I will give you an example why we need faction lock (that cannot be solved with tyranids imo). Example: Chaos is pushing into Eldar territory with overwhelming power. Eldar are putting up good fight defending their big fortress. But chaos is so strong that it has become kind of a grindfest. Random ork guy sees this and thinks; Wow! This would be good opportunity to gain some exp for my Chaos alt (he might not be the only one with this thought). So he and others log out and join to chaos to gain some easy exp. And they change the course of battle with their faction swapping reinforcements. That could also go other way around. SM players hear that Chaos is pushing against Eldar and with their win, it would put SM faction into poor situation. So some people join Eldar and help them to push Chaos back. This kind of things can happen without FL. And it's bad. That's why I'd like to have FL timer between 15min-2hours to prevent this kind of swapping into battles to gain exp or impacting your nemesis factions plans. These are just some rough examples what could happen.
So following your line of reasoning, A massive zerg of chaos is assaulting an eldar fortress. Meanwhile the games systems recognise this large imbalance and dispatches a counter tyranid zerg to assault your now lightly defended flank. The chaos wc now has a fairly important call to make. Proceed with the eldar assault or divert some of the attacking forces to defend there failing territories behind them. I would also hope that eldar scouts reporting to their own wc about the tyranid zerg eating away at the wxposed chaos flank and they can double down on their defenses. This could end up going from assured chaos victory to a major strategic setback. Still I vote no on faction lock.
This should be in this other thread but hey, I'm not the one who brought up the subject Why should we care about nids? for what we know the nids are going to attack territories, not front line, we don't know if they are going to appear in the open world or if we have to clean instanced dungeons to get rid of them, that doesn't stop anybody from taking important campaign objectives, even if the nids make the territories drain Requisition instead of generate it, the nids will affect territory, the devs are telling us that territory is not important, what matters is the campaign objectives.
Territory is important, it's just a means to an end. We still need to own it just by the sounds of it; owning too much will be a liability. (harder to defend). I don't know how they'll promote that, I have personally theorized that holding territory for it's own sake will require upkeep costs. But you are correct, we don't know what role Nids play within the environment that will make them effective at promoting careful territory management. Sounds very sporadic and random to me and less reliant on the engine for balancing them, considering the devs said they can even attack your own Faction 'safe zone' islands
Yeah, you see this is where you are wrong, it's a hybrid FPS-MMORPG, you will have characters and character slots for each faction, there is XP progression (all be it horizontal) to get you your skill unlocks, and equioment unlocks that you cannot share with any other "Character" that you have on the faction (although you won't really need more than one per faction). It's been stated by the devs that you can spend your unlocks to specialize to an insane level in a single class, or spread them out so you can switch classes. There are both play styles available as they have to cater not just for the FPS fans, but the 40K fans and all of the MMORPG fans that are migrating over because the game is being advertised as the "1st ever MMORPG FPS game based in the 41st millennium".
Yeah...Though I think that they'll try and get the lore best as a number one priority. Maybe even add in some of their own. I just have this ultimate fear that the spiritual liege will be asked to write some lore....And then that lore will spill over to the game, and 'the blue faction' will be created with near-broken skills and r***tastic fluff butchering.
Sure, territory will be our ladder to reach the important objectives, but once we are at the objective if the nids are trying to steal our ladder... why should we care? Maybe if you are 2-3 bases away from the objective it's better to go back and don't get cut out/drain of resources, but once you are there you need other mechanics (like faction lock). Again, this is based on what we know right now, maybe in a couple of days the devs tell something more about the nids that may make them useful to prevent this stuff.
Maybe it will be made so that if your ladder gets broken, you go down with it? So in other words, you NEED the ladder to maintain an attack. Say...no respawn without a ladder?
