War is unfair, but there are plenty of natural consequences in life that seem to make things balance out without having to be heavy handed. Here are some natural consequences that will likely Feed the Underdog, and Starve the Zerg.

Split Resources into Requisition and Power & then Share them throughout the Faction.

Requisition - Earned by owning territory and key points in the world and doing heroic deeds. It is used to buy everything, from ammo, weapons, armor, and tanks.

Power - Signifies how invested you are in your faction and requires significant Requisition investment, earned over the course of several actions in a campaign to put additional Reactors (Increases Base Rate of Production), Capacitors (Reduces Cooldowns on purchasing items and using supporting abilities), and Batteries: Storage of power. Power is constantly being collected and stored. The more power an individual has, the quicker they receive a basic allowance of Requisition. The more Capacitors they have, they can spend power for special abilities more often but with less available power, it reduces the rate of Requisition earned; and batteries enlarge the amount of power you can store at any one time. Economics; on a personal level therefore becomes a matter of strategically using power.

"Do I hit the big red button, do I buy a tank, or build a bigger battery??!"

Meta Level Economics - "Blood Makes the Grass Grow."

Requisition: Requisition is split between players. The more players on a faction - the slower players will earn their base allowance of Req. The more people that assault a weakly defended base, the less spoils will be earned for its capture. Kills and assists are reversely affected. If you're a lethal player, you will be justly rewarded no matter who you are. Kills, regardless of the faction on an objective make the objective worth more points on a capture. For those who control it, each kill begins to slowly grow in Requisition value, as does the value of the objective itself. Therefore, a hotly contested objective, with hundreds of thousands of players fighting furiously for hours or even days will swell the objective's worth to truly astronomical levels - that even when divided by a thousand players will feel like a staggering achievement. Yet, even losing the objective, although not a very rewarding concept will make players come away with some serious pride, since each kill they achieved will be worth a considerable value - likely more so than an attacker. In addition, because of splitting the resources of the faction, assaulting or defending a base with very few players against many will have serious visible and meaningful rewards.

Feeding the Underdog - Power is not split between players unless players combine their personal craft into a Strike Team Cruiser, or a player elects to enter "The Maw of the Warp". On board their Strike Team Cruiser, players can either choose to use their reactors to help the gigantic reactors of the Strike Cruiser or lock it to their personal use. It cannot go the other way. Obviously, the rewards of acting selflessly are far greater than not, but here is the catch:

Starving the Zerg - "The Maw of the Warp" - To signify your breaking its allegiance, when you choose to switch factions, all of your character's power supplies are reduced to 0, as you warp out and reappear above Akrohma as the next character. The power supply of your original character is then automatically diverted to your Strike Cruiser - or split as charged power cells active players can inject into their batteries, helping to sustain their power supply until you return. (Your character does not sit idle, watching its counterpart burn Akrohma at its feet.). This only happens if you log off a character, and relog. This penalty does not occur if you log onto one character, exit the game, and then relog to the game several hours later.

Gameplay Translation: If you have a vested interest in your character, you will not only become more and more flexible, but also more resilient to defeat. Switching factions will allow you to join a zerging force as the most basic trooper for a limited period before more and more power is generated; costing valuable time. Should you have stayed on your own faction, you would receive natural bonuses for being invested, carry your best weapons and be able to replenish them quickly if you died, redeploy quicker, have quicker ability cool downs, and even possibly be able to field more tanks than the enemy. This does not remove the possibility of making alternative characters, but as you will read in the final section; having your power reduced to zero really, really, really sucks.

Economic Victory and the Australia Tactic

Requisition - or territory control is the ultimate resource of the game. It can't be farmed. It can't be abused. It must be earned. Power, enables you to gather Requisition quicker when you faction controls it - so if your force has little hope of overcoming the massive odds of 4 enemies at your gates, then a large initial investment of power generators and a very small amount of territory that is fiercely guarded and upgraded for the entire duration of the campaign will allow your faction to hold out even among impossible odds: Ala' Australia vs. the World in the game of Risk. Should your force have a higher than average investment in the economy, by spending as little resources as possible and earning the most unspent Requisition by the campaign's end, your faction may earn an Economic Victory that is rewarded in the next campaign.

Its reward? When the world resets, and the economy is reduced back to zero or equilibrium, your entire faction will have a significant leg up in terms of base power and requisition, allowing you to field elite and heavy arms much quicker, setting you up for a devastating initial blitzkrieg.

A lot of stuff here punishes a player for reasons that they cant control. So I would have to disagree with your ideas.

I'm not sure if I follow your logic.

I see giving players the ability to control how they wish to spend their resources as empowering - much in the same way as an RTS. I see players who make a commitment to invest in one faction, have that faction reward them by increasing their personal rate of earning requisition. I see charging a hotly contested objective with ever increasing rewards eliminating the feel of a grind and rewarding players in conflict. I see splitting the rates of earning these resources between a faction as a fair and balanced way of ensuring not one faction gets bloated or overpowered because of its sheer size with everyone earning the same amount of points regardless if you captured the objective on your own, or with 10,000 other players from your faction - while the shrewd investment in the secondary resource of power allows players to balance their personal rates of requisition income and the neat abilities that require the usage of power. I see that players have complete control over the choice of giving up their resource of power to move with the zerg, hampering their ability to bring their most powerful toys with them.

Can you please elaborate what you mean? I don't quite see your point of view.

If im doing good but my team sucks and we cant capture anything then I am being punished for their actions. If my team is doing good and I am doing nothing and im getting the same resources as them then what incentive do I have of helping. And to get power you have to have requisition, which is determined how well they do instead of how well you are doing.

So I am punished for joining a populated faction? Every time a bunch of people join my faction and my rewards are cut down, through noting I did mind you, I will just join which ever one is least populated.

And in general I down want to play Eternal Resource War 40k.

Thank you for explaining it, your view makes more sense now.

Your thoughts of, "I am being punished because my team sucks" vs. the idea of "Shared Req. is different than Socialised Req." which I think is what you've misconstrued it to be.

So lets say you're rocking it today. You have a 50:1 KD ratio and have helped capture a bazillion points for the Orks. You, still earn your rightful amount of Requisition in your faction. You will more than likely be able to buy a bunch of new toys and things like that - and continually be able to replenish them should you die. The loafer, Orkboy Snotbag, that's been tagging along with you, capping points at the last second and occasionally shooting in the general direction of your red hot death will earn a significantly less amount of Requisition than you.

Ms. SexyMcSexyness of the Eldar however has performed on par with her faction, scoring a medium amount of kills, and helping her team score a few objectives and defend others. Because her faction is underpopulated to a ratio of about 4:1 in comparison to yours, she earns close to equal the amount of Requisition you did, and may have even earned double of what you made, had she had done as well as you - this is in accordance to the ratio of players active on the faction - and is made even more apparent in "Blood makes the grass grow", when players are rewarded for heroism in the face of futile odds, and hordes of players that fight for territory over a long period of time are rewarded for their perseverance in capturing a bitterly fought objective.

This allows both of you to purchase items that Orkboy Snotbag cannot, and then face each other in battle on still equal footing rather than you riding upon the shoulders of 10,000 Orkboy Snotbags all earning the same amount of Requisition as you and then roflsteamrolling over Ms. SexyMcSexyness of the Eldar without her even being able to put up a fight that's still rewarding for her.

"I'm being punished for joining a populated faction?" vs. Making an economic commitment to your faction.

Power - Accelerates the rate of your basic Requisition allowance, and yours alone because Reactors and such will be inside your personal quarters. Power is generated day and night, online or off. So, as more players join your faction, you can therefore compensate for the divisions of allowance resources by adding more Batteries and Reactors to produce more energy, and store it - making you more invested in your faction, and less warrant to switch and follow zerg's riding the "Requisition Grab Train", because if you join the zerg train, your power is reduced to 0 - and so are all the benefits that went with it as the Reactors recharge the batteries. So yes, joining the team with the most people on it is going to hurt the amount of initial requisition you earn in comparison to lesser populated factions, but this is compensated by being able to build reactors, become vested in your faction, and have the support of vast numbers of other players supporting you.

Also; I forgot to mention (it's in another thread) Power acts as a sort of "Mana" that enables you to use special abilities, like calling down needed supplies, lance strikes, and other support that the use of Requisition would not make sense for - because you're right, what's the point of fighting for a faction that's always going to lose because it can't capture or hold points? Well, to help you capture them; invest in energy. No matter how populated the faction is, you can always draw upon this secondary resource to give you aid when even all the Requisition in the world could help you. So, even players who are terrible at PvP, but dedicated to the faction, can lend a lot of aid when it's really needed to help the faction in times of dire need.

This means, that no matter HOW MUCH TRASH is on your faction, or how many Zergs are unleashed, if you put the effort in to adding Reactors and continually putting back into the investment, your personal economy will become such that no matter how badly your faction is losing, no matter how little Requisition as a whole is earning in comparison to the others, you will always, ALWAYS, be able to continue at optimal effectiveness on the battlefield.

"In general, I don't want to play Eternal Resource 40k."

Well, I hate to break it to you, but the devs have confirmed that players will outfit themselves in gear that they buy using Requisition. They haven't really elaborated how Requisition will be earned other than obviously fighting for control of Arkhona. It does seem fair however because unlike SM, where teams generally were 8-10 people each, missing one or two of them didn't make much a difference. Here, we might be talking a difference of ten, fifty or even one hundred thousand players at any given time. It doesn't make sense to allow them to field 10,000 Land Raiders when the opposing force may consist of only 9,580 players.

Likewise, if Requisition is the currency of the game, and is earned by your actions in battle it can also be mathammered down to simple 1st grade arthritic. If a battle consists of 500 defenders and 1,000 equally skilled attackers, each worth 1 point naturally, we can assume that at some point the attackers are going to win. How much are they going to win by? More than likely by 500 points right? Wrong, if Requisition is not properly distributed by the size of the faction, than it is to the advantage of players to jump to the largest faction currently in the game because not only are they going to win by 500 points, they are all going get the bonus for taking the objective (again 1 point each): giving them 1500 more points than the defenders. Now multiply that by a thousand conflicts raging across the world, and suddenly you have a recipe for disaster as the most populated faction literally steamrolls everything else because:

A. It has the most people, and B. It has by far the most resources.

So like it or not, if even all you do is consider the simple fact that the populations will be imbalanced with no true way of fixing them, there are few other ways to bring the game back to equilibrium than with a simple, meaningful economy, that's only regulation is how many people are within it.

Good ideas. Balance is hard thing to accomplish in this IP where there are so many Space Marine fans and Space Marines are supposed to be AWESOME. SO... there needs to be a way to keep the underpopulated factions on par and I think your ideas are worth taking a look at. I'd love to see this in BETA to see how it works out.

OFF TOPIC: I wish they wouldn't have gone with the initial classes they did. Space Marines, Chaos Space Marines, Nobs, and Aspect Warriors should have all been "earned" classes like the Jedi in the original SWG. Should have kept everyone as the baseline weakest troopers of each faction and let players upgrade from there with "elite" classes being earned through deeds of epic proportions.