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Due to the nature of faction population, is it currently very possible when attacking certain factions' planets to be dropped into an "auto-win" battle wherein no opponents are available to defend and your team needs only to walk into base (minding the turrets) and destroy the generator at your leisure. This counts as a successful attack on the planet. This is all well and good against those factions completely unavailable (offline) or unwilling to defend the planet for whatever reason.
Instead the issue lies with factions attempting to defend a planet that are being swamped by a high volume of attackers at once. Peak times, like those just before the Cease-Fire, are the most critical as the 6 wins needed to take a planet could all happen simultaneously. This can then easily be compounded by a faction willing to simply stall a defensive force, artificially prolonging their fight to the full 30 minutes by remaining at their spawn point. This forces the defenders to come to them if they want to end the battle anytime before those 30 minutes are up. Meanwhile other groups queued to attack drop into auto-win battles with no defensive team to repel them.
Regardless of the legitimacy of that tactic, such a strategy can only lead to bad gameplay, a planet captured without any actual combat despite willing participants, and the creation of a highly demotivating aspect of Community Warfare to those with lower faction population.
Therefore, any solution to this gameplay mechanic must still allow a larger population faction to use their numbers to their advantage while making the capture of a planet a fierce battle and not a series of delaying tactics while other units swamp the queue to gain auto-wins.
Proposed Solution:
Queue multiple attack groups against a single defensive group who is given no time between defensive actions to repair and rearm (or perhaps do so at a scaleable rate).
The second wave drop is only pulled from the queue once their timer runs out for finding another defensively-queued group not already engaged. While the second group awaits their drop, doing so only after the previous group has been completely destroyed, they are free to spectate their own factions' 'mechs as if they had been previously killed.
If the first wave defeats the defenders, the second wave is immediately placed top of the queue for another attack
However, if the first attacking group is completely destroyed or the timer runs out, the first group is ejected into the main lobby and the second wave group launched. A ready up screen could appear briefly with a few minutes to allow the defenders to select a different 'mech and auto-reset positions and clean the map. The defenders could also choose at this point to decline defending against the second wave, thus granting that second wave an auto-win. A third wave would be pulled to wait in the wings just as the second wave was. This would repeat until the defenders were defeated or the attacks stopped.
On top of this, a short "CW cooldown" could be established to slow time between attacks (those traveling to planets not own by their faction), explained as "Drop ship travel time," and would be somewhere around 10 minutes long on top of the actual max possible queue times for attacking planets. This is not to say that auto-wins would no longer be possible, just that defenders would be given more time to finish any battles and reengage against other attackers and carries a most logical sense in that anyone attacking a planet would obviously have to take some time to travel there while the defenders would already be in position.
Possible Negative Consquences:
-Adds more wait times. Especially true of second (and third/fourth/fifth) waves who may end up spectating a game for up to 30 minutes.
-The number of players included in a single battle (up to 36) may not be something the engine can handle presently.
-Would require significant adjustments to game mechanics by the developers to implement
-Single battles could potentially last 30, 60, or even 90 minutes and beyond depending on the abilities and skill of the defenders
Possible Positive Advantages:
-Gives defensive teams (who by default have an advantage on maps) a chance to defend against multiple groups from factions with larger populations without removing the larger faction's numbers advantage from the board.
-Does not remove the possibility of auto-wins and thus defensive teams are still necessary on all planets being attacked.
-Repair/rearm would be scale-able, allowing developers to tweak the settings depending on how this mechanic performs, or even for certain factions.
-The second wave could potentially communicate with the first wave during their spectating, offering advice or leadership depending on how organized the groups involved in the attack were (Note that the second wave would not be included in game chat during the first wave).
-New tactics created wherein the first wave's goal can either be to wear down the defenders by focusing on damaging them exclusively in hopes that the second wave would then be able to complete the final push or the first wave would just go for broke successfully and have the second wave join a different attack.
-Makes attacks throughout the day just as important as the final attacks in the last hour as removing/adding all those bars can no longer be done by simply swamping the queue in the last minute.
I am going to also post this on the HPG Manifold reddit, gain more feedback and opinions that why and will update this post with anything I find relevant.
Edited by jeirhart, 18 December 2014 - 02:09 PM.
