CASTLE PASSING Leo's suggestion:
Well, people are always passing castles basically. Because when you are in mid ranks there is not much you can do to defend when someone 2x KS attacks you while your army at home. In late round with gate they can send almost full force, so basically you pass your castle to them. In my first round gate was not breaking protection and i was into seeing how much Caragous can be strong. Playing Elf running full ATC and Caragouses i used to watch KHoF, find few targets who gained castles, attack/gate/attack/gate... then sell my castles to happy buyers from above. Get protection gate back army to defend any possible retals and use the payment to feed my army which was not possible with normal game economy.
Castle passing is also most effective strategy for mid-rank players to annoy and keep top players on their toes.
Without changing too much about the game, best can be done about this issue is to promote province success which still needs few comprehensive coding:
Increase province capacities to at least 10 (or to 15-20 if the player base in enough)
All provinces are multi-race.
Round does not start right away after sign-ups. A player or a group of players can assign a password to a province and share with people they want in.
After 3-7 days for a province forming phase, players without any province are assigned randomly to empty spots or together to a full province.
Disable inter-province attacks.
Introduce a feature to retreat (send) army to mountains with half travel time as attacks. Still spends a general.
Remove KHoF and only list PHoF (this one will not be popular amoung community) KHoF can still be reported at the round end.
Below two are double edged suggestions that can go either way. But, needs to be allowed in such concept.
Enable players to switch provinces (members in the new province need to vote for the new joiner with a 70% acceptance )
Enable province members to kick a member with a vote that needs no less then 70-80% to pass
Well these are just basics. If the concept is codeable and community find it interesting more ideas will be found to promote provinces.
No suggestions yet for allied provinces to pass castles to each other. But, the main reason for castle passing is to go under protection. With a better engine where losses are manageable and new/ enchanced strats it can lose its popularity. If we find a way for the game to discriminate real battles from castle passing battles to punish with a little protection time that also helps.
