I don’t think the described scenario is adequate for everyone to be determining if it will make good gameplay.
For one, it says the opening round will be with small ships, but if there are capitals on the field that doesn’t make much sense. I think it would be much better to describe the actual intention of how a match will progress than simply considering one battle.
For starters, everyone will be in small ships. Given the original description in this thread, I would argue that the initial conflict should occur on a “contested” planet, rather than starting on two bases on opposite ends of the system. This conflict would likely follow as described in the initial post: lots of death, missiles against relatively fragile interceptors/fighters, etc. As the conflict resolves at that planet/moon in…5? 10? 15? minutes, both sides would be looking at having adequate supplies to start purchasing larger ships.
This is where a team-strategy starts to come into play: do you get Corvettes, and hold an advantage over a team of interceptors and Bombers? Do you save up for a Destroyer, and win the early game by having a mobile fortress against smaller ships? Do you get Bombers, to counter the capital rush? Do you save for a Carrier, and get a mobile respawn point to push into an enemy base? Do you get a Cruiser, to counter the Carrier/Destroyer rush? Do you amass an obscene number of bombers, warp to an enemy base, and obliterate it as quickly as possible as early as possible?
I think we can safely assume that, aside from an incredibly well-organized fleet of bombers, capital ships will take at least some time to bring down. A fleet of capitals against a fleet of capitals would probably take 10-15 minutes to resolve in and of itself, nevermind the additional burden of whatever objective the fleet set out to accomplish.
The real question is, how long is a match supposed to take? Following that, do we want to prevent snowballing? One way to punish a team without granting a snowball effect is a gradual wearing away at their earnings for losing, without adding to the enemy earnings. If we assume five bases, each progressively further away from the enemy than the last, and each one worth more in terms of income, you can have something like this:
10 - 6 - 4 - 2 - 1 - S - 1 - 2 - 4 - 6 - 10
The initial conflict “S” offers no disadvantage to resources, just a spawn point for small ships. As you move forward, it becomes harder to deliver supplies (ship respawns) to the battlefield as the attacker, but easier to resupply as defender. Losing your first base only reduces your income by 4.3%, but makes it that much further for the enemy to bring an attack to bear. Adjusting the length of each battle would determine match duration: if it takes 5 minutes to clear the skies and 5 minutes to destroy the objective, the match takes an hour. 10 minutes each, two hours, etc. so on and so forth.
So…yeah. As I said, I don’t think the initial post accurately depicts how anything but the early game will play out, especially once capitals come onto the field, or if one side decides to sneak rush the destruction of a “deeper” base. Some guidance on match duration, conflict duration, and general match progression mechanics will be needed to tell if the intended gameplay matches the experience.
