Global Strategy & PS2's Territory System

[Malorn]

It does't balance itself out with a 3rd empire. It didn't in PS, and we have no reason to believe it will here. The suggestion in my original post was to help encourage the 'balancing out' by providing motivations to attacking the empire with the largest territory domination (its faster/easier to take), and making it progressively more difficult to dominate a significant portion of the planet. Not impossible, but hard to do. Likewise, it was also to help out the underdog by making it easier for them to recover from the bad decision (which will reward them with captures, xp, and resource gains).

This will still happen with large populations because it isn't the size of the population that was the issue, it was the idea of attacking multiple locations and both sides escalating the conflict. Its easy for a conflict to escalate because it's a "good fight" and it absorbs the majority of two empires. Now that fight could span across an entire continent, but then what is the 3rd empire doing? They have only two options - attack territory elsewhere and gobble it up or join in on the fight and make it one big 3-way. If they choose the first option, then the most logical option is to attack the territory that will be difficult to defend or be unlikely to be defended strongly.

Population limits on the continents actually helped put a cap on how much of the population of an empire could get absorbed into a single continental battle. Without a limit it could very well engulf the entirety of two empires.

I guess you could say that there's a 4th problem here, and that is allowing a battle to engulf an entire empire's population. That might not be something they want to prevent, as that would be truly massive and epic (afterally, PS2 is going for scale, so more the merrier, right?), but I fear it will eventually lead stagnant 3-way battles on a single continent, with some land-gobbling along the way by the empire not locked into the epic struggle. But after they gobble some land eventually they'll decide to join in on the big fight. Missions might be able to help here too by encouraging folks to attack other fights after a battle escalates to a certain point to try to spread the fight around.

I think the load-balancing aspect to missions is to just do that - spread out the fight across continents and within the continent and try to prevent it having the entire server in one territory hex at the same time.