TLDR: Combine Strategus ticket and spawn system with Siege flags and make it into a Conquest/Domination mode like in Battlefield where the team to not run out of tickets first, with deaths and holding less ground draining tickets, wins. Use a limited amount of very high quality maps instead of 100+ on battle or siege. Put the objectives over different terrain so there are forts and cover that need an infantry push, or more open/hilly areas that require support by cav and ranged to capture. Spawn points rotate with territory captured. Ultimately create a gamemode that promotes teamwork and objective gameplay so classes perform their roles instead of hunting for kills and preserving their life.
My thought process:
A whine thread about battle servers being crap got me thinking about whats good and bad about cRPG, all the game types, and all the effort the dev team put into Strategus development. I'm starting to see a big gap in the potential of cRPG gameplay between what we are now so used to in Battle and Siege, compared to the innovation the dev team is capable of with things like Rageball and Strategus. I wrote a few posts and I am basically just going to copy them here but I wanted to describe how I see a "conquest" type gamemode for cRPG that people are starting to wish for, accomplished by drawing from the best of all the modes available in cRPG for an experience that sounds, at least to me, like it would be the best thing to happen to cRPG.
A fully realized conquest/domination type game mode, that is fast, functional, rewards infantry play and encourages even pubbies to do teamwork, and has really good maps.. not 110 shit generic maps like battle, just 5-6 GOOD maps designed for the mode, even only 2-3 to start..
Would be the best thing for this game in the past year, would be tremendously more entertaining then any strat gimmicks, and could be a flagship gametype for a future MELEEGAMING.COM entry into the donkeycrew's game catalogue.
I wouldn't want to see a single respawn either. Just ape Battlefield's conquest a lot. Teams get tickets and losing ground or lives ticks them away. What's so shitty about battle as an infantry player is you can man up and charge to take ground that is being contested then just die to pikes, a cav couch, headshot, or whatever. If you want to get points stay alive and not die to ranged or cav instantly you need to honestly play like a pussy more often then not, even if being an over aggressive dude can have moments of hilarity/great success too.
The metagame I always honed in my mind when I was a strat commander, most of which never really work that well because even strat just is glorified team death match.. is the idea of map control. Occuping territory with infantry. Using ranged to facilitate movement of infantry players. Cav threaten the routes infantry must take to get from points a-b-c or can be a mobile force like jeeps in battlefield to threaten rear spawns. Strat NEVER plays like this though. Its boring. Its just TDM, regardless of map or setting.
Just making really interesting maps for this mode, with you know A B C points, and spawns turn to these points if you control them and maybe a few others around it that you set like Strat battles. Maybe mini castles around the points and stuff like that. You could also use the reworked town maps for the big Strat battles that I only got to play a couple times ever, and some of the towns that i saw the UIF take are too great of maps to be wasted in Strategus.
I imagine a few flags like in Siege across the map, on places like top of hills or in the middle of ruins or keeps.. just places that are fun to fight on. Like the map Field by the River, probably the best native map. People naturally gravitate towards the set of ruins on one side of the river. Places of interest like this would have the Siege flags on them, and capping it will reduce a gradual drain of tickets on top of the drain you get from deaths. So like a Strat battle, but with more fluidity and another layer of depth in a give and take of land, instead of solely being about grinding out a TDM count of lives.
Strat battles have the set spawn system built into them already, so you could just slap a couple of these around the siege flags, and if none selected just randomly select a siege flag that your team owns to be a spawn.
Basically I feel like this mode could be created by using assets that all already exist in cRPG. You guys have created some awesome gameplay possiblities in Strategus, that the community often look forward to instead of mindless siege or battle server gameplay, and you know how often people bitch about maps and cav and it being unfair and everything for pick up and play sessions.
So I think it would be very forward minded for the dev team to consider porting some of the best features of Strat into a more accessible game mode, because Strat battles are rare, are full of bullshit drama and bugs, require effort and scheduling.. but have ultimately some of the most teamwork focused gameplay and inspired design compared to the port of native warband modes that just ape counter-strike and stuff.
You guys tried out that Stronghold or whatever mode a while ago that I think was basically too confusing and not focused enough on what I think all of us agree is the best part of Warband/cRPG: Charging with a bunch of bros in a shield wall with pikes and whatnot, archers shooting away at each other, fighting over concise objectives. Moments of gameplay where you feel like two armies fighting for something. Not having to run and chase the last few alive archers across hilly generic map village map #3 for the last 2 minutes of a round, every other round. Or being couched at spawn and sitting out for 6 minutes.
Siege gives you a basic objective and frees up the stress from a single life, kiting and cav, and keeps up a sustained level of intensity that is very fun to play for short gaming sessions. This is why "bads" go on siege: casual type players, who this mod honestly drive away in flocks, probably like this kind of gaming much better instead of the counter-strike ONE LIFE MAD CAV OPEN FIELDS GOOD LUCK BRO mode. But Siege is full of shit maps, cav can't do anything, it just feels half assed.
Now if you can get that kind of objective based, fun, fast paced Siege gameplay on maps that represent the most balanced and fun experiences in Strat or Battle servers, you'd have something really great. Some of those reworked town maps that we only got to see at the end of Strat 3.0 when UIF were taking them.. those were some amazing maps! And would be perfect for a game type like this, instead of only getting to play them 3 times a year.
That's a lot of damned words I know but I combined my posts so people could have a place to talk about a game type like this instead of being buried in shit threads of people simply saying cav is OP. I dunno, seems like it would be pretty fun to me!
