You pretty much said all what needed to be said. They should indeed keep in mind that people would like to create maps just for this very game mode, and it would suck if they (the map creators) will never be able to place the Occupation planet where they would want it.

Likewise, agreed. I'd love a viable 'King of the Hill' mode, but Occupation just isn't it.  It tries, but it needs maps more structured for the victory condition to make it interesting.

To be honest, it surprises me they didn't have separate maps for the occupation victory...I'd have thought that method would actually have been easier...

As far as making occupation victory more "fair"...let's be honest, Sins is inherently an unfair game...even if we had perfect balance between the factions (which we don't and probably never will), the random map generator still is a dice roll that benefits some at the expense of others for all game modes...

A poor start has always been able to doom your chance of winning, and I'd argue that occupation victory isn't any more unfair than the "normal" conquest victory...the fairness/unfairness of occupation victory may seem more clear cut because it can boil down to just one number (the phase jumps between you and the star), but I don't think it is any more a dice roll than having a rough start that sets you back the entire game...

A series of heavy militia worlds between you and the star would be more detrimental in my opinion than having "one more phase jump"...call me a pessimist but I think trying to make occupation victory fair is somewhat futile...

That being said, it really sucks when the map gimps you, and though things may never be truly fair, we can always make them more fair than they are now...

I'd advocate more sweeping changes like a narrower range for dice rolls regarding extractor count and militia sizes...for example, ice/volcanics planets have 3 or 4 extractors (instead of 2,3, or 4) to reduce variability...neutrals could be changed similarly...and the militia templates could also be made to have less variability (terrans currently can have anywhere from 5 ships to over 20...really?)...

In regards to occupation victory, simply putting a more powerful Vasari force there would go a long ways (a higher level titan and an upgraded SB would be a nice start)...if no one can even approach the occupation planet until late game, I think it hardly matters how many jumps your HW was from the victory planet...

True, but you well know we can mod the randomness out of the per planet stuff. I've done in with extractors in E4X. We can't do that with map generation.

I never argued it was, it just seems to me that ensuring the same number of jumps from the star was a good way to make it fairer even if it inherits all the other side effects of the random map generator. And its a relatively easy thing to check and implement grammatically, depending on how there random generator is set up.

A series perhaps, but I'm thinking have two or three jumps to the start at most. The chances of all of them being terran or desert worlds are pretty slim. They could in theory get more advanced with their generator to handle this issue as well.

The thing is I'm sure some people would like to have the occupation victory be away to make games faster, as a genuine king of the hill mode. As mentioned I don't think it currently fulfills that criteria. Ideally it should have an option to adjust the strength of the defenders there, but if they open it up to map makers it won't be a big problem because the map designer can just add what defenders he wants (huge fleets that can't be beat until late game or nothing at all).

Even though I've never played Company of Heroes, I agree that control point systems are probably far more fun than a single hill. It would be great if having multiple occupation worlds would cause the timer to go down faster, with that at the least a cool mod could be made with this sort of gameplay.

If they add an option to disable the automatically spawning occupation system this could be done quite easily in Galaxy Forge.