For those who don't like when massive alliances form or if you like solo play and/or want to try to get new players to play, here is a suggestion.
There are ways to completely prevent these massive alliances and this style of game play, but it fundamentally changes Thardferr.
The big issue is that we've all played the game so long that it has naturally evolved into necessarily forming these larger alliances to be at the top of the KHoF. This happens every round, and eventually two super alliances form, the pinos and the others.
You can't force players to not be in alliances, and as it's been mentioned by Adin and others, that's also a fundamental part of the game. Yes that is also what shuts out new players, and ultimately kills the growth of the game.
Possible solutions are:
Provinces of similar sizes are locked in to only war against one another for a week at a time, then afterwards the provinces rotate. If you can't fight a province outside of the war that you've been locked in against, it forces conflict and entirely removes alliances and pre/retals. Give an incentive at the end of each week like for every successful attack you made you get X amount of bonus land, and for every 45 land that you won you get an extra castle.
Groups of individual players are locked in to weekly battles. Think like a 20 player free for all randomly selected. This forces your pool to remain small and you have to hit those players. At the end of the week, the players shuffle to fight against the new pools.
Provinces are made smaller, 4 players per province. Every week 4 of those provinces get locked in to battle one another. Same process
There can even be a 1 week period in between locked in battle where any can hit anyone again. But the point is that it would force fighting and break alliances.
As always, opinions are welcome!
Sidenote:
@Lord Thane apologies for double posting this, but I felt like it was getting lost in a bunch of replies and could use it's own thread.
