I have never given up on strat. In fact, I take credit for helping revive it a few times.
But, despite Dave's best efforts, he fucked up.
The initial grind for silver turned pretty much every North American off. Grinding is for cell phone games that at least give the option of Micro-transactions. We have a lot of good gents who are willing to move armies and trade and attack, and even show up to NA1 to get some ticks. And odds are fans of cRpg might take a break from Mordhau to play important strat battles. But they can't raise armies without grinding, so they just said 'fuck it'.
The shared map. Well, ok, it could work. If factions were open minded and had a mixture of NA, EU and CN players, yeah, it could be fun. But while I noticed NA and CN players tend to stick together, most of EU players seem to want to fuck the CN players up. I myself, noting the shortage of NA players, but even if we had a lot, realize inter-continental alliances are important. But a lot of EUers just want to bully them off. But, if we had an even strat, we could learn to play together.
Strong AI. WTF is with 500 man lightly armed villages? Fiefs should just be a formality. 200 farmers with peasant gear, thank you. Let the active players grab shit quick. Let's let people build their kingdoms so we can go fight each other. Right now you either waste 400K of gear if there is a defense, or you gain 400K of gear if there isn't.
The Vicinities. Too big for cities. You cannot blockade an area that huge. We need a little more no-man's-land to keep travellers scared. Relying on Ping and battle times and Eu Bro-coding makes for unfair strategy.
We had a bunch of new players all excited about strat, and I chatted with them and offered advice. But now that they've seen what the game is like, they are all quitting. I tried telling them about the exciting times we had on the NA map, with manoeuvres and counter manoeuvres and sacrificing armies to buy time; and blockades and reinforcements and chasing caravans... and quite frankly, they were excited. Well, they were. They realize now it all depends on people working together to not be dicks... assholes, yes, but that is part of the game... but dicks ruin the game... much like they have always ruined half the map before.