To start I want to make clear everything in this article is my own best guess. I have no more information than the general public does. That being said I have been playing this game since December 2015 so I would like to think I have a reasonable understanding of how CG thinks and what we can expect.

 

Part 1 (What I expect we will actually get)

We will get both a Light Side and a Dark Side territory battle, but Dark Side will debut first this time, and a month later we will get the light side version.

Once both versions are released we will move to a constant Territory Battle schedule, with a new one starting every Monday. The main reasons for this are:

1) CG has stated that TB frequency will increase, that was part of their reasoning behind the reduction in shards for ROLO and IPD.

2) this would play well with the extra currency needed to buy Malak shards, as well as the high likelihood that there will be two new characters to buy with Guild Event Currency.

The format will be pretty much the same as the current Hoth Dark Side, expect 4 waves per battle, one special mission per day, with the third day rewarding character shards for a character like IPD or ROLO.

There will of course be hero units for both the light and dark side battles. For Dark Side I expect we will see a new separatist release that will be required for the day 3 special mission. Also expect General Grevious, Count Dooku, B1, B2, and Droideka to be required for missions. Geonosians and separatist droids will likely be the factions required for special missions, and I would expect the droids to be the harder one on the final day.

For the  Light Side I expect the recently reworked Galactic Republic Jedi to be key who along with Padme, making up the hero units and the main faction required. Clones are likely to be the second faction required for special missions. So really there won’t be anything surprising here aside from Padme joining the game.

Given the resurgence in Fleet it is also likely that we will start seeing fleets in the very first day of TB, but this is not a guarantee. Max stars will likely require a Total Guild GP in excess of 250 million as they typically want guilds to grow into max stars. I expect both Light Side and Dark Side to be approximately the same in terms of GP required as they will both be released fairly close together.

Aside from a handful of new toons which will be released to bolster factions (more Geonosians and Clones) I believe one of the main drivers will be having people upgrade existing seldom used characters. This will most certainly include Eeth Koth, Ima Gun-Di, Nute Gunray, and all the Geonosians. In short, my main take on this new Territory Battle is CG will want us to spend resources on the parts of our roster we have long neglected, a handful of new characters will bolster their effectiveness, but nothing will really be pushed into the top end arena meta. But you know the truth is CG is not really focused on top end arena meta, they want to see more diversity in Territory Wars and the Grand Arena, and all of that requires multiple teams.

 

Part 2 (What I don’t expect, but would love to see)

The number 1 problem with Territory Battles is the time constraint, 6 days to complete is a really long time, and by the end the rewards barely feel worth it. But you also need 24 hours to give everyone an opportunity to do their battles, because of time zones anything less than 24 hours really runs a risk of people missing out. But if we are going to have two new Territory Battles thrown at us we either have to deal with constant TB or there needs to be a change.

To that end I would love to see Territory battles changed to 3 days with no time locked phases, what I mean by this is your entire roster is available for each phase, and the next phase opens up as soon as you get 1 star in the previous phase. Allowing people to do their battles and deployments at anytime over 3 days for any phase that is open would make the whole ordeal much simpler and allow us to run 2 territory battles in a week, then have the next week off for Territory Wars. This would give us 4 TB per month without needing to run them constantly.

In addition to this change I would love to see the date be more useful when we look at what people have done. For example right now we can see how many Combat Missions people have completed, Special Missions and total GP deployed. While this seems great it misses a couple of key things.

First this does not separate Fleet battles from Squads. Second it does not separate Ship deployments from squad deployments for GP deployed. And finally it does not give an easy read to see if someone has done everything they can with respect to deployments.

What we really need is the following:

• Phase 1 Ship Battles Completed
• Phase 1 Squad battles Completed
• Phase 1 Ships GP deployed X/1,250,000 (or just a straight % as in 100% or 22% etc)
• Phase 1 Character GP Deployed X/3,000,000 (or just a straight % as in 100% or 22% etc)
• Phase 1 Special Mission Completed

These tabs will give officers all the information they need to track down who has not completed their missions or deployments and would make it much easier to coordinate.

Finally, while I am making a wish list, I would absolutely love it if once a player has all the combat and special missions completed for a phase if the remaining GP available was automatically placed into a reserve zone where an officer could deploy where needed. The number of times I have had a zone overkilled because the game was not updating quickly is incredibly frustrating. Add to that the times where a player forgets to deploy or deploys incorrectly ignoring instructions and this would solve all those problems.

In conclusion I don’t actually expect much from these new Territory Battles, as they will be fairly run of the mill, but it would be absolutely amazing if CG took this opportunity to streamline things and reduce our workload while they are at it. And for anyone wondering, speaking as an officer who has organized Territory Battles from the very beginning, I will say that I would much rather do all the deployments myself after people have finished their missions than chase people down giving them instructions as we near the end of each phase.

I hope you have found this somewhat informative, and in a few weeks we will see how much of this I got correct. Until then have fun on the Holotables.

 

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