Yesterday night (CET) the Lithcorp server was in stalemate. The NC owned most of Amerish. The TR owned most of Indar. The VS owned most of Esamir. Each side also had the largest population on the continent it already had the most influence on, while the other two had some under-equipped stragglers that couldn't find their Warp Gate. This resulted in a stalemate- there was nobody attacking an enemy continent, and even if people were, they ran out of juice quickly and got pushed back by the more resourceful and numerous enemies. The reason for this, based on my observations (and actions) is resources. The people who own a continent have resources. Those who don't own it are stuck to fighting on foot. I've recently adopted a strategy of moving to the continent my faction owns to stock up on resources, and go back to where the war is until I run out again. Rinse and repeat. Some players probably want easy mode all the time, and just stick around on the continent they have 40+% of population and 75+% of terrain, so they could farm infantry kills in their vehicles while covered by a bunch of friendlies and earn easy XP. How to solve this? Make resources globally gained for everyone, just like they are globally stocked and spent. This would mean that the defenders won't be under-equipped. If both sides globally own similar territory, both sides will gain similar resources. The defenders won't be target practice, so more people will decide to stay. When the life is harder for the attackers, all the "easy mode" players will distribute more evenly across Auraxis. With global resource gain players like me won't have to leave whatever continent they're defending for 10-15 minutes once in a while to restock resources on the continent their faction owns- which will lead to more people permanently being on continents their faction doesn't own, either attacking or defending. All these will help keeping an equal population distribution, should allow effective defense of friendly sectors on hostile continents, and should allow to attack hostile continents without grinding to a halt in a few minutes due to lack of vehicles on the attacker's side. EDIT: How to edit a thread title after posting? I tapped ENTER instead of ' in the word Nobody's and now it's stuck half-edited.
That may not help. To make this work they would have to knock the resource gain we currently have now on everything, down to a third of what it is. Otherwise the gain would be too high and the resources would again not matter like when in Beta. Now once this is done it becomes a case of having to take 3 times the territory to make up what we lose in the deal. Two factions have a continent each and push on the third you are fighting for as that last faction, and you are permanently screwed to a third or less of the resource gain.. It seems it would create a bigger problem. Also figure there will be more continents also.. so this approach would go from being 1/3 to 1/4, to 1/5th to further keep balance each time a new continent is added.
Or, you can just wait for them to add more continents like they're going to, as well as the ability to push empire out of continents.
I've got to admit, I'm not a fan of the effects the resource system has on battles where one side is stuck at the warp gate. One team usually has a ton of air and armour along with maxed out resources just sitting around in case their vehicle dies. The team entering the battle has no vehicles yet (they're cutting into their resources right away) and when they lose resources those resources don't come back. I'm not sure if there's really a way to fix it. Maybe the resource system limiting vehicle spawning just doesn't work.
There was a much better solution to this posted a few days ago that made a plan of something like "Each hex away from your WG causes a vehicle's cost to increase by 10%, up to a cap of 100%" It would make the gameplay much more strategic and dynamic, and would be a much better solution than just making resources global across continents because it adds a nice depth to the game. I can't remember who it was... but he also brought up the point of bringing ANTs from PS1 into PS2 which would also help the problem, as resources are stored in the WG.
That would be interesting, but it still doesn't solve the issue of everybody going to the continent that gains the most resources rather than fighting on enemy territory. If a player makes 250 resources per 5 minutes for a tank, spends 3 minutes driving from the WG (to avoid the price penalty) to combat and 2 minutes fighting before getting blown up, he's still better off than when he's earning 20 resources per 5 minute and needs only 30 seconds to reach combat. The player earning 20 RU's still is not able to break out of the WG (and having potentially a really high RU gain on the other side means nothing). The 250 RU earning player has no benefits of attacking the enemy continent (in fact just leaving the one his/her faction controls puts him/her into a huge disadvantage in terms of war machines availabe), so he/she stays and we still have the stalemate. In fact this price increase along with increasing distance from the WG only hurt tank users, ESFs only need a minute or two to reach any area of a continent after spawning in the WG.
Lol yeah once a faction conquers a continent they will all swarm to its defence the moment territory starts being captured, sending up their population to 50%. Its the same case on Briggs with TR owning Indar, Vanu owning Esamir (since release) and NC owning Amerish.
All a symptom of making the game nothing but a cert grind fest that puts WoW to shame. If the game is nothing but certs for things that require a week of pure playing to unlock 1 sidegrade gun, then of course people will take the path of least resistance to get said certs. Another design failure, and an example of "sacrifice game quality for F2P model". No one to blame but the greedy people at SOE.
We have a similar issue on Cobalt, every faction has their own playground aka continent, but still there is lots of pewpew. I think beside the resources (absolutely support the idea of global resource gain!), the other issue is that defending currently is not really netting you much XP. If you are lucky, you might get a few kills with the 15% bonus, but to get those 250 XP from even the small captures you would have to kill about 16 ppl, which is rather unlikely as you are usually either overrun or just have a hand full of people attacking. So people rather leave the base undefended, even if the attacker is already waiting at the door-step, because you can always recapture it later and get the bonus XP for free. I think there should be a bonus for defending of 50% of the capture bonus. Then there is spawn camping. Under normal circumstances the enemy will camp your spawn point just right out of sight so that you would have to leave the safety area, which usually gets you killed instantly. So even if I would want to defend my base I couldn't because I cannot leave my spawn area to actually do that. Besides it feels kind of strange to farm (literally) thousands of XP with my engineer using his turret. I think people should get 3 seconds of invulnerability if they step out of the force field, so the enemy actually has to fight them and can't just aim all tanks at the door-step.
This would lead to boring travel times and wouldn't really help with ESF since you can get across the map pretty fast.
The issue is that there is no real incentive to defend or reconquer a continent. The 10% bonus is negligible. You really won't put up a last stand to retain your discount. New players who just logged in will naturally go to the continent where their empire has the most momentum: there is no other indicator of a high action to playtime ratio. In short: there is no reason to defend, nor is there to attack.
That's the point. It will draw back on the amount of tanks, and also adds depth to territory acquisition. Flying over a large area exposes your ESF to a lot of fire, and they're also not nearly as effective as ground armor at taking infantry out. Even with rocket pods, you'll need to reload after 2-3 runs.
The values were just examples, but I quoted specifically from the thread. I'm sure you can find it somewhere around here, it's in these specific forums.
If it's flying over friendly territory, then only people who shoot blue Doritos are a threat to an ESF. They can also resupply in the nearest landing pad and fix their plane up while ammo gets loaded, so having a higher initial price for spawning outside the Warpgate won't have any effect on ESFs at all. So what about global resources to allow getting and retaining a foothold in an enemy continent, and a 25% bonus for defenders instead of 15 to get the defenders busy and making it their best interest to stop the Zerg and make its blitzkrieg turn into trench warfare?
free to play games are 500000000 times harder to contorl than not.. You paid for this aggravation, even though its ugh... FREE..
If every continent on every server was like this all the time I might agree with you, but they aren't. It's a rare occurrence.
Day 2 of 90% of Amerish population being NC on Lithcorp, with proportional ownership of terrain. Same thing with Esamir being owned by VS and Indar belonging to TR.
Funny, this **** doesn't happen on Waterson. Everything is in a constant daily push/pull, save for when the NC are involved then it's more of a steamroll/lol situation due to the NC leaders being absolute dip****s that put up zero resistance.
I think the adding of new continents and the ability to warp vehicles between them will likely solve this.
