05-25-2005, 10:36 PM
Gurnsey,May 25 2005, 12:01 PM Wrote:Is it inevitable that all towers will be destroyed? If the team knows that towers are not recapturable, will they place more emphasis on defending the towers? Do the towers provide enough advantage that anyone even cares?
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Well, I'm happy to educate you, young padauan, based on my lofty experience of 2 fairly lengthy play sessions.
First off, I can see why they wanted to make things more "winnable", nobody won in either of my sessions.
To your questions:
Currently, capturing an undefended tower is not superdifficult. A bunch of people run in, distract the guards, and someone yanks the flag down. Capturing a well defended tower is difficult, because the PC's will snare you, and interrupt the guy pulling the flag down.
Towers do provide a significant advantage. The archers hit fairly hard, and once they aggro they have a very long range. The towers provide an excellent place to regroup if you are being pushed back, and are difficult but not impossible to bypass.
If towers are destroyed, not captured, it probably will put more emphasis on defending towers. However, the towers are quick enough to destroy and spread out enough that they are hard to get to that defending them means putting 6-7 people on permanant tower babysitting duty. Doesn't sound like fun to me.
Sentry totem doesn't help for 2 reasons : these things have to be balanced for both factions, and they only last 5 min. It is frequently a 5 min round trip from the frontline to the back, so you don't gain anything.
As far as stratagies goes, capturing random towers behind lines is one, it's just one my side said pfft to. If, durning the time they were in enemy hands, they made a break through, they could have turned the tower they already had into major gains. While the tower is in enemy hands, it is more difficult to go to the main base, for repairs and to drop off blood and armor. So eventually, a group of us broke off and retook it. While we were doing that, if they made a major push, we would be undermaned. Making towers be destroyed, in my mind, limits that. Since riding to a towers defense is often impractical due to distance, the only stratagy that keeps your towers safe is to keep a patrol back there. Who wants to do that? And once the towers are destroyed, they are elimated as a stratiegic item.
Similarly, since the leutinants and explosive experts no longer respawn, I fear they too will be quickly assinated and removed from the game as a stratiegic element. Briefly, there are minefield on the map. Briefly, there are minefields on the map for both sides. They can be avoided, rogues can disarm them, or you can kill the explosives expert to remove them. I believe if you can kill all 4 leutenents in a set period of time, it burns down the foreward base. I'm not sure what this does, since NPC's still spawn there. But again, if they don't respawn, they will be killed relativly quickly, and removed from the game as a stratiegic element.
There are ways to fix the winabilty problem without making the battlefield empty after 1 hr. And they will be, niether towers nor leutinants stand up to the large summon well. An obious one to me is to spread out some of the GY - Tower combos that are exceptionally difficult. And it may just be that the good stratagies still need to be discovered. How long did it take for Oxy to go down?
And finally Jerry is right, capturing towers gives you mini goals. Even if your team sucks, and you are pushed all the way back to your main base, you might be able put togeather 5 good minutes and take the first tower back. From there you might be able to get your mine back.... Where as if you can't get towers back, you break out, but as soon as you stumble you are right back where you started.