Can we please have something similar? Someplace where a series of very important bridges connect the world, so neither would dare collapse it, and on either side factions have entrenched themselves so hard into the earth the zone is divided in half leaving two sides in a near permanent standoff unless a major (1,000 players or more) war is raged there? Perhaps the SM's on a peninsula vs. 2 other factions? It would be a great way to "naturally" impose a balance to the SM when they have to fight on more fronts than other races....

To be honest, I think there might be more mileage in letting larger factions sprawl over the map, but requiring them to achieve more to get the same level of resource gain as smaller factions through objectives / territory, then giving them grief via the tyranids the more territories that they take. That way you have both a clear incentive to expand, and increasing difficulty the more you do so, as holding your territory becomes increasingly important and increasingly difficult.

My worry with bottlenecking the SMs into one place is that they're going to funnel into the other end if they have no other targets, and no other faction is going to want to be on the receiving end of that kind of a zerg. And once they break through, as they inevitably will, the chokepoint effect is lost.

Personally, if we're going to try to protect smaller races via the terrian, I'd go for a Maginot Line effect. The side pointing at the larger race is heavily defensible and a nightmare to storm. If the larger race storms it and takes it, its a nightmare to hold because its the exposed and poorly defended side that's facing the enemy - and there's not much they can do about it.

Nothing to stop the larger race following the historical route and circumventing it, but if that means crossing into the territories of other races and having to leave their flank exposed to the Maginot Line holders, its not going to be such an easy strategy as it sounds.

That's kinda what I was thinking, but instead of having to have a race, like the Eldar, "manning the walls" of this line enormous line, having the SM's on the wrong side of a peninsula with two fronts of players to contend with, it achieves the same effect by a simple level design rather than putting effort into large gun batteries and the like.

Furthermore, I like the idea of the terrain after the bridges being cliffs into forward bases where the struggle and benefits of fighting the uphill battle remains largely one sided. Doing this, isn't as heavily reliant on sheer manpower holding the line, nor is it particularly difficult to do in terms of level design, where (possibly what lays beyond the forward bases) a developer constructed Maginot Line would excel, is a taxing challenge in terms of level design and reliance on the unpredictable nature of gamers.

I like the idea, though major map design elements around battle flow need to have something similar to the Planetside 1 Latice structure as well as good map design to funnel and control the direction of combat.

I remember bridge battles in Planetside that were close to 15 hours long, Those were epic.

I probably wasn't clear enough.

I wasn't necessarily thinking a Maginot line replica (although that would be awesome), but any terrain which is defensible from one side but hard to hold against the other. You can do that via balance of cover vs killing fields, height, buildings that are fine on one side but have entry holes blown in from the other - all sorts of ways.

If you make enough of those into a line, or create artificial choke points (bridges and gorges could work, in line with your idea), then you force people on the "wrong" side into two evil choices - the risk of a direct attack, or the risk of counterattacks if they try to circle around the position (because it's a long journey, not a five minute detour).