Ideas for the "Rich get richer" problem

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Aaron

There are two other factions. If one is to overspread, then it is likely they won't be able to hold it down.

Of course they wont' hold it down forever, but they could hold it down enough to make players' life on a particular empire/server miserable. Since the game is F2P it is likely that players will have multiple characters on different empires, possibly even on the same server. When one empire gets beaten down we'll see the same behavior we saw in PS1 - players will either jump ship to the "winning" empire or go to another server where things might be better. This exacerbates the problem for the empire that lost. This was the "fourth empire" phenomena in PS1. There must be incentives to keep an empire fighting and help facilitate a comeback to prevent the exodus that will occur when an empire's back is broken and they get pushed back to a handful or less of territories on a continent.

The important thing to realize is that this happened in PS1 without resources or a territory control system that makes it easy to hold territory when the neighboring territory is friendly. Both of these make the problem significantly worse than it was in PS1. There are many good ideas in this thread to help mitigate it, but denying that it is a problem is rather silly.