[Malorn]

lol @ reaching post char limit (Hamma can you up that for me ).


Commentary

This design like any has some pros & cons.

The Good

• Capture strength is proportional to capture time.
  If someone captures a few capture points and tries to contest a territory but doesn't have the manpower to back it up (i.e. a ghost-hack from PS1) it will be quickly squashed and the capture will be halted. If on the other hand a serious contest for the territory is underway then the longer that contest goes the more time it will take defenders from re-securing.
  
  
• Extensibility
  Adjustments to capture rate are easy as described above in the Augments section applying capture bonuses or penalties is easy with this model. I particularly like the neutrality prospects.
  
  
• Capture is not arbitrary
  When capture occurs, it is because an empire has sufficiently overpowered the other empires for a reasonable period of time to establish dominance. It doesn't happen because it happened to be a certain amount of time after which the capture was started. Capture indicates you fought hard for control.
  
  
• Minimum capture rates are upheld and predictable
  Since capture strength is the maximum capture rate we can make guarantees on how long it takes to capture a territory without any defenders.

The Bad

• Complexity/Cost
  Implementing control vectors for the 3-empire tug of war is certainly more difficult than a ticket-count-up race-style design. This translates into a higher dev cost. The biggest cost as I see it is the vector modeling.
  
  
• Capture Time Balancing
  Since capture time is a factor of both control points and a non-linear function of adjacent territory it is more difficult to balance this model. As more augments are added to the system it becomes more difficult. However it isn't too difficult because there's basically a single strength formula that could be tweaked. Getting the right formula is the tricky part. I think I'm close with the above formula but it might put a bit too much weight on adjacent territory. That can be fixed with tweaks to the strength formula and tone down the above-50% portion and make it almost linear instead of non-linear. Going from a .5 to a 1.5 capture rate from 0 to 100% adjacent territory may be more than sufficient and a simpler formula to work with and calculate. I'll run some numbers on that and see if a simple linear formula will work out. The simplest linear formula might be as trivial as R = T +.5.

Ease of understanding could either be good or bad depending on how well the UI represents the capture mechanic. As long as players can figure out how to increase their capture strength (by having adjacent territories), and how to see which empire is in control I think it shouldn't be all that hard to understand.