Thoughts to consider:
- I can agree with not letting teams be eliminated in this format. However, if the main base effectively can't die, then this game is more of an arena than an AoS. That means you should consider whether lanes are worth keeping, or what alternative advantage pushing lanes might give.
- Try to limit PvE objectives to those which are contestable or centrally located. It's 3v3v3; you want player interaction.
- If you introduce a capture point, it needs to be plausible for team A to hold it against teams B and C. That's hard to get right when team A is outnumbered 2:1.
- One solution is having many capture points, but that can introduce a lot of cat and mouse when teams want to avoid engagements.
- An alternative: if team A has the capture point, they passively generate x orbs per minute until they lose control. For the other teams, orbs will spawn in the area (some for team B, some for team C). Here, team A is rewarded with guaranteed orbs, while teams B and C aren't forced to team up immediately: they can try to zone each other off the orbs if they're okay with team A getting the guaranteed ones. This keeps the politics interesting.
- You can have the objective spawn closest to the weakest team to give them a chance to catch up.
- Capture the Flag is hard to get right in an AoS. I would avoid this unless you have a clear image of how it's going to work, and it isn't trivialised by certain heroes/compositions.
First I have to say, thanks for the input, quite a few bits here were very insightful and definitely food for thought.
Some things I think I can help point out or clarify:
One of the few things I'm basically dead set on is to have 12 human players, the three teams' creeps would be controlled by AI player Neutral Victim, Extra, and Passive, for an effective 5 players per team if you include them.
So it's 4v4v4 + Neutral Hostile, I think this should help to always have something going on and teams not feeling too limited even if there's a lot of different objectives.
- I can agree with not letting teams be eliminated in this format. However, if the main base effectively can't die, then this game is more of an arena than an AoS. That means you should consider whether lanes are worth keeping, or what alternative advantage pushing lanes might give.
As for the lanes (assuming I go with standard AoS creepwave-esque), they wouldn't move directly towards the enemy bases, but rather toward the (in my mind probably somewhat fortified) "outposts" (tentative name for capture points) and flags that are more towards the center in between all three teams.
- If you introduce a capture point, it needs to be plausible for team A to hold it against teams B and C. That's hard to get right when team A is outnumbered 2:1.
- One solution is having many capture points, but that can introduce a lot of cat and mouse when teams want to avoid engagements.
This is a very real concern, at the moment I think that first of all I can't have too many "outposts", like you said, and secondly I'm thinking along the lines of retrieved flags being brought to the team's "outposts" and being half of the benefit of these "outposts" but also having a loss of efficiency the more flags you keep in the same outpost.
Basically I think that ideally there would always be a trade-off and it would almost never be beneficial for your opponents to completely shut you down as their objective isn't directly related to your elimination, they should just want to kick you down enough to give you a speed bump and take take the lead. They're still competing against each other as well so they wouldn't want the other team to be the 3rd dog and get the bone. Or they could change their priority and give up on one objective in favor of another indefinitely.
- Capture the Flag is hard to get right in an AoS. I would avoid this unless you have a clear image of how it's going to work, and it isn't trivialised by certain heroes/compositions.
I'm not completely certain of how key this will actually be of course, but I'm thinking along the lines of besides them giving some benefits that they're mostly for increasing the secondary resource income generation of the team's base or outposts (depending on where they're brought).
So I'm thinking that while I probably won't get it right the first time it should still be something that can be tweaked as long as I'm not completely off-mark.
As for compositions trivializing the CtF aspect, I'm all for having a strategy in mind and making a team setup to match it. Ideally it should be a valid strategy to adopt a primary focus on CtF.
However, I'm not thinking along the lines of a literal flag which you pick up and then teleport/jump/get hooked/increase movement speed get in & get out type of thing.
My idea of CtF here is more along the lines of the Blood Elf campaign map where you have to rescue the captured Illidan from Maiev*. So it's more of taking control of a Flag and then escorting it to one of your outposts or all the way to your base, where it's still not entirely safe as you could lose your outpost to another team and they could either leave the "Flag" there or try to bring it closer to home.
I've got a pretty much blank terrain map as an early outline**, which is at least looking along the lines I've been thinking. But since I'm not even entirely sure about what I really want the map to be myself I'm having a tough time making a new version of the outline...
In this version the 3 large circles are basically the rough estimates of the bases, the medium circles represent capture points, and the small ones are locations for the Flags to spawn.
And the center of the map is basically supposed to either be where the 3 teams duke it out to control the center
OR the win condition would be something along a Race to first get to and through your part of the inner section and kill your relevant Neutral Hostile Guardian boss as the win condition.
(While I had this outline made I was weighing more towards an enormous fortress in the middle as a capture point but I'm thinking more along the lines of some kind of PvE race focused win condition.)
**Outline:
http://puu.sh/nGRDJ/416764d286.jpg
*Some Russian video of the captured Illidan Campaign Mission
https://youtu.be/uHuK6kBndtw?t=256