if there is such a steep slippery slope.. teams will rage quit sooner and it could empty servers. i played this MMO "Sword of the New World" a long time ago. there is like a territory war where there are like 20 territory to fight for. for each territory the guild takes, they get a 3-5% hp/sp/atk buff *forgot how much exactly* and the guild can freely teleport to any territory under their control. I quit because even now, the same guilds hold 98% of the map for the last 3years. most retarded system ever. the point im trying to make is.. the winning team must work harder to win. the most epic games are long games where there are several base switches or a big upset where the losing team with only 1 resource starts coming back and starts kicking ass. this 2 tier system seem to benefit the winning team more.
Perhaps if you made the successive ref upgrade to be the one that gets tapered - e.g. the first cap gives some res (default amount), then the ref is placed giving a res boost (again, default amount), then you can decide whether or not it's worth it to upgrade the ref one more time - as teams with lots of refs will get a minimal amount of res, and those without many refs will get the maximum viable from the upgrade. It represents keeping and holding something while being on the backfoot, so you get more resources as a reward.
