Originally Posted by Jimmytwohand

At the danger of hijacking im going to briefly expand on this...

I was thinking of some of the custom maps ive seen being designed for tacmod and the comp. In particular kilroggs map where you have a flag surrounded with buildings and cover and a forested area also with lots of cover surrounding it. If played with a normal radius i think a lot of the time you will have a buggy piling into the buildings and everyone disgorging leading to a mad minute of firing and then one side quickly comes out on top.

If you had a flag radius which encompassed the flag and the forest surrounding you could have a squad move up to the forest cover and the flag would then be contested from a distance which never really happens at the moment. All the emphasis is on quickly getting to the flag.

With a little open ground between the flag and forest you then have something of a standoff. The defenders can engage from a distance and the attackers can choose to either stand off or move in. It also adds another defensive challenge, do they keep their cover and fight from it or try to move out and flank the attackers.

It also means that the attacking squad could (if their long range fire was accurate enough) turn the flag neutral before moving in meaning both sqauds would have to guard their manpower as neither has a flag to spawn on and immediately reengage.

I could be missing something obvious though and this probably needs a custom map which i just dont think i have the time get into making with all my other TG commitments.

It just seemed to me that this would shift the emphasis from the flag to the men guarding the flag. You hhave to take out the squad not the 10 meters around the flag.

This quote is from the most recent tacmod AAR, and i just wanted to expand on the idea of controlling zones as opposed to some flag pole. Im aware that Asch has stated that they are working on this, but we can at least hash out possible details and possible downfalls of this idea.

So first of all, every flag would needs its own capture radius. This radius cant be a set radius because all CPs are different. For instance, the Old City in daquing has a HUGE area, but the suburb in Karkand is considerably smaller.

When a zone is capped, we want to be saying that the attacking squad was able to capture because they controlled the zone. We dont want to say that the attackers capped it because they were able to keep their guys alive for a long time in some obscure corner against a bulding that is hardly in the true capture zone of the CP. For instance, you have building X perpendicular to building Y. The 90 degree angle created faces away from the true CP itself. This would be a really arbitrary way to lose a flag from or to cap a flag from. If its possible to create capture zones by using polygons instead of circles, you could easily get around this. If its only possible to use circles, then we'll just have to carefully set the capture zones.

Another important consideration is the logic behind how a flag goes neutral, and how a flag actually turns over to the opposing teams control. An attacking squad could just send all 6 guys to the outer rim of the capture radius, and turn it in their favor without even trully controlling the zone at all. Instead, i think the flag should turn just neutral if the attackers have equal to or +1 or more people in the flag radius compared to the defending squad. For instance, the attackers have 6 men alive in the zone, and the defenders have 5. The flag would be neutral. This would make it important to keep the attackers alive as much as possible, because it will make the flag neutral and therefore the opposing SL wont be able to spawn. But if the attackers are reduced to just their SL, it allows the opposing SL to spawn again. Once EVERY defender is killed, the flag finally turns in favor of the attacking squad. If the defenders's flag is neutral, it should still count toward their teams bleed. Also, if ALL of your flags are neutral because the enemy decided to attack all of your remaining flags, i think spawning on SLs should still be permissible despite not fully controlling any flag. We dont want a team to lose because the opfor decided to put a lonewolf on the rims of all your CP zones, and therefore nobody can spawn.

Im sure someone could expand on these ideas, but i think no matter what logic we use in this, it must be simple. We dont want people constantly asking and being confused about how to actually capture a zone. It should be easy to state that once every one of the enemy is dead, its your flag, and that neutralizations occur inbetween. No complicated formulas, please.