Lykaon, on 26 August 2017 - 01:40 AM, said:
This is assuming that the end result of the battle is your team has more than one or two badly mauled mechs left and you're only concern may be a solo enemy light mech.
But if the opposition takes caps and your team ignores caps and you do not convincingly win the attrition fight with enough mechs to uncap and retake the enemy caps you lost the game dispite winning the fight.
Since an effective murderball does not leave it's assault mechs trailing behind to be picked off a team has more than enough time to cap two points and regroup with the assault lance (as long as charlie lance doesn't go full potato and decide to split and cap).
From second one of a conquest match Charlie lance should be moving towards the most likely point of enemy contact. Bravo Lance should be forming up with Charlie ASAP and Alpha lance ( the fast lance) has capped and reformed with the assault lance well before the assaults have reached the point of contact.
And there is the added possibility that your opposition will waste resources uncapping your starting two cap points, diverting mech resources from the fight and further enforcing a numbers advantage.
It is always worth while to hold two cap points in conquest as long as you deployed your mech resources intelligently to get them.
if you are crippled to this extreme after going into a 12v11 or potentially much stronger power play. you are loosing because your opponents are better pilots.
If we look at your hypothetical and the blue team goes into this same fight with the same enemy 11v11 instead of 12v11, blue team still gets crushed and looses anyway. I could add that "it is fine" if lights take back caps early in the game (ie: before 14:15ish), because qp moves slow, teams are uncoordinated so it doesnt really matter... but it doesnt help you win, its for c-bills.
All the other scenarios you pointed out only matter, at all, if the game comes down to a cap loss which I have only ever seen if teams ignore caps beyond 450 (350 is playing conservative, its very possible to win by starting to decap as late as 650 or later depending on the scenario and the map)
We could spend days laying out stipulations, scenarios and situations where you can carve out an alternative win condition here and there, each for a very narrow contingency. Almost NONE of which will help the average player to win a majority of his/her matches. We could go into comp mode specific, fw specific, map specific, we can talk about mind games bleh....
I'm not interested about every edge case. Its not relevant to why teams loose conquest in 19 out of 20 games,
19 out of 20 conquest games are decided by who gets +2 kills first
if you cant do that with a numbers advantage, it is because the other team played the engagement MUCH better than you.
In conquest games that are not decided by who gets the first +2 kills first the vast majority of them are decided by who played the cap game better AFTER the first team hit 350 tickets.
To reiterate, the simple rule for anyone in pugs:
get 2 kills up before 350 tickets
secondary:
when the first team hits 350 tickets 1 or 2 lights can think about about normalizing ticket bleed and must start their first decap before 450 tickets.
The games that arnt decided within these win conditions are all "what if?"s, we could spend forever enumerating the edge cases for that 1 in 200 game when one of them might matter, or we could just remember 2 rules and win because we are better pilots than the red team.
tl;dr -
most conquest games are decided by who plays the skirmish better. and teams that win the skirmish but loose the game almost always loose because they are greedy, didnt take the initiative or lost track of the ticket count