Whatever win condition is used, I hope that it involves fights at multiple locations. Having everyone converge at a single point such that there are hundreds of ships blasting away at each other in a final, hopeless battle doesn’t sound like anything more than a good way to end each game on a frustrating note. The server and the clients will be pushed to their limits, meaning that the climactic battle will be the worst experience of the match. That would be a situation to avoid.
Normally, I like to trot out Unreal Tournament Onslaught as an example of a fun way to network facilities and fight through those facilities. However, it suffers from the problem of all players converging on one final battle. In Onslaught, you start at your own base and start capturing your way through the network of connected facilities. When you bump into enemies trying to capture the same facility, intense fighting begins. There can be multiple fights, depending on the layout of the network. But in the end, the match always ends up at one team’s base. Everyone fights there. So unless the server and the average player’s client is able to handle all players in one fight, such a game formula is best avoided.
In contrast, the Go approach involves players spreading out to tackle many objectives simultaneously, spreading forces out. One challenge would be figuring out how thinly you want to spread your forces. The more thinly, the slower your progress in capturing any given facility. The game could provide a fixed number of “facility capturing devices” that limits players to no more than N simultaneous captures. They could be manufactured, purchased, statically provided, whatever.
If you don’t know how Go works, it’s worth taking a bit of time to learn. It’s an incredibly simple game to learn and incredibly difficult to master.
I would not suggest that INS try to build a 19x19 grid of facilities. That would require 361 facilties. Novices use a 9x9 board, which would involve 81 facilities and is much more manageable. It would certainly present the potential for matches that last several days (not that I understand how a match could fairly be contested while the interested parties are asleep).
I’ll close with the observation that if Battlescape was based on the game of Go, it would have incredible depth and could attract a lot of attention in the Asian market.