Resources And Vehicle Timers for Upgrade Balance

[Sirisian]

Originally Posted by Brusi

So you can pay SoE for premium and one of the perks of premium is faster rate of faction loyalty increase?

Originally Posted by Sirisian

Prerequisites:
The first prerequisite for this system is that resources cannot be purchased using station cash and can only be aquired via the game. With this there is an assumed resource cap. So everyone has some resource cap to force them to use resources. Basically there is no reason to horde resources and players should never feel that they need to.

So no. Ideally this system is independent of any player's subscription status. It was mentioned though that increasing the cap would be an option. Allowing someone accrue resources faster than another player goes into pay 2 win too much for me and I'm against that.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by sylphaen

I would much prefer a system that disincentivizes double-teaming rather than focus only on resource distribution to the poor.

I had an idea about this many moons ago based on the territory control system.

We know that adjacent territories determines how long it takes to capture any given territories. I was thinking we can augment this further to discourage double-teaming an empire that is down.

One way to do this is to augment capture time of a territory not only by adjacent territories but also total territory owned on the continent. Specifically this would be inversely proportional to total territory owned beyond a certain point. So if lets say the TR have 50% of a continent, their territory will be easier to take than the other empires.

If the TR have 50 and the NC have 20%, it'd be pretty crappy for the VS to also attack the NC. The reason the VS might do so is because its easier to take their territory. However, by making the TR territory more vulnerable than the NC territory because they won so much of it that would help encourage the VS to attack the TR.

So this is not so much a system to discourage double-teaming, rather it encourages empires to attack a dominant empire on a continent.

The system could work really simply, like this:

Example
Capture time of enemy factions is reduced by 2% on a territory for every 1% of the continent that owning faction has over 50%.

So for example, if TR had 66% of the continent, there would be a 22% capture time reduction for VS and NC against TR territories.

The benefit scales so it makes it much harder for an empire to own an entire continent because capture times are greatly reduced for the enemy empire. At extreme levels, like owning 90% of a continent the capture reduction bonus is 80%, which means the enemy empires could take even isolated territories reasonably. And better, it encourages the other two factions to not be stupid and attack each other because the dominant empire on the continent is a much more lucrative target. As they start capturing back territories the bonus naturally decreases until it is no longer significant.

Numbers may need to be tweaked, like making the growth rate smaller but start earlier (like around 35 or 40%).

Point being that this slowly increases incentives to attack any empire that has a large percentage of the territories on a continent and makes it very hard for them to own all of the continent without losing grip on territories.

This might work a lot better than a welfare system, and prevent abuse of that type of system. I like making it easier to capture territories and recover rather than giving handouts.

[Talek Krell]

That's a clever system Malorn, but I'm wondering if it might not make the front line a bit too static? I think ideally we should be trying to encourage battles on ranging all the way across each continent. The uncaps are already going to make that difficult since they provide a natural home field for each empire, and it seems like bonuses based on amount of territory held will only amplify that issue.

[Malorn]

Battles all across a continent are fine, but the issue is that as a faction gains more territory the exposed number of territories decreases. Worst-case they take all territories and the only place the other two empires can attack is immediately around the warpgate. From a manpower perspective it's easy to bottle them in, especially if they can't do any attacks anywhere else. By lowering capture time as they gain more and more territory it makes it easier for empires to recover from that situation, or open up something behind the lines.