2-Faction PW?

In current PW, there is ambiguity of attacker vs defender, especially regarding PW structures, but more broadly ([V] and [Pirate] fighting for [0K] worlds when they have their own border disputes, or [0K] and [NC] fighting for [V] worlds and just trading IP with eachother regardless of who wins). Most people also arent interested in trading IP to get planets, instead you have a lot of idle IP that just decays and never adds up to anything.

A 2-faction setup is probably worth trying for the next round. The problem with this is that balance may become more difficult, which will probably require mercenaries.

The question is what role should the mercenaries play? Should they be able to hold planets (regardless of which faction owns it, possibly they might have IP from both factions on one planet)? Should they just be paid out in exchange for their IP? (Automatically, since people dont care to make trade deals). Either way they need some way to spend the money- what sort of rewards should they be offered?

Possibly the sort of people who chose to play as mercenaries wont care about the outcome anyway and thus wont require any metagame motivation in order to try and win, but my feeling is that it would be good for them to be able to participate in some fashion.

Mercenaries convert PW cash into xp on your account page. Disallowed for PW members (PW game should not be affected by external motivations).

I'd play PW all the time if that was the case. At least until I run out of commander unlocks. (Level 23 now and I have a few miserable commanders that aren't anything special. )

Or perhaps PW cash can be used to unlock a few recoloured units. Like planes with glowy exhaust (fireflies!) or the golden morty people like to talk about but I never ever see. Or special "hats" for your commander =P, like festive season.

I don't see anything inherently wrong with that.

Free IP and planets from last season were removed, weren't they?

If you want to simplify to having 2 factions mercs shouldn't be able to hold planets since that will mean the factions will have to war with mercenairies to gain certain planets, which seems undesirable in the current set up.
Personally I think, although this might be ambitious that there should be as much factions as the players desire. A system where you can create factions which are banded clans would be ideal in my opinion. BUT perhaps we don't have enough playerbase for that.

Not sure if this would work with balance since we would need an even spread of players on both factions. Maybe we s
hould just try and see what happens?

Four factions is a bad idea because it will ultimately become a 2v2. Two factions will become friendly, and the remaining two will have no choice but to team up against the first alliance. Eventually 1 pair will be killed off and there will only be 2 factions remaining with only half the playerbase allowed to participate.

There is the possibility of not allowing an attack unless at least one clan member is present to defend his clan's planet. So then two players couldn't play 1v1 just to kill all the structures on a third clan's planets. Although I can see that leading to the same problem as PW1, where you could defend a planet simply by refusing to play.

So there is nothing wrong with saktoth getting free IP all the time? Just looking through the logs and this has happened many times.

Yeah, lucky, waiting for both [0k] and [v] to be online in order to fight for our worlds isnt a reasonable prospect. Which is why 2 factions is the only way to go.

There are no mercs now, we'd have to re-add them: That's what im saying. Though it may be worthwhile conscripting some people just to get them involved (with 2 factions its a simple prospect anyway). Perhaps opt-out rather than opt-in, depending on the numbers this gets.

Mercs would'nt get independent IP and hold a planet as a 'merc planet'. They would get IP in their name for whatever faction they played with. So a merc might have 110 blue faction IP, and 90 red faction IP, on the same planet.

'As many factions as you like' is just an 'unlimited clan size' planetwars. It would have all the problems of the old PW, would be massively steamroller, and would be exclusionary rather than inclusive (if you're new to PW or havent joined one of the uberclans, you are on the bitch team).

Factions are auto-assigned, of course. Clans dont chose them.

Eh, in that case Sak, I would test that with 5-Fac first, since at the current time they are not auto-assigned.

I think many factions is working a little better than 2 did.