Footholds Archetypes: "Food for Thought"

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by NewSith

Added an extra-note:

Please have a crystal clear mind about the neutral warpgate handling method. We can have several choices for the way they operate: Non-contestable, always open; Non-contestable, accessibility is based on adjacency; Contestable, effectless hex; Contestable, adjacency-effecting hex.

Gates are tricky, but I have a few ideas...

In order for a neutral gate to become a foothold it has to have some amount of ownership, not because of the gate itself but because the territory next to the gate. The gate needs to give the empire attacking out of it some amount of influence so they can reasonably capture territory adjacent to the gate and start pushing out.


You could have the gate behavior change depending on territory adjacency, moving from effectively "neutral" to a full on exclusive foothold.

Here's some ideas

- you can enter/ use the gate if you have non-zero influence over the gate, so only one hex is required to broadcast to either side of the gate

- if you own 51% of the influence over the gate it becomes a broadcast source and you can broadcast from that gate to other broadcast destinations you have

- if you own 100% of the gate *on both sides* it becomes a foothold *for both sides*, and you have exclusive control over the gate (nobody else can use it).

- strength of influence generated by the gate scales with amount of territory adjacent to it *on the other side* (so if you have all of the territory on the other side it gives you a strong influence bonus, making it easy to capture the territory on the other side).


The way I see this working is that as you approach a gate you want to own all adjacent territory, as that gives you the strongest influence on the other side of the gate. Once you go through it, you start capturing territory immediately around the gate, which captures faster thanks to the influence bonus from the other side. Once you secure all the territory on both sides the gate becomes a foothold on both sides and only your empire can use it.

It is then possible for enemies to uproot that foothold by attacking territory around the gate on either side to break the foothold. It only takes 1 adjacent hex for an empire to start using that gate and break the foothold, but since influence on the other side is proportional to adjacent territory on this side it will be difficult for them to simply capture 1 hex on one side, hop through and start taking territory on the other side. It'll be a gradual process to weaken the grip on the gate.


One thing I like about this is that the gates themselves and the areas around them become conflict points and they become relevant.



Also, instead of having permanent "sanctuary" footholds they could make it more dynamic where every foothold can be uprooted, BUT - each empire must have at least 2 footholds at all times (on different continents). So if they are down to their last 2 footholds they cannot be broken. Since every WG has a companion on the other side it means the most you could back up an empire to is 2 different continents (with back-to-back warpgates that are footholds).

It would allow empires to actually relocate and choose their own homes, and always guarantee two continents are available for play for any given empire.