Supply lines should be important. Supply lines should be fought over. Key planets should be required to be controlled before pressing forward. Right now Wolf has no supply line but charging forward head long. It makes no sense. The other clans would not simply let them through their space uncontested. Nor would they allow them to run wild without intentionally hindering them. Although you can't control who players attack, you can definitely still make them work for it.
Populations rebelled against clan control, there was constant policing. When things got too out of control they would send in front line units to smack down resistance. 4v4 fights would be ideal here. If Rebels win enough gorilla fights, control returns to the original owner. If this is a key planet for logistics this would be crippling and awesome. Also, it would force another invasion(here come the front line units), once again slowing down progression to Terra.
Another way to represent resources and their importance would be to limit mech duty. Something really needs to be done about this. 5 minutes after a major scraping they are back and ready to go lighting up another zone? I think not. Slap on a repair timer or even a patrol timer(both?) so people have to use different mechs during the next, say... attack window of CW. These mechs would be locked down only in CW. Random matches they would be unlocked. Make sure they are not able to remove weapons or modules during this repair time, once again representing a proper showing of limited resources.
It would probably be easier to just give each Omnipod, weapon, and module an individual CW cooldown along with the mech they were in. <--- Threw this in upon reflection after submitting post.
Sure people could just buy multiple of the same mechs equipped exactly the same way, but hey, once you factor in customization and modules... it gets really expensive. This would also justify having multiple variants and would encourage seeing different mechs in CW. On top of that I don't see why people couldn't spend MC to speed up repairs or bypass patrolling to move onto other Invasion zones. A second random thought is people with Premium time rolling could have this repair/patrol time reduced by 30% or so.
Slowing down the map in this way could also allow you to keep a higher number of attackable planets. I think this is important, especially if you want to have more smaller units. The whole reduce the number of attackable planets while increasing the number of individual units thing seemed off. But keeping a decent amount of attackable planets for the increased number of units makes sense... to me at least.
Edited by Groundpound, 09 July 2015 - 12:59 AM.