[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Higby

We've talked about capture mechanics that are very similar to this, in fact I even have a triangle "vector" control drawing on my whiteboard that looks exactly like your mockup from when I was trying to explain it the other day. Funny. We went away from it primarily because we didn't want capture events to have the possibility of going on for long periods of time. Right now we have a min and max time they can take - this helps a lot with balancing possible rewards.

Our current "race" model has a lot of the same advantages and is a lot easier to understand.

Thanks for the response Matt, also good to see you had the same concepts. The race model certainly has the beauty of simplicity and few problems.

A couple points about the long captures and rewards...

Long captures or a stalemate - I think those are good things. If an empire doesn't demonstrate sufficient control one way or the other why not let the capture continue until someone does? The shorter captures won't stop the fight, it'll just have multiple capture attempts strung together until the attacker or defender is driven out completely. The tug-o-war method has the same result, except you only have one capture.

From a resource perspective I can see though if you have significant rewards for the capture/defense then it makes sense to have that at a predictable rate and to dish them out multiple times over a long battle as opposed to at the end and having to work in resource payouts over time.

The only glaring issue I see with the race capture is ghost-capture attempts bogging down the advance, especially right after a significant capture or resecure pushes a force out of the capture area. For example if I had an infiltrator in the base after a resecure I could trigger yet another cap, even without anyone around to back it up and that cap would continue for whatever the minimum capture time is. Unless you have some sort of mechanism to detect that case and cancel the capture attempt, such as if no hostile players are in the capture vicinity? I can get behind the race model if there's some quick resecure methods or a way to prevent that sort of shenanigans. I see that being a highly annoying and frustrating issue, as you just know there's going to be a few infiltrator asshats sitting around after a capture completes to do exactly that.

Also how close was my other thread to being accurate?