End Game: Pros and Cons

[Kipper]

Surely 'end game' is a personal thing - you're at endgame when you've unlocked all of your sidegrades and specced yourself exactly how you want to. It doesn't mean it ended for anyone else and they're still going to shoot you if they see you whether you have a fancy helmet or not....

The game could take snapshots so that stats show who is currently winning (with the most territory) and who made the most gains and losses yesterday, last week, last month, last year, so you can take bragging rights (and temporary titles/unlocks) for empires, outfits or even individuals and you can be the winner of a day/week/month and get their titles even if its your first day - and without worrying that you'll never catch up with the 3 year veteran on overall points/kills.

The overall battle must be persistent tho. If one empire loses everything, they need to find a way back in by taking something back (you're going to need a sanctuary/mothership just in case) - after all - the less territory you have with approximately 33% of the worlds troops, the easier it should be to defend what you have and expand from it - so the war really ever shouldn't end anyway.

Events wise - I'm all for events ranging from random AI based ones such as a technical failure takes down the shields on a random base for an hour, or makes the turrets go crazy and start shooting up anything that moves. Or an artefact spawns randomly in the world and it has to be located, collected and removed to a base to get access to a treat. These things could just happen every so often to make the world more dynamic and give people diversions.

And then scheduled 'live' events - alien (dev) invasion, disease, whatever else from time to time to give people a chance to win at something or become a hero for a while. Then history forgets, the war continues, and so on.

Winning a 'day' as an individual might get you a title for a week or two, winning three days consecutively, or three out of five, might get it you for three months etc... but everything can be lost (or permanent titles are next to impossible) so that battle heroes change from time to time. The higher the status - the longer you keep it.

Maybe something like a reputation - individual and outfit, that increases when you do good stuff, and decays over time - the higher the rep, the more flamboyant the title/cosmetic gear.