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[Roland Skinner]

I'm getting bored waiting for more details of Community Warfare. So here are some idle musings.

A 'mercenary' queue makes sure you can always launch in whatever mech you like, with whoever you like, regardless of what faction they're in, and always make CBills. In the mercenary queue you can end up fighting anywhere. This is what we have already. If the rest ends up sucking, the game devolves back here.

A 'reserves' queue makes sure you can always get a match fighting for your faction, in any mech you like. You can't win territory, but you can slow enemy advances. The reserve queue lets you grind up CBills to get into (or back into) deployed matches. In the reserves queue you can end up fighting anywhere where your faction is currently fighting.

The deployed queue lets you play in the strategy game fighting on and for specific worlds. If there are enemy units deployed on your world, you'll keep fighting them; if there isn't, you'll still get a match because forces are drafted in from faction reserves (or mercs). You could end up losing CBills fighting deployed.

In the 'deployed' game each player has a set of mechs and equipment these are always on a particular world and are subject to repair and rearm. There are restrictions on moving them between worlds based on how your unit's DropShips and JumpShips are deplayed. You can inject your regular mechs into the deployed game (with a rate restriction), or you can buy discounted mechs and equipment into your deployed pool, with costs based on strategic factors like world ownership. You can't get deployed mechs back out into your regular pool (or maybe you can if you pay up the cost difference). Only deployed mechs can be used to conquer worlds. When you win deployed matches you can get a (nearly) full salvage from deployed mechs you defeat.

The matchmaker first puts together matches for deployed launches on a world. It can use reserve or mercenary launches to make up opposing forces if it can't make a deployed vs deployed on a world. Then it puts together reserve vs reserve matches; the populations here should be higher, so it should be able to do some skill and class (or tonnage) matching. It can use mercenary launches to make up numbers. Then it then makes mercenary vs mercenary matches.