Strategic value of planets in GW

[nine2]

I confess I haven't read much about GW. I was wondering if there is all planets are created equal or are some better than others?

One thing I love about FA is how you have to fight for the map, control territory, and there are reasons to want one bit of land than another.

If the same logic was applied to a galaxy, it might be less about how many planets you have but which ones you have - which makes it strategic what you decide to protect and what you attack... and how much you invest on those things

[Rogueleader89]

In the last galactic war the only strategic value of planets was planets that stood in chokepoints (where you could nicely position defenses) and sometimes the last planets of a faction (since enslaving a faction essentially meant a massive increase in player numbers + all their tech). I agree planets should have more strategic value in general; infact I've outlined a fairly large amount on how we could achieve that elsewhere in this forum :P (see, future of galactic war thread).

This said, I'll add something I did not have in that thread, another thing we could do is have stationary resources that are based on certain planets, they could be special structures and provide a bonus of some sort for holding the planet, be it more income, cheaper costs to something, improvements to an existing system (like, if we tie reinforcement time/availability to depots you could have a resource on some planets which provides a +1 increase to all of your faction's depot's max distance of effect); lots of options here. The only downside to this is that we'd have to ensure that such things were spread evenly and balanced against one another so that one faction didn't get some fantastic boost while the others miss out or get something less useful. Personally I see these sort of resources as something it might be desirable to have at some point, but I think adding new strategic structures that allow factions to increase the strategic value of planets on their own is probably going to be a stronger move in the near future.

[Hawkei]

Another aspect of strategic importance was their interconnectedness. Which came into effect with the influence mechanic. In that way, it was much like playing a game of "Go". Surrounding enemy planets, and disrupting enemy planet interconnectedness would disrupt enemy control. Which would then cause entire networks of planets to fall.

Other planets were valuable simply because of the maps played on them. Certain maps favoured certain factions. Other maps had a large player count, and therefore could be defended by a large team of players. While other maps were single player maps, and could be defended by a single player. Other maps gave advantages to static defences, and gave a distinct home ground advantage. Making them very valuable targets to take and hold. There were some notorious examples where an enemy spawn point was in immediate range of the home base TML. There were other maps where home base T2 artillery would dominate the battlefield. There were even other maps where players spawned right next to each other. Which meant that spamming a load of T1 and T2 PD resulted in an "auto-kill" .

There was also the strategy of placement, which comes into effect when there are multiple factions. Meaning that GW was not a zero sum gain. Based on who was fighting with who at any particular moment in time. Certain planets became more or less valuable as they would allow or deny access to certain other factions.

[ZLO_RD]

For now They only act as a choke points that give ability to defend for faction with less players