Intro

Please note that this is just a sub-post covering only a puzzle-piece of my Land-Speculation.

To start on the "Front Page" or to return to the Overview-Post please click on the picture below:

So without further ado, here are my thoughts about the topic:

In order to get a better idea of the whole topic I would recommend checking out my post
#1 World-Map

For those who powered through every post so far, thanks at this point for the attention. If you like my previous posts, I think you'll gonna love this one.

So as a reminder here is the screenshot again showing the region "Oregon" and its many Tracts on the left. And the parish "Heppner" you can see on the right (consisting of different plots).

So basically in Stronghold every transport or walking-over-the-map takes time according to its distance. There are 5 different types of transportation:

• Sending Army to attack
• Sending Merchants to trade
• Sending Scouts
• Sending Troops as Reinforcement
• Sending Monks

So if you want to make one of the above movements it depends on your location and the location of your target. Sending troops within your own parish will probably take only a few minutes. Sending troops from one end of the map (Praetoria / USA) to the very opposite end might take you hours or even days.

In Stronghold the above types also take different times. Scouts or merchants travel faster than a whole army and especially faster than monks (as those are the slowest). So you get the idea.

Travel-Speed can be increased by multiple options:

• Research faster movement
  (Research mechanic is hinted on in #4 Buildings )

• Tract/Region Bonus: Upgrading Keep/Castle buildings
  (Capital buildings mechanic is hinted on in #2 Castles & Keeps )

• Playing a strategy card to boost speed for a short time
  (not yet discussed)

So in general Stronghold is free-to-play but like many other games they included Microtransactions

Strategy Cards are modifiers which can affect almost all areas of the game; for example, a card may affect a building's production rate, the strength of its walls etc. The period for which a card's effect lasts differs on a card-by-card basis.

You sometimes get these cards as rewards in the game itself but (you guessed it) you can also pay real money to buy "Crowns" and then spend those crowns for card-packs. And like I said, there are also cards that can boost movement speed for a short period of time.

But lets take a look on the different types of movements in Stronghold

Sending Army to attack

As it is probably already clear Stronghold focus lies heavily on PvP-Combat.
So it should be no surprise that Armys can be sent to attack another player or some PvE targets like Wolf Lairs or Bandit Camps.

There is no surprise to this type of movement and I will focus on that kind of attacks in my next post #6 PvP & PvE so make sure to check that out.

Sending Merchants to trade

As already hinted on in my post #4 Buildings Stronghold provides an in depth market-system.
So in your village you can build market buildings. And by building more markets (like upgrading a building in SL) you unlock more merchants to transport more goods to the different exchanges.

And now to what I think is just a fascinating system: Every Parish Capital (Like a Keep in SL) acts as an individual resource exchange. That results in very different prices when comparing different areas of the map.

So you could basically use that to play your very own arbitrage-game, meaning if e.g. there are lots of salt-field villages within your tract resulting in more sales in the Keep, that of course dumps its price. But maybe there is a Keep a little farther away where almost no salt is sold. So you could buy Salt cheap in your keep and sell it for much more in that other keep.

The only problem with this is: Transport takes time !

And that is the key. It gives you 2 options when selling:

• Selling in your nearest Keep : Transport is faster so you can send your merchants more often and sell higher quantities but maybe for a smaller price

• Selling in other keeps : Transport takes more time but the prices might be more lucrative within that keep

I still remember when playing Stronghold that I often searched the markets for good deals trying to basically become a merchant and get rich to afford better stuff.

But these market transactions never had any monetary value and thats why - when thinking about Splinterlands - I have mixed feelings about such a system. Yeah it would be awesome to have but:

• Bots will probably exploit the hell out of that arbitrage-game
• When doing a trade you would have to ensure that the prices remain fixed for that transport. Not sure its clear what I mean:
  If a player says: Oh look Wood costs only 10 DEC (or whatever currency there might be) which is insanely cheap in that other keep but transport takes 5 hours instead of 10 minutes. Still I wanna do this trade, so I send my merchant. After 5 hours the price of wood in that keep somehow rose to 1000 DEC again which is not so cheap anymore.
  So you would need a system where you pay that price beforehand and "lock" the deal but transporting the goods take the above time. I could see that working and it would be better than a First-Come-First-Served-System

Apart from the two points I think such a market system would be great to have. It opens the opportunity for a merchant-like play-style with land. So you can decide not to construct any harvesting/manufacturing buildings at all but instead you go full markets/storage.

Plus it could result in passive income (taxes) for the keep where the deal is done. So SL could also add different options for keep holders to encourage/facilitate market-trades. I don't have specific ideas for that but I am sure they would come up with something...

Additionally merchants can be sent to your own villages to get resources from one village to another

Sending Scouts

Coming to another great mechanic within Stronghold: Scouts. As expected in a medieval military strategy game scouting is a very important mechanic. Its mostly used for the PvP&PvE aspect of the game. You can attack enemy castles/camps/lairs without any intel and risk running into a trap. Or you send your scouts to check out the enemy defenses resulting in a detailed report where you can see the castle structures and troops stationed within the target area.

But more about that in my next post #6 PvP & PvE

What I do want to describe though is sending scouts to discover resources.

Of course the amount a single scout can carry can be boosted by certain Keep/Castle Buildings or Strategy Cards.

Again, I really like the idea of such hidden resources popping up on the map adding an interesting part to the game and world-map however I am afraid that bots and scripts could ruin that experience for everyone.

Sending Troops as Reinforcement

Thats also an interesting part of stronghold which can be compared with delegations in SL. In Stronghold you can take someone as your Vassal and become their liege lord which is basically what a scholarship is in Crypto-Gaming. You support that player and even provide them with cards.

In Stronghold you can station your troops in a Vasall Castle which gives you more army-capacity in your own villages.
So during war times you wanna have many vasalls so you can use many troops stationed there. In return the vasalls can use your troops to defend their castles so they can use their own troops for something else. Again I dont think SL will add a combat system from the start.

And with Delegations we kind of already got such a system

Sending Monks

Not really much to say here. Religion is an own mechanic in Stronghold. Monks are the slowest of all units but they can be quite useful. However using monks cost you specific religion points you have to obtain in different ways. So its not an unlimited use. But they can:

But I don't really see SL releasing such a mechanic cause Land will not be PvP driven but its definitely an interesting mechanic for Stronghold and offers another great option for warfare 😉

Land-Market

Coming to another market the game will bring us: the land-market. It is well known that Land will become an own market tab where we can buy and sell our land claims and Plots/Tracts/Regions.

I already touched the topic in my first post #1 World Map but this time I want to go into more detail:

So again, in my understanding the below artwork are the Plot-Summaries in Card-Form and the actual plot management will be done in a different screen

In photoshop I put together a picture of an inventory as I think it could look like:

It is very similar to the card-inventory and I think the market page will look pretty much like the card-market aswell. Just like on the card market there will probably be filters for

Rarity:

• No Prefix (Common)
• FERTILE (Rare)
• ABUNDANT (Epic)
• OVERFLOWING (Legendary)

Land-Category:

• LIFE (Virtulium)
• DEATH (Reclaimed souls)
• EARTH (Ulana seeds)
• FIRE (Sparkstone)
• WATER (Bottled storms)
• DRAGON (Heliostone)
• NEUTRAL (Grain/Wood/Stone/Ore)
• Occupied (Essences)

So with that info I thought about how the market would look like.

For the card-market its currently about 489 cards with all editions. Counting in Gold-Foils thats 978 Items maximum that are available on the card-market.

So when thinking about land we have 14 Land Types x 11 Land-Categories x 4 Rarities
(+ Keeps & Castles) So If I am not mistaken thats 618 possible Land-Cards. Seems about right actually.

And yes the Plots also differ in progress, e.g. some plots may have no buildings on them, some have a high-leveled one,... However I see that just as Combined-BCX-Cards on the card market. So thats why I think it will look like this:

I think here is what we can find on the market sites:

• Toggle Button to switch between Card-View and Land-View
• Little Icon-Filter for Occupied Plots
• Little Icon-Filter for Keeps/Castles
• In Card-View I could also see filters to show specific Region-Numbers (e.g. Show all Offer ins Region #57) That could come in handy if you want to buy additional Plots near your others.
• Show-on-the-map Button to look at the specific Location

So here is an example if you click on a specific card (just like on the card-market)
(Any infos in here of course are made up by me, so 0% official stuff here)

And additionally whats awesome but already hinted on in official eye-candy is this:

You spot it? I am talking about that "For Sale" Button on the right side

However I think its currently lacking the rental-page, so maybe they should rename "For Sale" to "Market" or add a "For Rent" tab aswell.

Anyway, I think thats enough evidence to claim that there will be a For-Sale View on the World-Map and that is actually an obvious choice. Just as in the screenshot above I suspect if you go to the For-Sale-tab it only shows the regions where at least 1 Plot is up for sale.

So it can be assumed that the Sale-Page also includes the Filters below

A nice little addition to that (if you ask me) would be a "Region / Tract / Plot" Filter
So if you are looking to buy a tract it only shows you the regions where at least one tract is up for sale.
Same for Region-Sales of course (even if rare).

For Plots I think it could be nice to see how many plots are up for sale within a region, so it could look a little like this (again, just my creation and nothing official):

I would really like to see Splinterlands using some sort of Transportation-System. Especially for Markets and resource-transport to other plots.

These options would lead to a more immersive land experience and it would be fascinating to study the characteristic of different regions on the map. It could basically become more complex than the card-game option right now.

Another big interesting point in my opinion would be Army-Transportation using the different monsters & summoners

That's why in my post "PvE & PvP" I will share my thoughts about PvE and PvP elements that would take the land-expansion to a whole new level.
So if you are interested in some more thoughts around land (and comparisons with Stronghold Kingdoms) you can either hop over to the next post "Markets" or return to the "Overview" Post by clicking the pictures below:

Either way, thank you so much for powering through the post. Please let me know what you think in the comments. Maybe you also have a particular game in mind or maybe just a particular mechanic you would like to see in Splinterlands.

I would also love some feedback so I can improve my posts so feel free to leave those aswell.

Thanks for the support

Yours, Moriarty (THE GRANDMASTER)