It seems that people are way more active around here so i throw these ideas under discussion here. The topic started from discussing 6 week servers under General section in the forums.
Critics
The general idea of having short term servers with lots of action while demanding low dedication sounds great, but is pretty much impossible to achieve. Whenever you cut troop building- or traveltimes it demands more time online to stay safe or to stay on top if you want to win. With all kind of speical servers arising, night truce, dry servers etc etc they seem like attempts to get more players by making the game more casual(easier to manage). Making the game casual is causing the servers to be filled with massive number of players abandoning the server. People abandon the server in various reasons:
1) joined to try a new strategy, didnt work out - quit
2) Got rekt by other players and couldnt rebuild to match his expectations.
3) ended up in very weak kingdom which had no influence in end game fights so the player had no motivation to keep on playing
4) off player losing his massive hammer knowing he couldnt rebuild nearly as big and lost interest.
5) etc etc etc
If anything, the main goal should be to reduce the number of players giving up on servers as currently we have ~6k players creating accounts and 600-1k actually play it till end. Across all posts there have been some really good ideas, but instead of implementing them on another attempt on speical servers they should be reworked to improve the original Kingdoms game which is 1x 5,5 months. I would've quit long ago if i hadn't the community (meta) around me. I actually find it a great example how Jagex made a massive mistake by taking away PK'ing. People didnt leave because of not being able to PK, (which was possible, only differently) but because of Jagex taking away the reason which kept clans (metas) together. My point is, that whenever i sign in i want to have something to do. If it is taken away (lost army, lost village, fell behind due to lack of time) i will lose interest and that will most likely be the case with many players. Every player wants to feel impactful at every state of the server no matter if they are Kings, Dukes or Govs.
Suggestions
To counter the negative effects i described above i'd like to state the general goal of my suggestions - being able to catch up at any point of the game. What i have in mind is that if i join the server at 4th month in current servers i would be useless governor to pretty much any kingdom. Being able to support ww with few k crop/troops is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome. I wouldnt be able to effectively attack or defend anyone, not even nearly being able to defend myself if i end up far from excisting kingdoms. It is obvious that it shouldnt be possible to reach top players after starting 4 months later, but it should be possible to reach a point where you could actually have some impact on the game. My initial thoughts would be to tie the available cp amount to server average. So when i start playing on 4th month i would already have CP slots available which boosts my developement decently. In addition, it sounds extreme, but whenever you fall below average population on the server you would be able to build 3x faster to gain up. In terms of balance it obviously needs some serious math behind it, but i hope you get the idea. Same idea could possibly be applied to troop numbers after reworking the troop management which is my next suggestion.
As mentioned above, losing big hammer is one of the key factors which turn people inactive or to just play less actively maybe only producing def troops, but not participating in social or teamwork aspects of the game. To make rebuilding possible i suggest to add a new building. Lets call it "hospital" for now. It would allow players to revive/heal ~75% of army over some time, for example 4x faster than building troops with separate que + reduced cost. In that way people who have put in huge effort to build an army wont have to lose it entirely and then rebuild for a month or more before they can consider being useful. that would keep average army size bigger than in current servers. That would lead us to my next thought where people with smaller army than average would be able to build troops 3x faster to gain up on average. That effect would be separate from reviving so the effects don't overlap. Average army sizes would become bigger, but the resource system, mainly the lack of crop would keep the army sizes reasonable. It would allow superactive players to build several hammers if they want or people playing less casual can just build army in one village and still use it in mid game. I find it rather dull that some people spend 5,5 months just to play idle and build up a 250k WW hammer. Having more people with the issue of feeding hammers more often would lead to way more active attacking, as the consiquences wouldn't be too harsh.
That leads me to my final thought about declaring a winner. In more depth about how VP's are gained. In addition to gaining VP's daily from active treasuries the idea of gaining VP's by destroying and cataing enemy villages would give a nice reason for attacking gov's more often. Same for conquering villages and killing troops. It obviously needs some balancing but the general idea is to give kingdoms various ways to gain VP's not just gathering treasures by building armies for months.
All in all everything i described would keep the game on 1x speed and for 5,5 months but with way more action and things to do.
All the ideas are not only mine, i did read the previous posts and tried to gather the best + develop them further so i don't take credit for everything!
I am very eager to keep developing the thoughs so i encourage discussion! Travian dev team is giving us, the players, unique opporitunity to speak out about making the game better for us, don't hesitate to bring in any ideas. Even if your idea seems silly, someone else might come up with something brilliant just because you said something silly.
