I've been playing CS for a while and thought I'd try a faction. Since they were friendly towards me and I was in their base, I joined Freedom. The game went downhill after that. I just seemed to be running back and forth between 2 bases and defending them. I'd help one group and then get a message to help the other. I defended each one about 6 times before I realized it was a waste and reloaded a save before I joined.
So is this all there is to being in a faction? Just capturing a spot and then defending it? Does it ever end?

You don't have to join a faction but you can get a lot of goodies after the final point is captured (e.g. good armour and rare artifacts).

The faction strength bars show how the war is going. Destroying enemy groups and stopping attacks will weaken the enemy overall and protecting allied groups will prevent their strength being reduced. You don't always have to take part in a battle; if the ally bars are stronger than the enemy bars there is a greater chance of them holding that location without your help.

Once the allied faction is strong enough you'll get a new task to capture a location currently held by the enemy. The other spots must still be held for this task to appear and be able to be completed--it will cancel if a prerequisite location is lost at any point in the process.

You should only conquer or defend bases if friendly forces are present at that spot otherwise allied forces might not move into it and the enemy will reappear as soon as you move far enough away. The lighter-coloured party dots on the map show groups that are moving to a specific location so you can watch for those and help them reach and capture their destination.

Once your faction holds all the locations the war is considered won (some enemy forces will still spawn).

Something to consider:

A faction's resources determines the quality of the stuff the squads get outfitted with. With high resources, they get exo suits and sniper rifles. With low, simple jackets and pistols/smg's. As you can imagine, a faction with low resources will have a VERY hard time beating a faction with high resources.

It's like this: When a squad dies, a new squad is then created. The new squad dips into their factions resources by equipping themselves with whatever is in their arsenal. This causes a loss of resources. As more and more squads are killed, the enemies resources are depleted by constantly giving out replacement gear to the new squads. Eventually if there arsenal has been cleaned out of all the good stuff, they can only give the new squads crappy equipment, which is when the faction resources are practically at zero.

Factions get resources by taking and holding territory. If they own everything, resources are easy to get. If all they have is their headquarters, it will be like using a depleted vespene geyser from starcraft. So if an enemy faction loses all it's territory AND is having it's squads wiped out constantly, that will be the fast track to their faction becoming totally crippled.

Although you cannot truly remove a faction from the game since they can always spawn a few squads inside their HQ when you aren't around, it IS possible to put it on lock down so they can never branch out! It's easy:

1. As mentioned above, get the enemy faction to have as low resources as possible so they are stuck using pea shooters and crappy jackets.

2. Wait until your faction has almost full resources so the squads are carrying the best gear.

3. Go to the enemy base and do your thing: but DO NOT LEAVE IT! Enemy squads will not respawn if you are close to their HQ.

4. If you have the patience, wait around for a bit inside the enemy HQ until 2-3 of your faction's heavily equipped squads arrive to secure the place.

With those exo suit wearing squad members armed with snipers/HMG's sitting inside the enemy base, any squads that spawn inside will get wiped out by them about 90% of the time, never being able to retake their own base thanks to their inferior gear! By doing this, you will never have to worry about that faction again...Unless you go rogue and start murdering your own guys.

Thanks for the tips. I enjoyed the faction wars, but had the same problem. I found it to be a bit too frantic, where I was constantly running back and forth between posts trying to defend against duty's attacks. It seemed that duty was always either better equipped or had higher ranked members, because my Freedom buddies didn't seem to stand a chance without me helping.

I never really paid any attention to the resources, nor did I know how they worked. This explanation helps, so I'll try to keep that in mind when I get to the faction wars again.

I'd say Duty is the hardest to bring down, because they seem to have the largest population AND resource reserves. When you are in their main territory, they deploy new squads the exact moment you finish another one off.

The trick is to wait till you've gotten one of those endurance boosting artifacts, it's a big help for running around. Then, when you push into duty territory, take out the forward squads as quickly as possible. Then make a mad dash for the HQ as soon as you eliminate the forward squads, killing any new ones that pop up as you go.The idea is to stop the squads from respawning by being near the HQ. This makes it a lot easier for your crew to finally catch up.

Yep. That's the point where I gave up, right as soon as I took the first checkpoint into Agroprom, I just couldn't hold off the hordes of duty squads that just kept coming and coming. It was ridiculous, it was like they were coming out of one of those Gauntlet monster generators.