[Malorn]

Originally Posted by DviddLeff

This also means that uncontested territory can be quickly captured - no more sitting around for 15 minutes doing nothing unless you are stupid.

Not necessarily - one of the things I don't like about this is because border territories could have ghost hacks that end up lasting a long time because of the race-style count-up mechanic. The only time hacks don't take a while is if you have all the surrounding territory. As territory decreases, the longer they take, regardless of how long the hack has been held. It is one reason I prefer a tug-of-war system, as ghost-capture attempts that are quickly caught are quickly squashed. That does not appear to be the case in the current system.

Originally Posted by DviddLeff

I am not too sure I like the tickets counting up - as you say it is arbitrary. How to replace it? Perhaps have the defenders tickets counting down as we had with NTU originally and when it runs out the defenders cannot spawn and the base flips. More points captured and the faster the defenders lose tickets. Adjacent defender territories could give the facility tickets, so capturing them even while the hack is in progress would still make a difference. It's a simpler system but again how to deal with two attacking empires is an issue.

I think the best replacement of the counting-up is a tug-of-war model, but while simple in concept, it is a bit harder to implement than this relatively simple race-style model they have.

The main reason a tug of war gets more complicated is that with two factions a tug-of-war is a one-dimensional line, while with three factions a tug-of-war model becomes two-dimensional space, and a 4th empire (if they implement AI later) would make it three-dimensional space which would be difficult to visualize at-a-glance in game. A race style system doesn't care about that, as all three (or four or more) empires are racing toward the capture-line at different rates and are, for all intents and purposes, completely independent of each other. A tug-of-war model requires them to interact, making it more difficult to balance. I have a design idea on how to get the same behavior this model provides in a tug-of-war version that doesn't have some the quirkiness that a race model requires. I'll post it later tonight.