For example, the team controlling the acadamy will get better accuracy or speed. The team controlling the farms will have more health (food = health) and so will the hospital. Controlling the towns gives you more people, and so on.

This was discussed earlier, it was decided that if you do this, it would give an advantage to the team that is already winning.

This would unbalance the game too much.

It occured to me, while discussing the map features in another thread, and seeing how much mortars keep popping up in discussions...

It might be worth checking what happens if there was a single mortar emplacement/base somewhere close to the center of a map. The team controlling the mortar base would have the ability to call in mortar strikes to pretty much anywhere on the map. The mortar crew is controlled by AI, as no-one probably would find it fun to sit in a base operating a mortar.

A few initial thoughts:

- mortar strike = 6 (or so) handgrenade(ish) rounds fall within 10 seconds to an area of about 20% of screen.

- player calls in the strike by aiming at a location and pressing a button

- when a strike is called, it's added to the mortar crew's fire mission list. the crew fires the missions as fast as possible, in order of fire missions received

- further delay is caused by aiming the mortar

- the aim delay is greater the more the crew needs to turn the mortar (worst case scenario is 1st strike to due north, 2nd to due south, then again to due north... 180 degree turn might take 30 seconds or so)

- mortar crew can only operate if they aren't fired upon, so the team controlling the mortar base also needs go put some effort to giving the mortar crew some protection

- the strike could be more accurate to short distances from the mortar base and somewhat less accurate at extreme ranges

- to prevent silly mortar strike spam, there should probably be some kind of timer or limit to how much/fast any single player can call in strikes

- there must probably also be some sort of autoclear in the list of called strikes, as it could become flooded with requests and any fire missions fired after 1-2 minutes from the call are probably outdated

- maybe the authority to call in strikes is given only to the top 1-3 ranked players

- ...and if the tab map becomes more accurate/detailed, maybe the strikes could be called using it (and a marker + time estimate on when the rounds land be then shown on the map)

I love your idea, but here's my adjustments:
Both teams have access to off-site Artillery at once, for balancing, instead of dedicated mortar bases
It would be fired by designating a grid square, which the map is already set up for
Instead of an aiming delay, just make a standard delay between strikes (say, a minute? It would have to be played with.)
Artillery does a ~10 second barrage on the entire designated square

Which kind of leads to something a little helpful:
Number designators for each grid square (I.E.: E1, B8, etc.)
Just put the designator for your square in a corner of the HUD, and whenever a radio message comes up, it gives the grid square it's talking about.
That way, I don't have to pull up my minimap to figure out exactly where combat is, and I can just check my designator.

My intention was not to just bring in mortars/indirect fire. I also wanted to fullfill a bit of the strategic area requests, add more combat hotspots into the game (the mortar base), add a tangible reward for capturing a base (the ability to call in strikes) and do it all in a clear and easy to understand way that players can see on the screen (capture the base and you get to use the mortar).

Offmap artillery, in my opinion, would be quite boring in a game like this. You'd just get barrages dropping here and there, and there would be nothing you could do about it. Also it just might force a pattern on the attacks; get in close, call in a barrage, sit around and wait until the barrage has finished, resume attacking. This is actually quite close how it is in basic infantry tactics in real life, but those tactics aren't designed for fun

I can see how my suggestion might also bring in the patterny bore-attack, so the idea probably needs some more thinking... I wouldn't want to add reasons to wait into the game, but if the mortar strikes hit the target quickly, they would be mighty powerful (overpowered)... It's great I don't have to make these decisions

The issue once again though, is balance.

Once a team starts winning, they get the artillery base, once they have the artillery, the other team doesn't stand a chance.

As it is, the team with the player is already stacked against the other team, the artillery would only stack it farther.

The way I intended is that the mortar base is a nice bonus if used well, but not really a battle deciding superweapon in itself (as I specced it originally, the theoretical maximum and optimized strike spam would be 36 grenades to one location in a minute, and real life strike count would be something like 2-3 strikes per minute, at most).

Trying to capture the mortar base should have a pretty fine balance between wasting resources from the main objectives or gaining a slight advantage if all goes well. There should be plenty of situations when players decide not to bother with the mortar (and, conversely, if the overall fight is dead even, the mortar just might give the little edge needed to tip the scales).

As for the snowball/momentum effect, an organic and even sort of realistic way to slow down the winning team, I still would like to see reinforcements coming from a single / few locations, which would eventually be farther and farther away from the front line pushed ahead by the attack. This is what has affected pretty much every armed conflict ever; the deeper into enemy territory an army pushes, the farther it gets from it's support and maintenance/supply becomes more and more difficult. And the defenders often get the reversed effect, it's easier and easier to combine all your forces when you're on the last sliver of your heartland. Overstretched supply lines are actually such a classic downfall of countless offensives that it probably wouldn't be fun to replicate it that faithfully, but the idea is sound, I think. (overdoing it even slightly is easy to see though; it would force the battles to a stalemate fairly reliably)

I'm thinking we both agree that the artillery needs to be balanced, I'm saying do it by give it to both sides, you seem to be suggesting something else.

Can we go into detail of the alternate balancing?

Snowballing/momentum/initiative:
That's the way it's set up right now, as you advance, you have to leave units behind at each base you conquer, plus units lost.
This requires you to think about your pace, of either blitzing (Hitting a target, dropping whatever needs to be dropped, and keep moving with a weakened force against a less defended position, and each subsequent position), or a slow advance (A slow push, constant reinforcement, with both sides butting heads).
The reason I mentioned it, is that if only the winning side has artillery, then they have the initiative because they took something, and are advancing, PLUS an additional capability to control the enemy's movements.

This whole mortar discussion is under the "Give us tactical areas" precisely because I don't look at this as adding mortars/artillery into the game. I'm looking at this as a way to add "tactical areas", which I interpret to mean conquerable targets with tangible benefits to whoever controls them.

A mortar base would be a good example of this; when you have it, you can use it. It's easy to understand and it makes sense (sort of; light mortars are easily moved and probably wouldn't be left lying around, with ammunition, in real life. but I think that's the wrong way to take hints from real life in game design)

That is also why I wouldn't add offmap artillery by default to both teams. There's no tactical areas involved, you wouldn't be able to do anything to take that ability away from the enemy, and, overall, I think it would be a boring feature. Now, I'm not saying the ideas I'm presenting are necessarily very good, but at least the various aspects I'd like to see are there.

Of course, other tactical areas could be imagined as well. Adding a farm to boost the controlling side's health and everything like that sounds very silly to me, so I wouldn't even bother looking into that direction. It's just stretching the "real" idea behind it way too far (eating healty food makes you more healthy, yes, but how on earth does capturing a farm make you able to take one more bullet? within a second of capturing the farm?)

That actually touches the main limitation I have in my mind when thinking about tactical areas; the effect should be such that it's conceivable to happen instantly (like capturing a mortar. in theory, you could just grab it, point it at the enemy and start shelling. no wait, no delay). What other battlefield affecting things could there be? Indirect (=long range) weapons are pretty much all I can think of right now. Capturing an armory to gain better weapons is quite... bleh, I suppose it'd be ok in some kind of games, but I'm not sure if RWR is that kind of game (nor should it; I actually hope not).

A hospital to treat the wounded better just might be ever so slightly plausible, but there's no wounded nor evacuation in RWR (and of course there's no way to bring a wounded soldier back to the fight, as proper healing from even a mild battle wound takes weeks, months or years no matter the initial treatment). It could trigger a morale boost, but there's currently no morale in RWR either.

What else... Armored guntrain by capturing a railway yard? Could be hilarious... in some other game.

Radio link station for enhanced communications/map features? Maybe, although it's not very plausible, nor do I have any real ideas what the exact gains would be.

Cut the power from something (or turn the power on to something) by taking a powerplant or some sort of switchyard? Hmm, this might work, only if there was something running on electricity in the game.

I don't know... More ideas probably come forth as we get to see what kind of features are added to the game in future releases.

This was discussed here already:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27

Of course this was back in .1 I believe, and certain things have changed.

I'd recommend you read it over if your looking for ideas.

And don't worry, I'm not debating because I think your idea is bad, just because these things should be considered to make everyone's ideas better.