One other thing that I was thinking of tossing is the stamina drop for attackers. Right now there are all sorts of complaints that Player A is pinging himself down on Player B, and Player B is doing nothing to stop it. Stamina was designed as a protection to the defender to help them be offline and not lose regs constantly. It has turned into something that attackers abuse to protect themselves.

I have two variations in mind:
1. If you attack, you don't lose stamina, plain and simple.
2. If you attack, you lose stamina, but you auto-heal provided you have enough food. If you don't have enough food, then some sort of penalty comes into play.

dropping stamina is not just a way of avoiding a revenge... it has multiple uses.

1. drop stamina in order to hit a player whose stamina is already low.
2. drop stamina in order to be able to attack a stronger player and get closer to their regs.
3. drop stamina to attack a lower ranked player

there are more, but these a trade secrets P

All of your statements are true from a game perspective, but make no sense from a realism perspective. I can't picture any real life commander saying "OK men, we are too fit and healthy right now. Let's all get our asses kicked fighting that neutral army over there. Then, once we're nice and weak, we'll go attack our hated enemies. Are you with me!!!"

in terms of real life, you might choose to send in only half your army.
stamina dropping is the only way to do this in this game.

A real army would continue to attack even when the defenders stamina is low and they can barely attack, up that would never work for WoE.

You could just increase the penalties for when attackers drop their stam, for a lot of this age I had a 4:3 troop:worker ratio and whenever my stam went down past 90 due to me attacking I'd get a red from my advisor and my recruiting would have dropped by 1.

I disagree on that point. Throughout history many armies have been paid off with tribute in order to just go away. Most armies would rather get the plunder without the fight, rather than fight first and then get the plunder. But there is a difference between armies that fight for plunder and armies that fight for war.

I did like not having to go to the troops' tab to heal in the non-reg version... But I would also miss not being able to get as many raids in on a target before they surrender. I guess that could solve part of the issue that makes some people want to get their own stamina down before they go offline, but I would still miss it.

DT's comment about sending half your army in has merit, though. If there could be an option to send in just a percentage of your army (the lowest could be at 70%, just like you can't attack someone with less than 70% stamina today), then that could still make it possible to get those attacks in. I guess it would be split evenly over the troop types and merc levels available (making it riskier if you mix troops and don't really, really know what you're doing), so that the x% of each kind is sent.

With that addition, this could be really fun! No more having to clickety click to heal your troops, and no more finding someone else to attack yourself down on if your target surrenders too fast. Just lower the percentage you send in, and you're ready to go!

I guess that would okay, just so long as we could continue to get to regs, although I would like to see the ability to send fewer and fewer troops, until finally, it is just one gnoll, with a gnife... :ph43r:

Why not keep the stamina drop to allow all the other options, but make the attacker heal up after the attacks? Why not just say "your stamina is below 95, this will cost you recruits" when they did the attacking? So don't bother even including the peasants to troops ratio, always have it at 95 stamina.

I have suggested this before.

Edit: plus, you know, this would take 5 minutes as all you have to do is remove a few lines of code.

That would work, too :)
Just wouldn't add the bonus of saving me on clicking, but I guess I can manage :D

Its called the Feint or feint retreat.

But they don't actually injure themselves to achieve that. They pretend, and though this is a fictional text-based internet game its not the same. Just cause we're pretending everything doesn't mean that our troops can't pretend