Alternative to the foothold system

[kunzadar]

Right now every faction has an non-capturable foothold on each continent. This idea has some benefits, but also a lot of drawbacks.

pros:
1. Factions can always choose to play on any continent if they want.
2. No continent will ever have no game play on it, this spreads out the population for the servers and allows people to see all the content.

cons:
1. It is impossible to completely cap a continent, so there isn't as much to strive for.
2. Since the footholds cannot be captured, and cannot move then each faction's territory will be somewhat static. Vs always hold southern, NC always holds north east corner, and TR always holds NW, depending on where each faction's foothold is. That means a VS player may never get to hold or defend many places on the map, because they are only very rarely contested, and only for short periods of time.

Many people have already posted on this issue, but i don't think any of their solutions are the best. Most people who have a problem with the footholds would like some kind of sanctuary system in it's place, and a lot of the people who don't mind he footholds would also like to see a return of sanctuary. This has a problem though, mainly that if people can drop from sanctuary they can drop all over the map which is OP.

So here comes my solution.

I thought. To fix problem 2 with the foothold system (the one in place now) take away the warp gates . When a faction is down to their last major base, a bio lab or amp station or whatever, that base becomes non-capturable. This way the territory system will behave more fluidly because the non-capturable area only appears when a faction has lost all it's other bases, so up to that point any base is fair game.

This still leaves problem 1 though. So instead of making the last base non-capturable make the territory it is in the drop point from sanctuary. In other words when a faction has no bases left they are pushed back to sanctuary, but can only drop onto the base that they lost last.

This would eliminate the static territory problem, and allow empires to gain complete dominance of the map, without letting players drop pod any where they want on the continent, and we get sanctuary as a bonus.

For this idea to work completely however the sanctuary drop system would have to be very robust. It would have to be able to drop vehicles, air and land. As well as be able to drop entire squads together, and players should be able to pick any place in within the territory to drop into, so there won't be spawn camping.

This might seem to strong for the attackers, but this drop system will only be available to a faction that has lost all territory on a continent, and can only be used to drop into one specific territory (the territory around the last major base to be lost by that faction).