Hello everyone.

In many youtube videos and many discussions i have noticed there is a big talk about capture points in battles and there are lot of whiners that are being very loud about the fact they did not like the capture point system and they want to remove it.

Since i belong to the other camp (of ppl who think that the capture points are actually good for the game - especially in multiplayer) i have decided to post my arguments because i think is necessary for the good of the game and all of its players (in short ...”for greater good”) that both sides state their opinions.

So why are the capture points good?

Here are two main reasons

1.Firstly they make the game more interesting by giving it more tactical options and more depth because thanks to them you have more options how to win (either by points or by destroying the enemy) and they make the game more complex (which is good in my opinion) because thanks to them, positioning, map awareness and maneuvering actually means something.

Imagine how boring will the game soon become if there were no capture points and all battles well be like this: two fleets just go straight for the middle where they clash and the fleet with stronger ships automatically wins! Sorry but i find concept that extremely boring and dumb.

2.Secondly, without the capture points the game would became extremely imbalanced. Now many of the whiners who do not like capture points say that the game is imbalanced because fleets with faster ships or with more ships have huge advantage and removal of the capture points will make the game balanced (usually those are people who lose the game by they incompetence because they totally ignore the capture points even if they have the option to easily take them and then blame the game system for their own failure). But guess what!Those fast or stealthy ships are much weaker in direct engagement and If you remove those points, the game will go just to the other extreme and will be even more imbalanced because speed , stealth and maneuverability will mean nothing and therefore fleets which rely on speed or stealth will be asbsolutely useless and everyone will play only fleets with strong ships that have good brawling capability because those will be the only ones viable for competitive play!

I am not saying that the system is perfect right now, it is not , and needs some rebalance, but i would ask everyone who thinks or talks about this issue to carefully consider both sides of the argument before making the conclusion Thanks

1. I agree with this. It gives depth. My only issue is that often the enemy ends up with a couple of escorts and annoys or even wins with them, because they cap the points that I'm not guarding. As far as I know, the point system was made in order to avoid an eternal kiting and force fleets to clash. The system now encourages small skirmishes here and there rather than a big epic battle.
2. I think that, generally, any faction should be able to annihilate the enemy, rather than having its strength in "flee while they're not looking". I can understand that balancing 12 factions perfectly is not that easy though

I also agree. It stops the typical 'more bigger ships' SPAM. It forces you to use light cruiser and escorts - to have a more diversified fleet. This is great for the game.

Bear in mind this scenario for instance:

Tau players creates a fleet of several long distance cruisers with a huge DPS output. Youcan either close the gap, or die. In Domination, you have other options and the ability to get the points, to split your forces.

Annihilation = create huge blobs and hit them with each other. Splitting forces is not beneficial, and this makes the game less interesting. Less maneuvering, less tactical optins. Just simple DPS and the old tactics that we were used to like kite'ing etc. Domination is the best thing they came up with for MP!

The original tabletop BFG had approximately 10 scenarios. That was the beauty of the game.

Just make us able to select the game mode and it would be fine. But this mode does not even make sense. What are these points lorewise? Also why do I lose even though I got the better fleet? It just makes the game easier for players that cannot micro their ships and use half of their fleet to go scout all the time. Fun.... Fly around and grind for points for staying close to a nonsense point even though you wanted to play a battle.

I LIKE the capture points. In so far as they force you to contest the map. No corner camping or endless running.

Capture points simulate strategic victory as seen in the real world.

The Naval battle of Jutland is a good example. Materially, the Royal Navy took some pretty decent losses, but strategically they achieved their aims of locking in the German navy.

Capture points are an easy way for video games to simulate the distinction between different claims of victory.

The EXCEPTION I have to this is that chasing around a single escort is stupidly annoying and makes for bad damn gameplay.

A happy medium is what I want to see

One more reason I would not play the game without capture points : deployment became a very important strategical decision.

@iuiz

For skirmish against the AI sure. Have a toggle.

This game is already going to have a small multiplayer community. Anything that divides that further is going to give the impression it’s smaller then it is.

iono guys i understand you desire to have a balanced mode but with 12 factions with varying base strategys meta fleets/factions/ships are going to be their regardless. In every major instance you can point to cap points in an rts its generally always with non static forces making countering on the fly possible this game with its limited forces just forces streched out forces and heavy reliances on expanded fleets, if your goal is to make MP more inclusive thus creating a larger and longer lasting comunity forcing heavy micro burden out the gate may not be the best approach. If the question is "is capture points more balanced?" i would yes sure it is but if your asking is it more fun then things get very murky very fast. I think the only way that MP survives beyond a few months is that they segregate ranked to take and hold and offer a new variant of MP that is not ranked that opens up other modes because people are not going to stick around for something they find inherently annoying and with the already small player base starting off losing them is a loss im not sure MP can take.

Multiplayer is going to survive by cutting it into smaller pieces? Read your statement again and try and make that argument.

Older relic titles still have Multiplayer communities because every time they released an expansion it faction it didn’t suddenly exclude the people that didn’t buy it.

Keeping the already smaller community playing under a single rule set is the way to go. If there are serious legitimate concerns with the system address those, but we won’t build the community by chopping it up.

@brn4meplz someone that plays in the general section is much more likely to play ranked because they already play MP, someone that plays 1 match of take and hold and says wow this is all i got and never try it again will never play ranked. Its like custom games for starcraft or warcraft... people that play them are much more likely to make the transition to melee than people who dont play MP games at all.

I'll be pretty disappointed if for the life of the game capture points is the only game mode. I liked destroying/defending space stations, escorting transports, and even protecting the data (though that was my least liked game mode) in the first game, and a single scenario means faster boredom, and more rage from people who really don't like that one scenario.

Straight up combat is the absolute worst choice though, because it takes away a lot of the tactical choices provided by having a separate objective, which would normally lead to fleet experimentation, and fleets with variable ship types. Some kind of annihilation objective encourages pure math efficiency towards maximizing DPS, and survivability, and only cares about things like speed/stealth/boarding/ordnance when it is a heavy enough influence on the other two traits that it overwhelms just having more/better guns and armour.

Anyone who complains about capture points has not played enough RTS games on a competitive level.

Very good points raised. I agree with both sides of this discussion really: I don't see anything bad about Capture&Hold itself, but there are some things that should be looked at in my opinion:

• If the match is even in terms of points scored, and one player decides to split their fleet and use their escorts to capture points and gain an edge that way, that's a valid tactic. Having a single escort left, losing badly by points, and still trying to capture a point or 2 in a futile attemp to revert the situation ends up with the other player very bored of chasing it all over the map until they win anyway by points, since they were ahead in points already, and understandably makes people despise this mode. I'm not sure how could this be avoided, but @Valrak had raised good points against this in his video.

• Having Capture&Hold as the only game mode in MP, and most of the campaign missions, ends up feeling repetitive despite having lots of factions and ships and loadouts to try. Personally I feel Cruiser Clash should also be present at least: just make game mode randomly selected in MP and campaigns. Oh, and when player-run lobbies are in, allow the host to choose the game mode like in DoW2.

• With the previous point in mind (random game modes), having more game modes would be very welcome too. Breaking a blockade of defense stations or a "King of the Hill" (a single, large area in the middle of the map, earn points only by keeping ships inside it (not capturing it)) would be awesome in my opinion. Random space hazards would also spice things up in any game mode.

I really don't think Capture&Hold needs to go. Removing it would only reduce the content of the game and increase the chances of corner-hugging and chasing escorts all over the map, like in BFGA1. It just needs some tweaking, and to be accompanied by more game modes.

Something that I like from Capture&Hold is that it introduces more tactical depth into the game than a "simple" Cruiser Clash, by adding more things to take into account. I've seen some people in the Steam forums claim "40k is about battles, anything that keeps me from just straight up fighting is bad", and I'd say that's very wrong. Rarely a tabletop 40k match is reduced to a mindless clash: there are usually capture points to claim, or objectives to achieve (assassinate this unit, extract this unit, keep this area for X turns, etc). The lore is also very explicit in this: while the general objective of a war might be to eliminate a foe in that region, in the "day to day" of said war there are endless objectives to achieve: keep and hold a beach-head, provide orbital support in specific areas, assassinate key officers, destroy specific devices, and a long etcetera. All factions do this, even Orks and Tyranids, in their own way. Wars can be won while inflicting less casualties and/or taking many, if important objectives are met: the lore is full of examples of vital last stands, cunning infiltrations and more by virtually all factions of 40k, and we all know them.

In BFGA2, Capture&Hold is just an abstraction to introduce this important aspect of 40k... but as I said before, in my opinion having more game modes would introduce more of these aspects of war. Without removing the awesome 40k battles we all love.

@lkhero games with static forces tend to stay away from take and hold, but if we want to go down that rabbit hole those games also tend to have much fewer choices as far as races/factions are concerned and they have somewhat homogenized fleshed out rosters to choose counters from that can hardly be said about this game. seriously look at the games you are referring to and youll realize that most of their rosters get used were as this game will see most of the ship options deem useless or obscure relatively quickly as its blind pick against 12 factions.

RTS games that work well with cap points (DoW, CoH and the like) all have the ability to spawn new units and the cap points themselves dictate how many resources you have to build new units.

RTS games with no ability to spawn new troops in battle don't have cap ponts (looking at Total War).

First thing is we don't know what faction we are facing until after we've picked our roster.

Second, we can't then build new units during the battle to help control the cap points.

Third, we don't know what map we are playing on until after we've locked in our roster.

This in turn reduces us to a blind game of rock, paper or scissors . If we pick the wrong build before the fight, and our enemy has the correct build we're doomed. If we pick the correct build, and our enemy has not we've won. We are going to get the odd game where we have a 50/50 chance of wining based on our skill, rather than I picked rock and you picked paper.

If we had the power to either pick from a list once we knew what race we were playing then I believe games would not be won or lost on a blind pick. Same if we knew what the map was. I'll take Total War as an example here. That has to be the premier smash 2 armies into each other with no respawn, unit building or control point RTS games.

We're limited like Total War in that we can't change our forces once the game starts. However in Total War games we have to fight over points on the map. We've no idea what faction we are facing when selecting/building our list. We've no idea what map whilst building our fleet.

It seems like we've taken the limited no re-spawn battles of Total War and thrown in the capture points of DoW/SC. Should Creative be looking at BFG2 and re-thinking how their MP works, or should Tind be looking at all the Total War games and re-think how theirs works?

We will see most factions disappear, along with many of the ships from the few factions that are viable as only a few meta fleets will emerge. This will drive players away as many will play as they like X, Y or Z faction.

More Tactical Options

Comparing Cruiser Clash and Domination (Capture Points) this is not true.

Case-1: WC: Eliminate enemy fleet
Case-2: WC-1 Eliminate enemy fleet OR WC-2 earn enough points faster than enemy

In the first case your fleet needs to be able to eliminate the enemy.
In the second case your fleet needs to be able to eliminate the enemy AND contest the points so he doesnt out-cap you.

This REMOVES possible choices/combinations because they may only do one thing but not both (like a pure kiting fleet that can't contest points)

Game balance

Actually this hurts game balance because now you dont only have to balance races/ships/abilities around having a equal chance of killing each other but also contesting points.

Again the kiting fleet example. If you Balance around the fact that a Kiting fleet should be viable they must be able to kill fast enough so the capture points dont matter at all anymore OR they will never be viable because the "tanky"-fleet simply AFK's at points.

Last night I played the points. I played a mix of Imp, Chaos and Ad Mech. I avoided fights and just played for points and cheap kills. I received a fair bit of abuse in chat and a 100% win rate.

A few games did have brawls, however I always had 2 LCs and a frigate squad capping.

Did I have fun? Yes. However the chat box showed me my opponents did not. I've uploaded one of the games to my channel:

Youtube Video

@bosie said in Capture points - The other side:

RTS games that work well with cap points (DoW, CoH and the like) all have the ability to spawn new units and the cap points themselves dictate how many resources you have to build new units.

RTS games with no ability to spawn new troops in battle don't have cap ponts (looking at Total War).

First thing is we don't know what faction we are facing until after we've picked our roster.

Second, we can't then build new units during the battle to help control the cap points.

Third, we don't know what map we are playing on until after we've locked in our roster.

This in turn reduces us to a blind game of rock, paper or scissors . If we pick the wrong build before the fight, and our enemy has the correct build we're doomed. If we pick the correct build, and our enemy has not we've won. We are going to get the odd game where we have a 50/50 chance of wining based on our skill, rather than I picked rock and you picked paper.

If we had the power to either pick from a list once we knew what race we were playing then I believe games would not be won or lost on a blind pick. Same if we knew what the map was. I'll take Total War as an example here. That has to be the premier smash 2 armies into each other with no respawn, unit building or control point RTS games.

We're limited like Total War in that we can't change our forces once the game starts. However in Total War games we have to fight over points on the map. We've no idea what faction we are facing when selecting/building our list. We've no idea what map whilst building our fleet.

It seems like we've taken the limited no re-spawn battles of Total War and thrown in the capture points of DoW/SC. Should Creative be looking at BFG2 and re-thinking how their MP works, or should Tind be looking at all the Total War games and re-think how theirs works?

We will see most factions disappear, along with many of the ships from the few factions that are viable as only a few meta fleets will emerge. This will drive players away as many will play as they like X, Y or Z faction.

Actually prior to TW: Warhammer the communities general view was that Shogun Total War 2 was the best multiplayer experience and that actually did have capture points.

The capture points in Shogun didn't lead to victory instead they led to bonuses for troops.

I think this would synergy with BFGA both in Single player and more appropriately Multiplayer - fighting above a forge world, take a cap point which gives a small range boost. Above agri worlds get a small troop boost etc.

This would also solve the abstract issue of why these circles are important, makes manouevere important but still pushes people to fight rather than run.

@mystic_taboo I like your idea. We all know Medieval 2 was the best TW until Warhamer landed.

@bosie haha, not multiplayer I would contend, singleplayer possibly yes, but the multiplayer in Shogun 2 was generally lauded as the pinnacle, with its capture points and conquest of Japan mode.