After Midnight (or a bit later on weekends), 2 Maps seems to be too much for Connery's population. What seems to happen is one Empire stacks one map, another Empire stacks another map, and the third empire is split between both. The result is that (in general) the fights are really lacking compared to earlier in the day. This occurs even though the World population is roughly split a third each. Personally, when this happens, I practice a bit in VR, and then log off and do something else. I assume locking 3 of 4 maps under the current system isn't viable. So short of that, perhaps a special "Overnight Alert" could be introduced, that doesn't lock maps, but does give a tangible award. This would be an incentive to funnel people into 1 of the 2 open maps.
Graveyard shift alerts could be a good time to bring back the facility based ones .. Capture Indar Tech plants etc .. Would help to funnel the lower player base to more smaller goals than " capture the whole continent "
Just to be clear on this: whatever the Overnight Alerts or Mission might be, they would have to be almost constant, with very little downtime, if there are still going to be two open maps. What usually happens, happened again tonight (Saturday night). There was an Indar Alert in the middle of the night which created some great fights. After that players scattered, and there were some good fights on Easmir for a bit. But that soon degenerated into zerg ghost capping, with each Empire zerg taking a different lane, making bad fights. So when the population is low, without a steading stream of Alerts or Mission, people are going to take the path of least resistance, avoiding each other and ghost capping.
Ahh the lovely night crews of Connery. Back in the day where there was just Indar, Esamir and Amerish (which got no love), and when the Japanese player base would log on to their VS characters. Good times.
Often I'd see each empire pool into one platoon each that wandered up lattice lines eating territory. Then two of the platoons meet, stalemate, and the third platoon captures the rest of the continent almost uncontested. OR that third platoon is on the other continent capping it the old fashioned way as OP says. I do miss the facility alerts. "How many buffer territory" debates in command chat were fun.
