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So we've played... a lot of ranked team battles, and found some pretty unfortunate behavior for the creep AI. I think most people who have played some 5 stack games will have encountered this or will soon, but wanted to bring attention to this quickly so that it can be resolved.
The short story is that creep AI don't seem to progress past the midpoint of the map. This means that if a team is able to destroy their opponents first two objectives without losing either of their own, they can sit back and kill creep until either the game counter ticks down to 0 and they win on tiebreaker, or the passive damage that capital ships take on defending eventually end the game. The defender's can't ever get to the creep to push the meter back, so they're forced to either just throw themselves at the attackers and slowly die, or try to get kills - but they can't, because the attackers are just hiding under the cruisers which more or less one shot things during the attack phase.
Basically, because the defenders can't kill creep, the phase can't change, and the attackers have unlimited access to all the creep to make sure the phase can't ever change. We've been running experiments on this all night/morning (sorry to our opponents... :( ) and no one has been able to find a way out of this, including ourselves when it happens to us.
All that being said, of course games where one team destroys two objectives without losing any were going to be pretty one sided anyways - but ideally they'd be over quickly, but this guarantees that the people losing are stuck in the game more or less unable to play for 15-20 minutes.
Here's a quick example game, https://www.twitch.tv/videos/759823602?t=9h45m50s should be timestamped to the point where we put a team in this position. You can check the previous games and the ones afterwards if you'd like to see more examples. It doesn't seem to be map dependent, or faction dependent in any way. Here's a second example, where the defenders made a valiant effort trying to kill our cruisers out of phase which went... about as well you'd expect. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/759823602?t=11h4m20s Props to them for their valiant effort though, they made an awesome attempt at solving the puzzle, that just ended up not working. Note - they had about 150 deaths suiciding into cruisers out of phase to (eventually) bring them down right as the game ended.
TL;DR The creep mechanic isn't working correctly. The defenders get more morale from killing creep than the attackers, which looks like it's an attempt to be an anti-snowball mechanic, but since the defenders can't actually get to the creep, they can't ever recover from being pushed to their capital ship if the attackers have two cruisers up and don't leave the cover of them, or just make sure they get creep killes for morale faster than they lose it dying.
I'm sure it'll get brought up, so may as well get it out of the way - we aren't whining that people are doing this to us. Frankly, the problem is that we are doing it to other people, and it appears to be the dominant/best strategy. For reference, here's my stats as of posting this for evidence that we don't suck or whatever: https://i.imgur.com/CMjyBWi.png
Side note - massive props to the development team for this game. This is easily the most fun we've had playing any game in a very long time.
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