Welcome to Fine Tuning SWGOH.

So I have been absent for a while with this article, the truth is I have been feeling burnt out, and the reason for that burn out is Territory Battles.

I am an officer with BHG Black Sun, and while I will not say I run our Territory Battles exclusively (I don’t we have an awesome group of officers) I am the one who plans the strategy and crunches the numbers to maximize our stars. What this also means is I spend way more time than I would like policing what the guild does, and making adjustments to the plan to cover off any mistakes people may make.

In short it’s exhausting, so its time to fine tune Territory Battles.

Territory Battles have a few problems, not all of which can be addressed easily, but lets start by listing them.

1. The ground battles are all the same, the main variation is what teams you are allowed to bring into the battles. In short doing the same fight 17 times over 6 days gets boring.
2. The ship battles are suffering exactly the problem that the ground battles are.
3. Platoons are absolutely horrible to manage, they get filled with valuable toons and quite often some rare Ewok prevents that platoon from being filled, so good bye to the Baze, and 6x Wedge people sacrificed for nothing.
4. Deployments… yeah that’s where all the organizational effort goes in, so it needs to be fixed.
5. The Length of TB, lets be honest 6 days is a long slog.
6. The rewards… Yes they are much better, but really? 6 days straight of dealing with TB for those rewards?

 

My Solution for Territory Battles

So to the first two issues, I don’t really have a good solution, I could say allow us to sim battles but we already sim too much as it is, and the battles are somewhat random each TB. So let’s sink our teeth into number 3.

 

Platoons

In short this is a fix that needs officer tools, I understand what the developers are trying to do, but for an officer trying to manage this it is absolute hell. Therefore I suggest the following fixes.

3.1) allow officers to lock a platoon so that no one can put toons in a particular platoon

3.2) Overlay on the toons a number showing how many of that toon are available in the guild at the required star level. If the developers are feeling extra ambitious I would also suggest this number updates in real time as toons are deployed to combat missions and other platoons.

Doing both of these things makes it very simple to see where resources can be best deployed and what platoons are fillable.

Deployments

Trying to tell people how much to deploy to what areas is time consuming and hard to manage with 50 people spread all over the globe some of whom log on once or twice a day and others of whom log on constantly. To alleviate this issue I propose that when a member is finished their combat missions they be given an option to deploy troops to an area, or to deploy troops to the reserves.

All troops in reserves are available for guild officers to use in filling out platoons and in deploying to areas as needed. In this way guild officers can manage the deployment and members don’t need to check for the latest instructions, and the TB becomes less about hounding people to read instructions and more about everyone just doing their part.

Of course the catch 22 to this method would be the downside, if an officer does not deploy the reserves before a phase ends….. well then you missed your chance.

 

Length of Territory Battles

This one is very difficult, I think most would agree that 6 days is a long slog, but also 12 hour phases seems really short to coordinate 50 people in. Therefore I propose the phases maintain a 24 hour Maximum length. Yes I said maximum, just like officers can abandon a raid give us a button to end a phase early. If a phase is done we can end it early and start in on the new phase. Its really a very simple concept, and for many it would alleviate the frustration and drag that can come with territory battles.

 

Rewards

Rewards are vastly improved from where they began, but there is one thing that has always bugged me about rewards that come from a random box, the odds of getting a fully crafted piece of gear, it has always seemed to me that I get the most full pieces when I post a zero in a raid, not when I get the boxes with the BEST chance of a fully crafted gear.

When you spend 6 days on an event getting a full gear seems like the bare minimum you deserve, therefore I propose the following change.

Keep the number of drops from each box the same, BUT if your guild obtains more than 25 stars one of the gear drops which would be an item like a stun cuff or stun gun is guaranteed to be a full piece from the same gear tier.

If you obtain more than 40 stars then one of your gold salvage drops becomes a full gold piece.

Now I know this sounds like a ton of gear to give away, but lets look at it another way, on a 10 day schedule that basically means every month if you score 40+ stars you will have enough currency, salvage and full drops to get 7? Pieces equipped, perhaps 8 if you are very lucky, and 9 if you had some left over from the last month. So in 2 months you can gear out 5 toons….. that’s just one team, and last I checked yeah those 5 toons all need to be at gear 12 already for it to matter, and in the light side TB alone you generally need to have at least 4 full teams to do decently. So just wait till there is a Dark Side TB as well.

My point is the gear grind is not going away so giving us some rewards to make the full week grind worth it is not asking that much.

I hope you have enjoyed this week, and I really hope we get some useful tools to help make TB’s more enjoyable cause I know for me the grind is getting me down.

 

By Sparrow
BHG Black Sun Guild Officer
Gaming-fans.com Staff Writer