OK guys/gals this has gotten a little bit off-topic with the back/forth. So back to the basic idea of trying to balance up fort battles a bit more, trying to deal with Duelers getting way more damage and boxes, and with pure HP Soldier fort fighters from being much harder to kill than pure Skill fort fighters of any other class.
How about these as a 'combined' approach to balance:
1) Introduce "Player Aim" for Duelers to target specific players in LOS, AND ALSO reduce chance of Criticals to 7.5% (percentage to be tested in Beta to get balance etc)
2) Change the way Criticals work so that they are "the greater of 10% total hp OR shot damage" So i a Dueler doing 300HP shots who hits a 10HP player with a crit gets 1K damage instead of 1.3K and hitting a sub-3K player would still do only 300 damage, AND ALSO change the fort skills calculation so that Skills are more balanced against HP potentially by increasing the ^0.4 figure to ^0.5 or ^0.6 etc (figure to be tested in Beta to get balance etc)
3) Introduce on Small and Medium forts (but NOT on Large forts) a "Maximum Total Health Per Side". This would mean that the Attackers and the Defenders would each have a maximum total amount of HP that all of their players could add up to and once it hit that level they couldn't have more players join their side even if they weren't full on numbers. So as a 'random' figure let's say 100K HP for a Small fort, so you couldn't have 50 players with 10K HP as that would be 500K HP, so you could choose to have only 10 players and pick 10 10K players or you could pick 6 10K players and have 40 1K players etc etc.
Why?
1) Reduced % of Crits would slightly reduce damage by Duelers to fix the issue with people saying they get the Boxes etc, but the Player Aim would mean they could target Higher HP players if they chose, and the lower % of Crits would mean they'd want to aim for Higher HP rather than waste one on lower HP so Higher HP would become less attractive as you'd be more of a target. - Promotes 'slightly' lower Dueler damage while making High HP a bullseye as thus less attractive
2) This would lower the highest damage but still keep Crits high, but would stop Low HP skill-based players from being ripped to shreds by Crits, and would make using actual Skills a bit more attractive than just going pure HP. - Promotes 'slightly' lower Dueler damage again, and again protects Lower HP more than Higher HP and also again makes Higher HP less attractive
3) This would make battles in general a lot more about tactics and teamwork and leadership, rather than just a "who has the biggest tanks" scenario. Also it would allow for some lower HP or lower Level players to fill in more spots in battles in the smaller sized forts, untouched Large forts would still allow for big old shoot-em-ups, and no cap on individual HP means people can still choose 100% HP and battle that way if they want but less per battle. - Promotes using lower HP players in battles, does NOT restrict player choice on their build etc, would balance out the HP on each side of a battle to make them more about tactics etc, would introduce much more tactics etc to picking who you let into a battle rather than just "High HP first" etc.
This incorporates a lot of Peter008's original suggestion, but with some extra to also help dissuade huge HP without capping it or just simply hitting it bigger/harder etc
Thoughts/comments/ideas? (constructive ones...!)
