My terrain BowlMA has a tests built into it because I wanted to see what is attractive and creates activity.
Groups or hoards form to attack the least defendable bases all night. Those three on the tip of each island, are closer than 25 miles from each other along with many other airfeilds. No GV spawns for M3s to interrupt the fun to those three, and no shore batteries to stop the carrier hoard at two of them. Just attrition in favor of the attacking hoard unless the defenders really fight tooth and nail to the bitter end. I see it go 50\50, the hoards win or the defenders bloody their noses. The furball guys hate it because it's "The Hoard" and the GV guys have to get in planes or wirbles to fight and get bombed. But, a lot of guys show up to that spot and fight. Unfortunately, those fights don't really drag out all night and go nowhere like on our AH2 converted terrains, so new fights get picked all the time around the terrain. Not setting every single airfield 25 miles away helps.
The next test has to do with vBases and GV spawns. You can see the terrain is not saturated with vBases and no airfeild\port\vBase have more than two GV spawns. The defenders can manage the incoming GVs if their fighters don't mindlessly furball, so far I have yet to not see that happen.
If the attacking planes get the upper hand, the GVs end up on the airfield, game over. The capture invigorates the attackers and they up and attack the next airfield generating activity. I gave the Gvers the center island and three spawns to the strats on each island if all they want is to tank furball and not be part of the general activity. The center island seems to be a cricket farm while the GVers all want to follow the hoard around the map to be in the activity locus.
I don't see any of this audience except for the game creator and maybe a few terrain builders who remain silent, testing the community to see how they really utilize the sandbox. Being on the stinky end of the stick in our game really sucks and even makes people log off. Being on the clean end sticking it to the other guys is what most customers are paying for. And it's intoxicating to the point of running out of control. We insult that condition by calling it a hoard. It cannot be controlled without Hitech killing his game by driving customers away with forced and coercive external forces. And a small vocal group of players keep saying the game will die unless Hitech does exactly this to his customer base thinking it will force them to play in the Melee arena the way they want to play.
I've taken my lessons from BowlMA and incorporated them into Oceania which I'm in the last phases of tweaking. I've added some new things along with a better understanding of how our terrains are utilized today. The vast majority of our converted AH2 to AH3 terrains want to slow down the hoard and give Gvers their own special places. That had to be done years ago because Hoards blew through the arena like unstoppable floods almost every night. Still there was no end to fodder for the furballers "because of only the numbers".
Today, the terrain builder has to bring players together and accept that will create hoards because everyone wants to be on the end of the stinky stick that makes the other guys cry. You disperse players by not building terrains to match how the current population utilizes the arena. Right now short distances to a fight keeps the players in motion which generates activity and opportunities as a group to break things and win fights.
