Team focused citadel

The citadel is a great concept.  It provides benefits that do not benefit any one person and is largely geared towards changing the play field instead of enhancing yourself.  A person saves up gold and buys an upgrade.  Next person saves up gold, and buys an upgrade.  Maybe they save at the same time, for a single big push of upgrades (cats/giants anyone?).

My issue with this is that it is not team oriented.  A person buys the upgrade.  A person has to decide if they want a new armor or a new upgrade.  This is part of the strategic decisioning of the game, definitely, but it shouldn't have to fall on one person.  In particular, how many times have you told your team "oh man, I just need a thousand more and we can get giants!"

I would like to see the citadel have a banking mechanism added to it.  The concept is simple: on the citadel page, each person's name is listed.  Next to everybodies name is a number, starting with 0.  If a person so chooses, they can add gold to this bank, and the amount of gold added will be reflected next to their name.  Likewise, they can remove their own gold (not other peoples, this isn't a player bank idea).  Now, the idea here is that people can contribute gold to the citadel without having to straight buy an upgrade.

in a 3vs3, each person can just put 2k gold in, and then one person selects the "buy giants" option, for instance.  In other words, when a player opts to buy an upgrade, it withdraws from the bank first, and then their personal stash second (if the difference still needs to be made).

The idea here is that there is no reason that one person has to be the citadel guy.  It'd help people know who is or is not actually contributing (how many people have you heard go "I don't have enough" and then you see that all of the upgrades for the citadel have been the upgrades you have bought...aka, you're carrying the team).  A second tally can simply keep track of a player's personal total contribution (only gold that has been USED in purchasing a new upgrade, NOT just gold that is sitting in the bank).

This idea is to encourage team play through offering a way to keep the citadel current by sharing the burden.  I don't think anybody seriously considers pooling items - if you are thinking of that as an alternative, and even if you use item pooling to exchange gold, eventually you realize that doing so for citadel upgrades means everybody but the person buying the upgrade loses out in terms of gold.  It's a team game, everybody should have the option of contributing, regardless if they choose to.

Reinforcements rework

The biggest issue most people realize with reinforcements is that there use is limited, and often discouraged.  If you want a good shot at winning, you do not buy priests or angels until you can also immediately by catapults or giants.  This is because the effectiveness of those two reinforments in particular do not scale well with how much gold (and to a lesser extend exp) the enemy gets.

At this point, most developers would start tweaking stats - "maybe if we make the priests a bit stronger, more health, more damage?"  "Maybe they should move faster?"  "Maybe we should just drop the amounts of gold and exp given?"

I say no to stat fiddling.  This has been the death of so many games because they cannot take a step back and say "screw it, we simply got the balance completely wrong, and no amount of tweaking is going to solve it short of making more unbalanced tweaks."

With that in mind, I propose changes of what might be a more dramatic scale, but would give potential more weight to seriosuly considering reinforcements:

Priests - No longer a direct heal.  Instead, priests drop hp regen flags.  The flags should stack up to a certain amount, and should stack with ALL other abilities and items.  The stacked amount should be worthwhile, where as a single flag may be ok.  My personal thought was each flag giving 10hp/s, stackable twice (maybe three?) and effects allied minion and normal creeps as well as the demigods themselves.  Flags would only be dropped at times when the priests actually have a target (to ensure they aren't dumbly dropping them right when they spawn).  Flags would have a short-ish duration (say 30 seconds) and could not be recasted by the same priest for at least a minute.  Bonus points if the priest group works as a group and only drops the number of flags that can stack, so that as flags despawn, a couple other priests can drop new ones, thus chain spawning flags.

Angels - Mana heal and area of effect +armor aura.  Mana heals about 500mana (no % scaling) and +armor aura stackable twice and giving +350 armor (700 total from two angels).

Catapults - Pretty good as is, but since the discussion is of changing the reinforcements, I will continue with thoughts.  An armor reducing flag, stackable once.  This is a hostile flag, so it will effect the enemies, not allies.  The flag will be cast around what the catapult is attacking.  The idea is indeed to weaken targets at long range, ideally (obviously some times catapults are attacking close range).  Armor reduction amount: 400.

Giants - 20% chance on successful hit to gain a 5s long aura that grants +10% attack speed to all allies nearby.  Creeps, minions, demigods.  Stacks with all other abilities and items.  Does not stack with itself.

The idea is simply to give more weight to reinforcements.  Make them actually impact the playing field beyond the two roles of cannon fodder and pusher, as well as helping to make the early game reinforcements a relevant consideration instead of just "in the way" of getting cats.