You claim squad spawning adds more depth, i say thats bull. Theres no special other way for the other team to avoid it, there’s no special way to ensure it happens, maybe you hide your squad leader somewhere and he afks while the other team tries to figure out where you’ve left a fucking teleporter in your base, gee what great gameplay. To have depth a mechanic should have not only lots of interacting systems, but many ways to change how you play around it, sometimes circumventing it, which increase and decrease relevance depending on the situation. Spawning systems increase complexity, not depth in the gameplay, they are always present and always at the forefront of the game, there’s nothing to them but done wrong they take up a huge portion of the strategy, which sucks. An example of a mechanic that i’d describe as having depth is something like a sectional shield or subsystem mechanic like in mechwarrior or star citizen, done right to a new player it would just appear as a single health bar and doesnt force complexity on them, but an experienced player can game them knowing how they interact, where to shoot, where to shunt shields etc. Just an example, not a specific suggestion for I:B.
I never played much 2142, but i did play bad company 2 for 500 hours and planetside 2 for a good 80, so i know how squad spawning affects gameplay at least to some degree though many details will be different. Yes, it’s a mechanic that allows arbitrary turn arounds because a squad leader lasted one second long enough and suddenly 3 people just appear out of the ether on you and murder you while your reloading. It’s not just that i disagree with this mechanic, but it negatively impacts the enjoyment of mechanics you do have fun with. Sure, bad company 2 had this, but the maps were small, the rounds short, and the gunplay was solid meaning hell even if you got screwed and screwed other people over due to the spawn system it didn’t really matter because most of the gameplay was elsewhere and you could often prevent it because of the small map… space isn’t small. Mechwarrior living legends territory control probably is the most relevant example of this. Factories get captured but spawn speed is slower the more expensive the mech, tank, or aircraft your buying, and suicide is rarely worth doing (except at the begining of the match but thats a bit of a problem with credit transfer that never really got fixed, most servers disabled it). A previously undefended base will be captured before spawning hell can have any significant impact on the outcome. Maybe a bunch of battlearmor infantry would run out of the base at you and cause you some annoyance depending on your loadout, but those are equivalent to fighters as far as infinity goes.
Im not against people spawning quite close to the action ala carriers(MW:LL did this too, APCs could spawn battlearmor anywhere), but at the same time you have to consider how long a 1 on 1 dogfight between fighters should take and balance travel speed, spawn cost and where the carrier is likely to be positioned accordingly. I feel like it’s completely possible to balance this well, keeping in mind this isnt a first person shooter where bodies get mowed down in less than a second. A space arena is more akin to mechwarrior in terms of what i feel like average lifetime should be, same looking at an older game like allegience that’s probably perfect and a newer one like star citizen which is probably too fast paced for our purposes. This worked very well in MW:LL, it’s an example worth looking at as far as TC goes because battlescape, again, aims to be something of a territory related game with resource points and facilities.
Obviously squad spawning becomes necessary if both teams are spawn spamming and everyone dies in a matter of moments (i hope this will not be the case in a space game that’s supposed to have some depth to the dogfights) but if the fixes described in my last post are put into place then you negate that advantage on both the defender’s side and remove the need for squad spawning on the aggressors side. If there is a limited spawn rate or spawn timer, there’s no need for attackers to also have people just appearing near their friends.
I’d rather not get into an even lengthier criticism of planetside 2 and how little the “territory gameplay” of that game actual matters (it doesnt, the game is designed to be an infinite xp grinding war not a match with a conclusion, id really advise doing the opposite of everything planetside 2 does in this regard), but the spawning in ps2 turns it into a game of spawn rates and whether or not your team arbitrarily chooses to spawn in a certain location. Even worse, you can’t pick your spawn location freely unless your at the 30 minute mark and then you can spawn somewhere else using instant action then respawn nearby when you die again. It puts way too much focus of the gameplay onto a poorly conceived spawning system rather than the actual gameplay itself, which robs the player of interesting decisions, and negates the overall strategy, there are very few interesting strategic decisions made in ps2 and when they are, you’re dealing with timers and nonsense spread over platoons of people. The “intended mechanics” of using sunderers and stuff sure some people “use them sometimes” but god damn players who just don’t care either way using these things is not an excuse, which is very common especially in a game where grinding xp matters more than any kind of victory. I don’t know if i can repeat this enough or more clearly. There’s nothing sneaky about a single invisible guy just spending 2 seconds placing a beacon or managing to drive a single van through a huge area then suddenly the entire army is inside your base. theres no depth here, theres no defense, theres no fun gameplay.
I think if this game is casualized, it’s done for before it starts. The casual audience will be attracted to games that do casual better with big branching level up systems and grinding, and the people who want more will leave once they realize it’s not there and the game is riddled with annoying broken mechanics. Take the niche in the space genre that’s missing from the other big name space games right now and run with it. The genre I:B is trying to go into is well fleshed out already, sure it’s scale and setting is unprecedented but damn there so many other examples to draw from.
), scout plane, artillery strikes (quite a game changer with high player density) and of course steering the Titan in BF2142. The Titan movement was disabled on many servers though as the Head on Head Titan fights (and artillery mounted below 
) wasn’t for everyone.