Conquest is back! A fan favorite competitive mode that showcases what Battlefield is known for; incredible action between infantry, tanks, and air vehicles.
Over the past month, our team has been creating a base ruleset for both 8v8 and 12v12 Conquest. We have been looking back at past Battlefield games to see what worked and what didn’t and adapting it to 2042. There will end up being separate rulesets for each player count, but for now, a lot of the initial testing can be done in parallel.
This first draft of the rules is far from perfect and is intended as a baseline to get the conversation going. So, experienced Conquest players and teams, let’s work together to create an incredible competitive experience.
There are so many Conquest maps available in Portal! Between the 2042 ones and the older maps, there’s plenty to choose from. Unfortunately, most of these maps are too big and don’t seem to work for either 8v8s or 12v12s.
The maps we will be working with to kick things off are Caspian Border, Arica Harbor, Manifest, Breakaway, Discarded, and Renewal.
In 2042, each map sector can have one or more flags. Each sector that a team controls causes the enemy team to bleed 1 ticket every 5 seconds. In addition, each time a team captures a sector, the enemy team loses 10 tickets.
This means that 3 sector set-ups on all maps will allow for scoring consistency without having to increase the sector count just to make the ticket bleed work like in some past Battlefield games.
We also believe that this three-sector solution will also allow specific maps to be playable in 8v8s.
We currently have tickets set to 350 (375 on Arica). With the ticket bleed mechanism, this should work reasonably well. Our only concern is the ticket penalty for each captured sector, but we’ll have to test this out further and gather feedback from teams. This might require a slightly increased ticket count, but we’ll have to wait and see.
This will be the most challenging part to figure out for this ruleset. We currently provide X Vehicles per Team in the ruleset for each map; however, these are just initial ideas. There will need to be a lot of testing done with teams to see what vehicles work on which map and how many are needed to keep a good balance.
We need to try and balance the map pool so that there are maps different teams can shine on. Some slightly more infantry-focused, some in which armor is key, and some in which dominating the air will be the key to success.
Vehicles will also be the most significant difference between 8v8s and 12v12s. Reduced player counts also mean reduced vehicle counts, and we look forward to working with top vehicle players to figure this part out together.
We would like to do both an 8v8 and a 12v12 Test Cup in the near future, but we will wait until we gather more initial feedback on this first version of the ruleset. This should also give more teams the chance to get active again, so we know what numbers to expect.
The first 8v8 Conquest Test Cup will take place on Sunday, February 6th, 2022. The event does not feature a region lock and is available on PS4/XBO, PS5/XSX and PC. Head over to “Schedule & Sign-ups” for more information.
We have also made a new channel in our Discord called #conquest-feedback to have specific discussions there on these topics. We can’t wait to get the conversation going!
