Mission Type Suggestion: Conquest

[AquaLogos]

This game is fantastic, but I will suggest it requires a new kind of map. You basically have all of the classic sorts of maps: Elemental and Thematic. However, the game style is always the same. Rush, jump, blam, splash, poof, and repeat. Some sneaky sneaky and space-mech shooter.

 

Map Suggestion:

Starwars Battlefront 1 - Hoth style maps. 

 

Hoth because it is basically snow/ice and incredibly minor asset plots. It wouldn't chew up much computer resource. 

 

These things are hugely popular: 

Probably the easiest modern example is Guild Wars 2 which added a map called Silverwastes.

The game released this map 2 years ago and it is still played more than the entire expansion they released immediately after it. 

The map is a large open sandbox. Players have to hold several fortresses / outposts. Each fortress or outpost is a fixed position. While players and assisting npcs hold the outposts supplies are escorted to these positions against overwhelming waves of NPCs. For each wave of defense there is a combat period, restoration period, preparation period, and renewed combat period. There are four rounds in total. During each round creatures become progressively harder and more complicated attacks emerge. There also a rare chance for a large enemy type to spawn that is essentially a boss-type. After this the players lose the fortresses as a boss spawns in them, burrowing in from underneath. The players must then defeat the bosses at each fortress before moving on to a final champion boss. Each wave is simply a progressively harder challenge that is pure fun. However, the final boss actually has all the precious loot. Everything else is just for the sake of having the challenge of maintaining that personal and co-operative coordination. 

___ Other Examples:

Dark Age of Camelot - Frontier & Battleground Maps.

Dark Age of Camelot was the origin to many MMO standards, but it also featured some fantastic micro-battle environments. The most popular of these is Battlegrounds. They're basically one castle surrounded by a moat. The players have to hold the castle while other players besiege it: quite literally with siege engines. It's quite fun and intensive. They just made the doors to the castle very hard with some climby bits on the outside for stealthers to get in. Meanwhile players had to use various tactics and lulls in the fighting to maximize their numbers against what was usually overwhelming odds from outside. 

Just switch that up for pure NPC vs. 4 player team on a wide open map and it would be quite fun. It would also let us use sniper rifles and jumps. We could use either the rifle or the jump to close range with a particularly important aspect of the wave/strategy then rush back to the primary defense point. It'd be a really beautiful way to show off scenery as well as change up the fighting mechanics.

 

Advantages to this style map:

Low in computer resources.

Renewal of interest for veterans.

Eye candy for us trying to advertise/bring new friends to the game. 

I noticed on the Corpus maps where there is a lot of snow these are fairly empty places. The moon is another such place. I think you could model something fairly fast and cheap that would work excellently in this game for just this sort of thing. Just throw a planet-type in the sky or some other vista of pretty-whatevers to start with. Then add some low resource very open areas. This would force people to use strategy over the current turtle or zerg tactics. Turtle is where everyone gathers around one spot and pumps out maximum damage/energy replenishment. Zerg would be the dogpiling of single target or area; again for maximum damage.

An open map would force players to rethink basic combat as it currently is while also selling this game on some of its more spectacular imagery and assets. I think it would revitalize the game for a lot of older members as well who are probably in want of something besides the same map-types for every single planet. It's not terrain types that I mean by map-types. I mean map layout and strategy. it is always the same tunnel system of chaotic battles. They're wonderfully fun, but this game needs to woof its wings a bit. It flops a little on the seemy side when it comes to map variability.