Originally Posted by Stardouser
I'm beginning to wonder if the size of the continents is going to prevent there from being any land behind the lines. It seems like they are small enough that you can have a battle going on in every hex, so long as someone can zip a galaxy past the battle in another hex.
What good does it do, for example, to send a feint team to attack one area when you really want to attack another, if every hex in the map has an active battle? Granted, the landscape might prevent you from taking a tank column everywhere easily, but that's about it.
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Some people are worried that there will be fighting on every hex. That would leave only 25-30 people per hex on average.
Other people are worried that everyone will zerg rush to the 3 way meet grinder, forcing 1000 - 2000 people into one hex and bringing the game crashing to it's knees.
Personally, I'm pretty confident that the two extremes will balance out. Some people will go for the big clusterfuck 3 way, others will go for the large 2 way fights, and the rest will go for smaller border skirmishes or the occasional behind enemy lines hex grab.
Now mark that I said "occasional" with the behind enemy lines thing. This part is important. The system is going to be made or broken by whether or not the front lines system works as intended. They need to find the right balance where it is generally ideal to attack/defend bases on the front so that most times players wont want to try to attack just any random hex on the map, while ideally at the same time making it still be possible to take a hex that's completely surrounded by enemy territory. It will probably be a difficult balance to strike, but I think we'll sort it out in beta.
Here's a mock up I did the other week to illustrate how I'm guessing the devs intend battle lines to be drawn. (click the image to enlarge):
I'm guessing that the 3 way will mostly occur where all 3 sides have a front meeting up, where they all have a vested interest in taking or defending the territory. I have no doubt that some 3rd faction players may occasionally drop in uninvited to another empires 2 way, but I don't think it will be the norm.
Along borders where only 2 empires have a front, I mostly envision those two empires fighting it out. Larger fights in more critical and/or defensible locations, smaller fights along the rest of the border.
If done properly, I would expect tactical strikes behind enemy lines to be reserved for things like resource denial. In the mock up, I have the NC dominating and trying to grab territory with a population advantage, but with both the TR and VS trying to grab some of their behind the lines territory to deny the NC access to one of the resource types.