The 3-way mistake?

[Bobby Shaftoe]

(Originally to be posted in the "Fear of the zerg" thread)

Yes, PS1 was a global 3-way, the fights themselves were generally 2-way affairs at release and with good pops.

Based off the Indar map and other information (3 conts, permanent foothold bases) I'm dissapointed they appear to be catering for 3-way fights instead of 'golden nostalgia age' of multiple 2-way fights that were the norm for a couple years after release. (at least on Werner)

3-ways were boring* and any advancement you made was more than likely not a result of your empire doing anything amazing, just the 3rd empire hitting whoever was the current filling of the sandwich.

*I'm sure we've all had multiple experiences of having a 3-way on one cont on one day, logging off and coming back maybe the next or even 2 days later and the fight still being there.

It's also a little surprising since 3-ways rarely happened until the server pops started dropping to levels where there was really only 1 large fight going on. Yet on launch, pops should not be a problem (maybe over pop?), however they've created a continental system that you can not get kicked from and promotes a perpetual 3-way.

It also removes one of the defining 'win' objectives that existed in PS1. Tactically you could cap a base/tower; Strategically you could lock the continent you were fighting on; Grand Strategically you could dominate Auraxis (rarely occurred). As it stands, it looks like they've made 'strategic' wins almost impossible (let alone Grand Strategic) and in doing so removed a discrete 'victory/end game' condition that used to exist. How many times would someone say, "I'm going to log off after we cap this base/cont"? It was a convenient gameplay/chunk of time (in addition to getting the xp).

I don't understand the logic of using a 'strategy' that the players developed as a result of low pops to ensure people still had at least some fun fighting and implementing it as the standard model for large (full server) populations.

Lattice system, hex system or any other variant of objective manifestation isn't going to change the fact that at any one time, 2 empires will most likely be focusing on 1 on the same continent.