Good discussion.
Heres a counterpoint to this old argument about objectives/strategy.
Right now we have in PR that the MOST IMPORTANT objective personally, is to stay alive. I think this is a key thing to note, and is absent in most every other multiplayer FPS that has respawn.
It does affect a players mentality I think, and I think encourages player to play more realistically (sometimes but not always). When your players life/vehicle is precious and a big factor in overall victory, I think you see players behavior to be a bit more slower paced/cautious, and a bit more realistic. If the objective is MORE important than your own life, then you will often rush to it, and try at all costs to get this objective, sacrificing your own life if need be in order to do it, because you know if the objective is yours, victory will be too, regardless of if you died in the process a couple dozen times or not
Although this is very noble of you to sacrifice yourself for "the greater good" lol, its also not creating a very good behavior in players, when they care more about taking objective than saving their own life they willing to take more risks and do some pretty stupid stuff all in the name of "capping teh flag!!!!".
I think to me, some of my most memorable rounds were when I had 0 deaths or close to it, and I think alot of other players can agree with that as well. Not saying that is the only way to enjoy PR, but certainly a slower paced game is a goal of PR's development, where rushing to objectives does not give successful results, but careful planning, tactics and strategy is key to victory.
I think vast majority of FPS players (this includes PR players) have a natural tendency to attack no matter what, there needs to be very little if any incentives built into the game in order to get players to attack. Majority if not all players will simply do this naturally, its usually the other way around, you have to BEG and PLEAD with them to stay and defend, as soon as an area is clear they are itching to move on and attack the next objective, regardless of whether its walking into a slaughter or not they often are heading to the next objective before they even capture the current one. It's just a natural instinct of most FPS gamers and I think that needs to be acknowledged in this discussion because you have to acknowledge natural player behaviors when developing gameplay with your "carrots and sticks".
Encouraging players to have even MORE aggressive behavior I don't think is going to help things in PR. We have tried our best to slow the pacing of the game down as much as possible, and reward defense and smart positioning as much as we can over just sheer aggressiveness and player "skill". However PR is still a game about rushing to places as fast as possible, moving out to attack as quickly as possible and generally doing things very aggressively, sometimes it works sometimes it don't but key point is, this behavior is deeply imbeded into the psyche of the FPS player, we dont need to tell players "hey, go attack", they will do it on their own, even if there is no objective to attack and ZERO strategic bonus to doing so!
Now talking about ticket bleed, the classic problem of ticket bleed I think is that once the enemy have started a ticket bleed, strategically there is little to no incentive to move forward (even though players will do this anyways). Whats worse though, is that once your team HAS a bleed, there is virtually NO incentive to defend, as its a losing battle. So essentially ticket bleed enforces an extremely aggressive strategy to be used most of the battle, with very little thought to defense. We hope that by introducing a ton of things in PR that defense would be more fun/interesting/useful, by adding all the deployables, the logistics system, etc. Adding a bleed negates most of that I think, and turns maps into slugfests between the 2 flags that induce the bleed, and the rest of the map/CP's are of little to no concern since by the time you get there, the ticket bleed will be heavy and one team will clearly be close to victory anyways.
Anyways that's a counterpoint to some of the arguments here, but I think the idea of adding ticket loss when enemy fully captures one of your CPs in AAS is a good one. Lets say for example 20 tickets lost each time the enemy fully captures one of your CPs. Adding ticket gain I think might drag on the battles for a long time, and I dont think the loss/gain should be large, as it does take away from what I mentioned earlier, the fact that STAYING ALIVE in PR right now is your #1 priority. That enables player behavior to be more realistic, player take less chances and dont act with a sort of suicide bombers mentality as much
Either way, I think its clear that AAS is very constricted because of the flags, and doesnt really offer a large strategy. I think youll see with newer versions we try to get away from AAS as much as possible and further develop the CNC mode, as thats what can offer true "strategy" to teams that are disciplined enough to follow a chain of command.
As for PRT etc.... I think it would be wise to adopt CNC as its main game mode as soon as the game mode reaches a point of maturity enough so that exploits are not as big an issue. AAS for competitive play I think is severely limiting and will always have that limit because of the nature of "flag capping". Other than the fact that currently there is not many CNC maps avaliable, I see no reason in the future that PRT should not drop AAS completely, in favour of the game modes that involve more deep strategy, planning and organization. As far as I see it, AAS is PR's "noob game mode", and hopefully when the more advanced game modes reach maturity we will see them played equally if not MORE than AAS.
As for mongol, I think your points brought up is a different discussion entirely, fitting the topic of strategy on maps but not really in the same way as the OP's point. Your gripe bout random AAS and what flags is relevant and what not also ties into making CNC and open style game modes more widely accepted and used instead of the "on-the-rails" AAS system that's been a mainstay at PR since beginning. The main objective for random AAS was to mix up maps and not have the action of each map focus on the same areas each time, thus keeping new/old maps fresh for much longer as you cant approach it the same way each time. It's not a perfect system but I think it has its merits, although yes a true open ended game mode would obviously be more desired than the AAS flag system.
I think alot of effort has been made to make insurgency both fun and strategically viable, and its been for the most part, hugely successful and popular. The game mode has nothing to do with flags yet it still remains strategic and tactically enjoyable. Hopefully in the future we can develop some more open ended game modes that involve conventional forces and don't involve "flag capping", for the more advanced players who are ready to evolve the gameplay further and organize entire teams with platoon wide tactics and strategy.
)