The Faction War is an interesting concept, with a flawed execution. Disregarding any suspicion of it being "rigged", it suffers from having only a very small degree of player involvement possible, a feeling of not being able to influence the outcome, and having only minor rewards, very infrequently. As such, most players have only minor engagement with it, and many disregard it completely. In this post I propose a few small changes that might improve the faction war and make it more interesting and engaging. I've also mocked up what some of these changes might look like, please forgive my rudimentary photoshop skills. (I've had a lot of time whilst the servers have been down...)

A) More Deployment Options:
Currently deployment is limited to two options: deploy to All Conflicts, or deploy to the War Banner. I suggest adding some more deployment options is a menu similar to the orders menu on the multiplayer selection screen. These options would be (for the Knights in this example):
  • All Conflicts
    • Defend Territories
    • Attack Territories
  • All Viking Conflicts
    • Defend against Vikings
    • Attack Viking Territories
  • All Samurai Conflicts
    • Defend against Samurai
    • Attack Samurai Conflicts
  • Hold Troops in Reserve (I'll explain this later)
  • War Banner


As before, only troops placed manually, via the War Banner will get bonuses for deploying to the corresponding front (Battle, Duel, etc) or on a Castle, but this will give options to players who want to engage with the Faction War but don't want to deploy manually after each battle. Placing a War Banner will work as usual.

B) Manufacture War Assets
This will be a similar addition to how the XP boost currently works. Via this menu, players can use salvage to manufacture War Assets to be placed at the currently deployment zone/banner. Each manufacture would create 1000 war assets (modified by faction scaling I guess), and would use 500 salvage the first time, then 1000, then 3000, and so on, like the XP boost works. This would reset each day. This gives another use for salvage (which currently is a fairly useless currency) and another way for players to influence key territories and battles.

C) Troop Reserve
This would take the form of another "Front" on the war map, placed on the home territory for the faction. Placing a War Banner on that tile or selecting it via the Deployment Options would deploy War Assets earned (or manufactured) into a "Reserve". Reserves would only be generated in this way, not from automatic deployments. The amount of troops held in reserve would only be visible to members of the same faction. One hour before the end of each battle, the reserve forces would be deployed to the territory on the map with the most War Banners for that faction on it. In this way, players would be able to coordinate and vote for the territory they think is most vital in any particular battle. An arrow from the home territory to the chosen deployment will appear when the reserves are deployed, and in the Battle Conclusion screen, the deployment of reserves would be shown by a war banner falling onto the map at the same time as the swords/axes/katanas do. The results of the reserve deployment could swing battles, campaigns and maybe even the entire season to one faction or another, and would allow players to feel like their input really mattered.

D) Improved Rewards Per Battle
One of the common complaints that you hear when discussing the faction war is that the rewards are pointless, just a bit of steel at the end of a season, a few crates every now and again, and maybe an ornament if you picked the right faction. Improving the rewards would be one way of improving player engagement.

To that end, I suggest that each battle reward participating players with a small amount of Steel, 10 per territory your faction conquered in that battle. You would only be rewarded with Steel if you had actually participated in that battle, and deployed at least 1000 troops in that battle (modified by scaling etc). This would rarely be more than 100 steel every 10 hours or so, and would most likely average out to 50 or so per battle, so it would not be big earner (or impact steel sales much at all), but it would be a nice token to encourage player engagement. Additionally if a player had contributed enough (per the previous criterion) they would be awarded with an XP bonus ticket, so you would still get something if your faction is losing.

Another nice feature could be to give players a small amount of bonus XP (+5% per match perhaps) for playing with a character from their faction, when playing a match from an active front (eg. Battle front is between Knights and Vikings, so Knight players would get 5% bonus XP playing a Knight hero in a Dominion match). This would give players a little bonus for playing a hero of their own faction, and hopefully strengthen their loyalty to that faction.

Finally, to award faction loyalty, at the end of a season, a player who has been in that faction for the entire season and at the end of the previous one (ie. Did not change in the offseason), and contributed to every campaign in the season, should be awarded an additional 500 steel.

Thanks for reading, and if you want to discuss it on Reddit, I posted there too.