In the lunchtime interview Higby mentioned that SOE are split between making resource rate global or continental. In other words should territories on your continent give you resources or should every continent worldwide provide them.
The continent idea has a problem, it means that people are strongly rewarded for fighting on continents that they control the majority of. With a game without a continent lock this could be problematic, an empire who controls the majority of a continent has a huge incentive to stop the enemy taking it but the opponents trying to attack have an incentive to leave and go to continents on which they have more territory. Another problem is that without continent locking there is no real 'objective' in taking territory other than getting more resources for yourself, continent locking was really the 'incentive' in Planetside other than getting into a good fight.
I have a semi-baked idea that I've just come up with after listening to the interview and it probably needs refining, but I think no matter what resources have to be global just to make the incentive *Taking* territory not just trying to camp the continent you own the most of. The payoff for this is that you reduce the value of territories on every continent, so the new objective becomes taking territory but not overexpanding onto too many fronts, now with lower resources per territory you can add in 'Strategic Locations'. Effectively these would be the 'Empire Specific' resources we've heard mentioned like 'Auraxium' for the Vanu. There would be a few of these 'Strategic Locations' on the world, not even one per continent , and they would be extremely valuable in resource-terms providing many, many times the amount of a 'Standard' territory. The developers could also put these in interesting locations or design interesting locations around them (River deltas, an industrial/mining complex, mountains, city) which would provide an extremely good backdrop and terrain for a fight.
The strategic territories would provide a goal and constant flashpoint for the Empires to fight for, denying them from the enemy would take a lot of effort but would severely damage their resource capabilities. Capturing and holding them would provide a huge boost to your own production capabilities, overall they would just be a point on the map to work towards and give a goal to the whole situation - Just an idea.
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2011-09-18, 08:55 AM
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