Crew battles haven't been satisfactionary in ages, if at all. This morning, I realized it may be a good idea to adapt the battle system from another game, I've seen before ages ago, to StormWars instead. This is the following: First: In a crew, everybody makes a number of dedicated Crew Decks. At least one, but maybe more. These decks are not your def decks - they are dedicated Crew Combat decks, used in Crew combat exclusively. Then When a Crew Battle takes place, there are two tournament structures in front of each other. One deck at the back, then 2 decks in front to protect it, then four in front of that, then eight at the vanguard. So a crew battle starts with the 8 decks opposing each other, which thins out over time - since every time a deck gets defeated, it is gone and its opposite number can battle the deck behind it. When finally the rearmost deck gets defeated, your crew loses. Draws are possible if both rearmost decks lose in the same round, in which case both Crews get a chest. These decks are arranged by the crew leadership in any order they wish. Crew leaders (Captains) as well as the new Crew rank of Lieutenant, can do Crew Battles. Lieutenants are a new Crew Rank, but their only ability within a crew is to rearrange the decks in Crew Battles. They are basically the strategist. Lieutenants can also start a crew battle, but they cannot recruit new members. Quartermarters are the opposite - they can still recruit but no longer start crew battles. The Attack setup is empty, and as such the crew leadership has to arrange the crew deck lineup every time they attack. They have a few hours to do so. The Defense setup is pre-set by the crew leadership - this way no one really has to be online during a crew battle, though there will be a Confirm button so that if someone changes or removes his decks it doesn't screw up the line-up anymore. They can also modify their defensive setup the same way as they could when being the attacking crew. The auto-defense setup is mostly to prevent an autoloss when the few leaders are not online. This system allows for much more crew battles on a day, which would only emphasize this. On that note, it should be obvious but... only one deck can be taken from each player. - In regards to the battles; HP and cards lost drag over from battle to battle. So yes, if one hero defeats his opposing counterpart in round 1 but loses 10 HP and half his deck when doing it, he will start the next battle without those cards and with that HP being lost as well. This will reward bigger decks much more than in the standard formats too, which is interesting. Yes, this system indeed means Glowstones are utterly and completely useless. This system, It also means members of a crew do not have to be online during a crew battle, except the leadership when they start one. When defending, there is the automatic pre-set defence if the leadership is not online, but if they are online (&awake) then they can utilize the same manual setup they could when attacking. - What do you guys think?

Man Stratocumulus, that is awesome! I think the devs could even implement a system like this while maintaining the relevancy of glow stones. For example, what if the system you describe is implemented, but only on defense. In other words, crew leaders set up their defensive structure for defense as you describe. Then attackers, instead of having a similar structure, see the defensive setup similar to how we see arena now. First, 8 decks to choose from. Then, when all 8 are defeated, 6 decks to choose from. Then, when those 6 are gone, 4 to choose from. Finally, when the 4 are defeated, the last two decks remain in the arena type selection screen. When the attacking crew defeats all 20 decks, they win. In order to add glows to the mix, attacking crews could receive one attack per member (i.e., a perfect crew could defeat another crew without using a single glow). However, if necessary, members of the attacking crew could use glows to gain additional attacks. Glows then become an attack only tool, but they will also (most likely) be necessary in every single attack (perfect crew fights are rare... even when beating up on lower crews). Eh?

Ty! No, that does not work. Your suggestion has two huge problems: First:Glowstones are a limited resource, and people don't like to spend gems on them. As such, what players are going to do instead, is to attack weak crews by the dozens so they don't have to spend as many glowstones, if any at all. And the second is even worse: Players that are more likely to be able to afford Glowstones (the experienced players) are less likely to need them because they win their battle on the first try.

Interesting ideas for sure. I think the only real drawback with a system like this, though, is it makes Crew battles a passive activity. As it is now players log in regularly to fight their Crew battles -- besides Coliseum it's probably the most regularly played content in fact. It's a problem to take away decision making from individual players as well as battles from individual players. Either way, the structure you're describing has some interesting aspects. Thanks for sharing and I'm sure we will be influenced when we next overhaul Crews by this and other good ideas.

True, it's very passive, and you give the decisionmaking from the individual players to the strategy council of your crew. But I've done that in other games and it's definately workable. This system could also be used to engage a Raid Boss instead.

I like it! Sounds fresh and interesting! Idk how hard it would be to implement and it does look like a major game change, but I believe that it is more interesting and deep than the current crew battles.

I don't like this, because this means simply joining a crew locks you out of a portion of the game content. Everyone who wishes to do this must start their own crew.

> *Originally posted by **[Blastar](/forums/32949/topics/861149?page=1#11547141)**:* > I don't like this, because this means simply joining a crew locks you out of a portion of the game content. Everyone who wishes to do this must start their own crew. Let's face it - most players aren't competent enough to make a good line-up anyway. I remember from the game I took as an example that many people suck at it and in StormWars it's far more complicated than it is there because all decks are wildly different. For many players it'll be a frustrating thing to try to get to work, and in the end many players have a say in how it's done simply because you need to work together to get anything done with this system.