something i'd like to see in Planetfall is some mechanic that makes losing a fight less absolutely crushing for the losing player. in AoW3, because battles are fought to annihilation, typically in pvp you have an hour+ amount of time dedicated to playing, uh, essentially sim city, followed by a single hour long battle which is a lot of fun, but typically ends with the loser losing their entire army that they've thrown their entire treasury into, and the winner losing maybe 2 or 3 units out of 18. so the winner of that battle goes on to steamroll the loser 9 times out of 10. people just calling it after that first battle and not wanting to bother with playing the mop up phase was really common, even in, say, a 3v3 game where the climatic battle happened between 2 players on each team.
There's a few systems that might help with this. something like total war, where (usually) your army isn't actually fully killed, but after a lost battle is severely weakened and must retreat back home to recover, would help with this a lot. i suppose a simple system would be something like, you get a partial refund for every unit of yours that died in a battle, though that's kinda unintuitive and probably really open to being exploited.
another thing i'd like, to come at this from another angle: some kind of skirmish game mode, where rather than playing the hour long set up game followed by the hour long battle, you can just skip straight to the hour long battle after a much shorter point-buy system to determine units or something. it's honestly kind of bizarre that a strategy game so heavily focused on combat doesn't have a game mode like this, i seem to recall there being efforts to create a custom map that would emulate something approaching this functionality in AoW3.
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