World of Tanks Ultimate Conquest -
Overview - Still in the Beta stages, the Ultimate Conquest gives clans the opportunity to fight against each other, fifteen versus fifteen, every night. Battling over territory that rewards its owner with in game gold, clans can spread their wings and create an empire across the world. Currently in the NA servers you can battle over Europe, the Mediterranean and Northern Africa. This review will principally concern the NA servers, as there is where I play, but the fundamentals are the same for the RU and DE servers. The major difference currently is that there are more playing grounds for RU members (RU players get to fight over the majority of Africa, Russia and Asia as well). Long term plans for Ultimate Conquest include developing the entire planet as a playing ground, mingling all servers so RU can fight NA, and vice versa. Additionally there will be 3 different divisions to offer lower skilled clans a chance to fight similarly skilled opponents. This review will concern what works in clan wars, and what doesn’t - what I’d like to see improved upon, changed, removed or tweaked.
It’s fundamentally a numbers game – A clan gets 1 chip for the clan wars map for ever member that has a tier 5 tank or higher. You can place 15 chips in a territory at a maximum. A team with 100 members tier 5+ gets 100 chips for the clan wars map. Whether a team has 15 for each battle is largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things because a 100 man team will always overwhelm a 30 man team by simple numerical superiority. A 30 man team can only play two 15v15 battles at once, but a 100 man team can do that many times over. This is both good and bad. While the gold reward for large clans is proportionally larger as a result, this system doesn’t allow smaller clans to actually compete. Large clans overpower the smaller ones not because they can’t win 15v15 battles, but because they just have more players. The truth of the matter is, this is unavoidable. Smaller clans will need to band together to stand up to the larger clans, and this can’t properly be done until new diplomacy features are implemented.
Mercenaries and Diplomacy – A mercenary stock exchange will allow smaller clans to field enough players to fight simultaneous battles. The highest bidder will likely win the temporary allegiance of mercenaries, but it could be introduced that once a team is above a certain size, it should cost them more to buy mercenaries. In regards to diplomacy - as the game currently stands, clans can only work together if they trust each other. This breeds distrust and encourages teams to backstab each other because there is literally no other way to operate. You either go solo, trust a team and rely on them, or let teams think you trust them and when it’s advantageous back stab them. Small clans can do nothing but trust or go solo, while large clans can backstab because they can overwhelm with numbers. Future plans for Ultimate Conquest should fix this issue. When teams can sign Non-Aggression Pacts (NAPs) they can get to actually playing the game as it should be designed instead of always looking over their shoulder, and really wondering if their 100 member “ally” is really that. When two teams sign a NAP, they should be required to spend gold daily to keep it in place, to prevent bigger teams from spamming them with every border territory. With NAPs, teams should be unable to physically attack each other. You could also introduce public and private NAPs. Private would cost more and only those two clans with the NAP would know about it. Entering into an Alliance with another team should cost even more gold daily, but give more advantages like moving chip stacks through friendly provinces. This brings me to the next problems with the game – empires get too large, and there is little reason to own a province beyond gold.
