Penalty for not deploying during deployment phase?

[JaguarUSF]

In CTF maps, you are restricted to dropping stuff near your flag during the deployment phase. This makes all the AI drop their craft near the flag. In the last game I played, I just waiting until the deployment phase ended and almost instantly dropped my tank in much closer to the enemy flag. Is this fair? Should there be some sort of penalty (such as no dropping during the first 2 minutes of a game after the deployment phase) to prevent my sneaky tactic?

[ClaytoniousRex]

Waiting until the end of deployment to drop close to the objective is always a good idea. I usually even order the bots to do this: during deployment, order them to drop near the enemy flag and then extract them. They will now wait until deployment ends before dropping close to the enemy base just as you're doing. This way you can organize a massive attack as soon as deployment ends. Just be sure to leave a few of them back at your flag for defense.

There's no penalty for doing this because it's the sensible thing to do. The enemy should be smart enough to deploy sufficient air defense to prevent you from dropping directly on his flag, so you're going to have to fight your way in. But this doesn't mean you have to drive across the entire map to do it.

You might think this means that all of the action will take place near the two flags with lots of "dead space" in between. This isn't true, either, because it often pays to position yourself at extremely long range from the enemy base for optimal use of long range weapons like mortars and ion beams. In this case, the enemy is going to have to come out into that "dead space" where you're positioned in order to root you out. There are also often useful facilities out in that space and of course in the end someone's going to have to take the flag across all of that terrain.