on their phone. I can't at all.

[Jambi]

Butan, my love.

I have a question for you.

How hard will it be to implement ai bots in strat battles? Will they need custom pathing set on every map etc? Is it even possible for bot mechanics to withdraw equipment from the pool?

... 

[Butan]

Making information transparent as possible on the strategus map is the most important thing to me. Having info of fiefs/armies displayed by default instead of mouse-over, night time settings, etc.

Mobile-friendly strat website would be the best quality-of-life improvement possible but that seems like it would be its own separate project and not really doable without a dev that has experience doing mobile layouts. Some people can just barely use the strat website on their phone. I can't at all.

Maybe its because I'm old but I didnt think that mobile-friendly would be so demanded    will definitely put that higher on the list then 
I'm not sure if Chy has the skills for that, but if he does, then...

I totally agree with transparent information, I'm also inclined to add informations that are not available atm but would benefit the game. For example adding "unarmed/lightly armed/armed/heavily armed/shiny army" to fiefs, to analyze defensive potential easily and encourage attacks. Also if we can loot silver from people, adding a purse equivalent (poor/filthy rich) to parties to encourage attacks (again).

Butan, my love.

I have a question for you.

How hard will it be to implement ai bots in strat battles? Will they need custom pathing set on every map etc? Is it even possible for bot mechanics to withdraw equipment from the pool?

... 

I dont know at all atm.
I already thought of many uses an AI could have over strategus, many of them would be incredibly game changing so not sure if good ideas 
The craziest of them would be to have strategus battles become commander battles only (I dont see that happening except if the community dwindle to nothing), then one player could be able to run a faction and do wars, a couple more players could help by commanding different AI groups. But it would devastate cRPG population since many enjoy Strategus battles for the "battle" part, in the sense that it is just like battle or siege gamemode.
A less crazy idea would be to have AI caravans run between fiefs, like in the single player, but a big part of Strategus is running caravans... so once again, not very inclined to do that.

But running caravans is a bit shitty atm since there is no waypoints system and no pixel to pixel terrain gamemode, will definitely add both if possibru.

[Vovka]

in drz at different times, we had between 50 and 150 people


• 3-4 leaders overall management (90% of fun from strat)
• 10 -  fiefs owners (the most boring shit)
• 5-10 -  generals (led the army)
• and others -  troops farmers

and this is the main problem of the strat. Most of the players can not take an active part since it takes too much time.

[Knute]

The craziest of them would be to have strategus battles become commander battles only (I dont see that happening except if the community dwindle to nothing), then one player could be able to run a faction and do wars, a couple more players could help by commanding different AI groups. But it would devastate cRPG population since many enjoy Strategus battles for the "battle" part, in the sense that it is just like battle or siege gamemode.

Have you played the commander mode in the Napoleonic Wars mod? On the most active server each team can have up to 19 players controlling groups of bots and the number of bots per player scales based on team size. So you can have a 19 vs 5 player battle and the side with 5 would just have more bots per player.

If it was possible to make a commander mode for Warband in general, that might be something that people who currently play other mods would want to check out.

[njames89]

If possible make it so field battles occuring in the desert are fought on sand, in the tundra on snow, maybe even in forest with trees.

Kinda boring and immersion breaking to only fight on green grass.

[Butan]

Have you played the commander mode in the Napoleonic Wars mod?

I did extensively, even participated in some semi serious commander battles events. There was also a time where there was a cRPG version of that, where the player controlled commander could not attack but only bump on horseback 

Ignoring the fact that it may not be possible to do that, I'm simply not sure people would enjoy this. I warrant that most of the casual players just enjoy strategus battles because its a less trivial battle/siege gamemode; if it turned out to become like the single player battles, I'm sure some would be rather unhappy.

[Jambi]

I dont know at all atm.
I already thought of many uses an AI could have over strategus, many of them..

Thats where my mind drifted to as well. I was thinking about ways to make taking neutral fiefs a little more interesting.
This strat we had people simply not showing up for defenders at all, in order for wiping the fiefs population etc.
Or players kept attacking things late at night, having no to very little equipment at all. If a few bots would spawn with proper skillsets, at least it would have some defense.
Before they seperated NA from EU, these things werent as much a problem as they are now, since roster filling was easier at any hour.

Im still pondering and trying to give my idea more shape.
But here is how far ive gone yet.

I was thinking about villages, castles and towns all having a diffrent set amount of bots spawn always.
Take a town with 25 bots (example), so you need quite a few attackers.
Now lets take a town 25 bots, and for every player that signs up and is present at the battle 1 bot will be replaced. So IE 5 players show for town defense means, 5 players + 20 bots.
And whenever a defending player leaves the battle, a bot retakes his place.
Bots cannot destory ladders, or put back up flags and have only few commands, this way bots dont influence strat too much, and strat would still rely on the players skill and input as its always done.
Perhaps even going as far to implementing some bot AI defense on and off switch for fief owners. When switched "off", the defense relies on players only. When switched "on" the fief will start "recruiting" and costs gold, and every "recruit" bot the upkeep rises. This way players cant simply switch the bots on whenever they see an attack coming, without cost and full numbers.


One issue i would see is DTV style bot slaughter. Where 1 person simply rides up to the village, aggro's the bots.. and kites them around...
Or one player moving forward, and goes around the castle.. bots will try move to him and they all start hugging the walls, leaving the front exposed.
When there are no commanding players present to call them back.

It should cover alot of the issue's we have, but it might also create alot more... perhaps i'm overthinking to much.
For me personally it would somewhat give back the feeling of massive battle's. 10vs10 players on a huge town map, were we all just run around putting down and upping flags.. doesnt resemble much of a siege
Or when one or two people attack a castle in the middle of the night. "RP"wise the local gate guards would have no problem shooting the trespasser down... no reason for the lords and ladies to stay up all night, or be called out of bed 
Maybe someone can take the idea, and give it a spin.. as its lacking

Not sure about AI caravans trough... it would need to be quite inefficient. So Kingdoms that are ran by players actually being caravans should reap its rewards.

[Butan]

AI fiefs problems and roster problems should be solved using other methods. I personaly think that random/semi-random/vote fief distribution at the beginning of the round is superior to AI fiefs, so if confirmed this is one problem less. Roster problems should be solved by increasing rewards for participants, and changing the system to that its nearly impossible to have a roster imbalance (see first page). I dont know if the servers would take it, but encouraging prime-time heavily would also solve most "there is noone awake to participate" problems.

But there is still reasons to have artificial intelligence somewhere in strategus, I keep my ears open for the long haul.



A question... I havent played much the first rounds of strategus, when there was EU/NA on the same map. Would it be a good idea to revert to that? How did it work back in the day, precisely?

[Jambi]

A question... I havent played much the first rounds of strategus, when there was EU/NA on the same map. Would it be a good idea to revert to that? How did it work back in the day, precisely?

It didnt. Since EU attacked NA at their time and vise versa. wich resulted in EU or NA attacking them when they knew the opposite side would be sleeping.
And the defending side plays on his server. So when EU attacks NA, EU would be playing on NA latency. Players mostly just avoided attacking and complained about lag.

At some point a night timer was set. Where players could set a timer between wich hours he couldnt be attacked.  The time of battle would be pushed. but this was also very open to abuse.

It simply didnt work, and both sides wanted their own sandbox. And smaller clans wanted to fight smaller clans, the combined map was simply to small.

[blizz]

Not sure if someone said this cuz i was too bored to read all the posts but one thing that ive always thought would be badass on strat is boat battles. pls add

[Butan]

Not sure if someone said this cuz i was too bored to read all the posts but one thing that ive always thought would be badass on strat is boat battles. pls add

Would need mappers to do naval maps where two boats are attached to each other and do boarding action I'm no mapper so... and if there cant be battles on the sea, moving on the sea would = invincible, so no.

It didnt. Since EU attacked NA at their time and vise versa. wich resulted in EU or NA attacking them when they knew the opposite side would be sleeping.
And the defending side plays on his server. So when EU attacks NA, EU would be playing on NA latency. Players mostly just avoided attacking and complained about lag.

At some point a night timer was set. Where players could set a timer between wich hours he couldnt be attacked.  The time of battle would be pushed. but this was also very open to abuse.

It simply didnt work, and both sides wanted their own sandbox. And smaller clans wanted to fight smaller clans, the combined map was simply to small.

So there is nosystem where EU/NA would be on the same map AND fair?   

[sJimmy]

Go back to one map.

[Butan]

Go back to one map.

But its bad?
Jambi discussed the bad points, elaborate on the good ones 

[Keshian]

We actually were super active in strat 2 when map was combined.  It was a lot of fun having na/eu allied against other na/eu.  There were always battles going on and they would be filled with somebody whether it was NA/EU/China/etc.

Downside is it took a motivated group of people to play that way.  I honestly don't think this community is active enough anymore or cares enough to show up for 2 am battles.  Also, I don't think any of us in NA want to play with the DRZ and Grey Order who habitually cheat and have more members than the rest of EU plus NA combined.  (Kind of reminds me of that movie about Stalingrad - made up for in numbers what they lacked in skill or training). 

But really last time we fought DRZ in EU we whupped them good, and they just resorted to cheating and glitching - actually why devs shut down strat 2.  They were mass signing for ai city defense that they were attacking then all no showing in hopes of flag capping (back then ai cities were a LOT harder to take since gear was more around yellow tunic over mail level for entire strat).  They also would have 3 fief owners they would transfer back and forth to, each with an 8 hour nighttime starting at the end of the other person's so it was a continuous 24 hour nighttime - lot easier to do since they agve all their cd keys to their leaders who would just do it themselves.


So to sum up - yes, lot of fun to combine NA/EU and would help with dwindling population of mod on only 1 condition - UIF gets there own separate island where they can circle-jerk each other all strat.  No ships or boats.


MAIN THING - we have to have strategus give crpg gold and strat ticks in order to get people to switch from eu1/na1 to eu3/na3.  Still a lot of players on na1, but strat dying with them not motivated to play in strat battles.