Furious:
when it comes down to those last 2-3 bases the fighting (from my obseravations) is the fiercest and most fun.
Of course. The defenders have no where else to go. It's not like they can roll from a rearward base and look for an easier fight elsewhere. If a large percentage of the team cared about "strat" then they would get interested in the war before they were down to 2 or 3 bases. As it is they become interested when they have no other choice except to log off. And my observation on that is a lot of defenders do log rather than stick around for the bitter end.
To answer your question: In one of its incarnations, the WB MA had 2 pairs of allies fighting each other. A pair of allies would be diagonally located from each other. It was an axis verses allies thing with the 4 sides being US/British, German, Soviet, Japan. Every time the US/Brits and Soviets would immediately gang up on the Japanese and crush them. Not many German players seemed dedicated to taking the lightly defended allied bases. I guess (like in AH) most people just wanted to engage in fighter combat. The Germans could have attacked the allies, taken bases, and caused the Allies to defend and prevent a reset, but I never saw it happen. Axis numbers plummeted because the German players couldn’t find a fight and the Japanese players always had to deal with 3-1 odds. So it generally became 150 allies against 50 axis (mostly German), and the Allied bombers would repeatedly milk run the Japanese for a quick reset.
WB “fixed” this by making 2 sides. The way this works is that whichever side has better aircraft during that part of the RPS has a significant majority of players and gangbangs the side that has weaker aircraft. It seemed like about 50% of the players were dedicated to either Axis or Allied (and more to allied). The other 50% would switch sides if it starts getting ugly for them. I suspect that in no small part, this is why there is a time delay requirement before switching sides in AH. A lot of people just won’t fly if the odds are stacked too much against them. They will switch sides if they can or otherwise log (and go have their fun where they actually would be having fun).
Hooligan