Abstract: You need to take out tickets to win, and you need to kill people to take out tickets, so you need to get kills to win. As long as the flag that prevents your side from getting a bleed is held, you don't have to worry about flags.
What really matters? Kills or Flags?
A recurring message I see, in game and on the forums, is that Kills, and KD/R (Kill to Death Ratio) don't matter, and that to win you need to capture flags. This is false on many levels.Let's break this down:
How do you win an AAS round in PR?
Officially, there are two methods, but only one is feasible. 1 - Have more tickets than your opponent when the round time limit expires. 2 - Reduce the opposing team's number of tickets to 0. Since rounds very rarely last the full (and server average) 4 hours, that really only leaves reducing the opponents tickets.
Now, eliminating tickets is pretty easy. You kill an enemy (and he gives up), blow up a vehicle, or cap enough flags to 'bleed' the enemy team out. The problem is, the enemy is trying to do the same to you, so you have to be better at taking out their tickets than they are at taking out yours.
Where do flags and kills play into this?
In terms of victory, flags don't really have a point. The only flag that matters on a map is the one that initiates the bleed. Keep this flag, and your team won't start bleeding tickets. Preferably you want to own the one that needs to be capped before this as well, to save yourself some breathing room, but that's not necessary. Example, the USMC MUST control docks in order to keep themselves from bleeding out. They don't NEED any other flag to prevent their own bleed. So long as the USMC owns docks, flags aren't an issue.
I know that their last flag causes a bleed, but the slog to get there increases your likelihood of losing, because you'll lose a lot of tickets (or you'll roll over them, in which case this doesn't matter anyway). Yes you will win if you cap out the last flag, but you're more assured to win if you outplay them, and can tie them down in the middle of the map with heavy losses.
Every flag between the 'main' (bleeding) flags only serves to focus the combat. Thing is, combat can occur anywhere on a map, and like I said earlier, as long as you kill more of them than they do of you, you're going to win. Now, you CAN fight through all the flags, and cap out your enemy, but as anyone has seen, that is not nearly as common as reducing their tickets before the last one is capped. It shouldn't be a goal, because it's harder, and statistics show less likely to happen.
So now that we've established that flags don't matter, but you still need to reduce their tickets, all you need to do is kill the enemy. So when I hop in a tank with a clanmate, and I get 80 kills + Vehicle tickets, and 1 death each, we are being damn good teamplayers, because we are helping our team win. I can get the same results with an APC, without ever giving a friendly soldier a lift. That's why I don't go out of my way to stop and give anyone a lift. They would have to get 80 kills between them after I drop them off, to counterbalance my awesomeness. I would be more vulnerable helping them, because I'm moving slower, so it's not worth it to me.
The team with the better KD/R is going to win the round.
*That's assuming that they can hold 1 flag, but that's not that hard.
That's why I don't like it when an idiot in a vehicle worth a number of tickets (almost always helicopter pilots) loses his vehicle, doing something that isn't crucial to victory. It throws in variables that make it harder to win. We may be creaming the MEC on Muttrah, but I still have to worry that we haven't lost toomany Hueys, because we can easily lose if it's too many. I have lost rounds on Muttrah 10 - 0, because a pilot got "bored".
One last thing (Reread this section please, edited in)
I'm not saying have everyone camp in your one flag. That's dumb, you'll get wiped out if you don't move in PR. I'm saying go forth and seize strategic areas so that you can get the most kills. You only need a few guys on the flag itself to let you know if they've been snuck up on, so that the rest of the team can collapse back to help defend. THE REST OF THE TEAM should be out in strategic areas of the map (not always flags) where they tie down the enemies resources. What's more important? Losing 40 tickets on both sides to cap city center, or having 1 squad occupy a T-shaped apartment building in a key area that might not be in flag radius, and inflict 40 casualties before being wiped out by multiple squads? I've been in both situations, and the second is both smarter, more helpful, and more fun.
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If you STILL aren't convinced, I'm going to give you a case study.
Beirut 16 layer yesterday on TG server. 31 vs 31.
I'm on the Russian team, with 1 clanmate, and 4 other pubbers in our squad. Our team manages to push the IDF all the way back to their last flag, and it seems like we may be able to cap them out. Our squad had been purely defensive to this point, and was rocking a killer KD/R, with a 10:1 for our worst player. That's because we were smart and defensive, and didn't look for fights, or try to cap flags.
Anyway, IDF is down to their last flag, but they manage to sneak behind us, cap south city, and push us all the way back to our last flag. Guess which team won? The Russians. Despite the sudden turn around, our team kept a higher Kill to Death ratio, and didn't have a ticket bleed, so we won. SEAL and I took spots 1 and 2, with a combined KD/R of 64-5 between us. We were the best team players, because we killed the most bad guys, which is how you win.
TL;DR. Flags don't matter, Kills do.
