I've been having fun opening chests in Crownrend! I love that you can get the excitment of chest openings without constantly having to put more money into the game. I put a little in to get to the point where I'm making about 300 denar every 4 hours so I can open several chests a day which is the best feeling but how can we keep the game going and build on this for the future?
If we want to go the PVP war route, we can make consumables that players can band together to take out defenses of the top players for a short period to make them attackable.
An example for this would be:
A consumable called Poison the well - This would lower their Army Toughness by 5%(relative) for 1 hour. These would cost .5 ori and each player can use 1 per day. These could stack but would be relative so 1st one brings defense to 95% then 2nd brings it to 90.25% etc.
Noone should be untouchable.
Alliance defense - a new feed that shows attacks against alliance members with an easy retaliate button.
If you see your alliance members being attacked, you should be able to send defense to their aid. Army Toughness could be sent to shore up their defenses but leaving yours lower for a period. It may take 5 mins for your defense to be added to your ally and then they stay for a minimum of 4 hours then return to you taking an additional time(like 1 hour) to avoid abuse.
If the game wanted to go a more PVE approach, you could make a rougelike game with a simple grid and mostly text based. Your character moves around 1 square at a time which costs energy and each square could have zombies or whatever to attack or chests to open for loot. This would be a separate game all together but at the end of each monthly or quarterly season you can burn Ori to soulbind 1 piece of gear or equipment to start the next season with. The goal of the game would be to see who could get to the highest level before the season ends with rewards paid out for the ladder being in tradable cosmetics or kingdom upgrades of some kind. I played a game like this a very long time ago that had a small entry fee and the winners got the prize pool split among them. Players could even burn Ori to participate or pay a small 1 hive fee or something and the prize pool gets split by the top 10-25% of players at the end of the season. A fun game that isn't pay to win and doesn't require a ton of time and effort to have a chance to win.
Crownrends current state is not perfect by any means. The scale of Denar production is too fast/high at the top end of players. I'd love to see what % of denar is claimed by the top 1% vs the lower 99%.
To adjust this, I think a balance pass to tax and trade power needs to happen and sooner rather than later.
The economy needs more use case for Ori to drive the price of denar up.
Ori is used for alliances and building upgrades which is great but maybe add some building crafting system to burn ori to change 1 stat for another random one or completely reroll the stats or stat range of a building.
Have a rental system to pay for defensed from higher players where they give up a stat for a period of time to boost another player. Rentals are paid for in Ori and 1/2 is burned and 1/2 goes to the renter.
Not all of these ideas are well thought out or good, just ideas. Nothing fancy. Welcoming criticism with open arms.