I am reminded of this one of the Dawn of War rts campaign, where each faction has to fight for control of this 1 planet (split up into about 14? or so zones), and you fight for control each each zone on the planet, slowly destroying the HQ capitols of each faction until you stand victorious over all. It was still fun, even if I didn't get to have my Tau take over the whole galaxy for the Greater Good.
I feel as if it might be better for PGI (if it were to ever give players free reign) to make up a story about some small chunk of the galaxy is really important, and how each and every faction was trying to take control of these x number of worlds (I don't know... 20?, 40?, 100???), with dozens or even scores of battle sites on each planet. Then factions could fight it out to conquer that small portion of the galaxy. Yeah probably no precident in canon for every house to be fighting in 1 spot like that, but it's the only way I can see the free reign thing working to any extent without becoming "How will this ever work?".
I'm no canon nut/encyclopedia, but from what I can tell, in canon these houses & clans have been fighting for centuries, and there's been no 'winner'. Just a lot of back and forth and back and forth. I doubt several thousand mechwarriors (and not even politicians at that, just pilots) could really accomplish
anything in a few months, or even years even in a time accelerated video game. *Serious question* Does anyone have any remote idea on the math for this? How many battles would need to be fought? How many mechs/jets/drophsips/tanks/infantry/pilots would be needed? Total # of casualties? Will MW:O ever have the numbers to come even remotely close to that (my gut tells me no)?
I mean, I guess what it boils down to is that people, even if it's not them personally, but the total combined efforts of all their peers, want to do something other than conquer 'Backwater Planet X'. They want to turn back the clans, conquer a rival house or do
some important thing different than canon. I totally get where they're coming from, and agree that having that in addition to the standard MWO battles would make it even more fun. Problem is you'd have to deal with the TON of fallout from those changed events, which would lead to more changed events, and more, and more, etc. I just don't see it being 'We turned back the clans, we won!' since some other invasion would come and something even worse would end up happening to the IS. Hell, maybe some people really do want that, where everything is random and who knows what will happen? It's just that... good luck trying to balance THAT game. It would be a mess, and I don't think that kind of game would be able to retain it's playerbase to a profitable extent. That game would be better suited to some type of turn based Galactic Civilization meets Sins of a Solar Empire [Edit: I since take it there's already some sort of mod program people have used to track IS conquest already?]. It even sounds fun, except that it would never comes anywhere close to the depth that canon has provided already, and it just wouldn't be MW:O either.
[Edit:] I also want to give props to the OP Lucifer for a good thread. Sure it might be filled with some flames and heated arguments, but I take that as a sign of it being a (mostly) good thread worth talking about.
Edited by HeIIequin, 16 April 2012 - 05:37 PM.