Region bonuses – Certain bonuses for holding specific territories will greatly enhance a clans desire to hold certain provinces. A discount for premium consumables or ammo for holding important territories, a discount on certain nationality tanks or crew members, there are many bonuses you could give for holding provinces. Whatever they may be, they need to only come from critical provinces. Give clans a reason other than gold to fight over capital provinces. You could also introduce bonuses for holding every province within a country. Holding all of France should give more benefit thank holding 90% of France. Then make it harder for those clans to hold lots of provinces through threat of revolt.
Taxes and Revolt – With 100 chips, at most teams can have 6 stacks of 15, with 10 extra chips. When a clan holds 15 provinces, this means they can only occupy a third of that territory in full strength. Provinces need to revolt if there isn’t an occupying force. It’s too easy for large clans to band together and form 1000 member strong alliances, putting all their chips on the borders. This border centric positioning of chip stacks is fine, but it doesn’t really properly represent realistic conquest scenarios. If a province revolts, require a clan to “defend” that territory. If they don’t, the province could turn neutral and the revolt randomly moves to the next province owned by that clan. You could even pit a randomized mercenary team or randomized public group against a clan for that territory during the revolt scenario. While any clan should have no problem dispatching a group of random opponents, what it does is force clans to actually police their own territory. This would force teams to dedicate chips to home defense as well as offense. The taxation rate of each province can determine not only the total amount of gold earned, but at how high of a rate a province has the potential to revolt. This brings me to the next issue of province combat getting old and becoming unoriginal after a while.
Introduce Sabotage to fix stagnating gameplay – With only one map per province, a province owner gets to know the ins and outs and every little nuance of that map. The issue is with how draws are handled. A territory owner gets the luxury of sitting on their heels and camping because a draw is a victory for the owner. This completely puts the onus of attacking truly on the attacker. An attacker not only has to play 15v15, they have to beat an opponent who gets to dig in and sit back. This tarnishes game play in my eyes, because a draw isn’t a win – it’s a coward’s way to hold territory. I think a couple changes to the way maps are handled for provinces can fix this. Namely, I think there should be a pool of 3 maps per province and there should be some side choices. Let the attacker choose the map, and the defender choose which side to fight on. Secondly, if a defender “wins” a province via a draw, they should lose their chip stack on that province. No longer should a team be able to hold border territory through draws alone. Without chips to defend the next day, the territory can be lost if a clan can’t reshuffle chips for defense. Lastly, if the sabotage feature is properly implemented, you could reward attacking teams by giving them the edge with a successful sabotage. Perhaps if successful, sabotage could let an attacker choose both the map and side to play on. Whatever it changes, it still comes down to 15 on 15 combat, despite it almost always being a tier 10 showdown…
Tier 10 is a requirement – This is a pretty dead horse on the forums. Less experienced players try to argue that no tier limits sets clan wars up to be a battle not between those with the most skill, but with those with the most time. My response would be: so what. Tier limits only server to hinder overall strategy and battle tactics, and on a long enough time line, it’s never going to be an issue for clans to field fully tiered equipment. This is an age old complaint by players that would get beaten in an even match up anyways. The truth of the matter is however, the three different Ultimate Conquest divisions might very well offer tiered limits to battles, but this will be reserved for the lower, less rewarding divisions. There are even more restrictive setups that could also be introduced for the higher divisions as well like tank lock downs.
