Nonsense. Harder town capture makes brute force more necessary and successful. Thirty pairs of eyes make it a lot easier to catch that one little yellow-roofed house that's up.
The reasons for hordes has been discussed here as nauseam and it has nothing to do with the white flag mechanism. Ditto for side balancing. If you think 100% town down captures would do the slightest thing to fix the utterly broken side balancing mechanism, you're dreaming. Side balancing is broken in part because ENY is designed so that it would work for a 2-way war but doesn't work at all for a 3-way war where a side can be outnumbered more than 2-1 across the board with no one having ENY issues. But the main reason side balancing is broken is that people apparently want it broken. Why else do we so often see one side (nits seem to be the worst for this, but all sides do it) decamping for the other LW arena en masse leaving a massive imbalance in both arenas? Plainly they want it that way.
That being said, I agree 50% is too easy. It has nothing to do with style of play, "Xbawks" or otherwise, though, and everything to do with correct balance between offense and defense. I think 80% might be about right.
Claiming that brute force is needed more so (and is more successful???) when the towns were at 100% and no white flag is an obvious knee jerk assumption and is a logical explanation, but the fact remains that there are far more hordes now than there were prior to the 50%/white flag settings. A bit of reverse psychology, I know. But think of it this way: with the town needing more attention, the 20-30 guys that made the horde were split, not all of them were in vulch mode. I'd say at least an equal number of them were involved in dealing with the town. With the 50% town/white flag only a few heavy attack aircraft are needed to deal with the town. So in effect there are more people in vulch mode and fewer people dealing with the town. If the 100% town/no flag required an even larger horde then why did we not experience such events on a consistent basis (like we do now) when those settings were in place? It is real simple: *points above* as well as the defenders had more time to respond from another base, it takes far less time and effort to capture a town now. The smaller groups of players attempting to capture a town are far and few between (as stated earlier one would think that the less requirements would equal smaller bands of players capturing towns but it isn't so) and even less so now, the 20-30 man hordes rule the show.
FWIW, I'm not the one who brought up the ENY or side balancing issues. That has never really been an issue with me, I fly aircraft from all across the ENY scale without hesitation.
The white flag notification is still, imo, a drag on the fog of war. It is simple too easy.
