Update Under Construction - Dev Letter

I was surprised how you updated OS Uplink. The association with the building is very curious.
Command Center is what you need. All in one building and nothing more. It would be nice to have more types of such combined buildings of different shapes and sizes.
The fact that you decided to make modules without a time limit is the same right decision.
New types of walls seem to be bad in terms of problems with their installation at an angle with other walls due to their models.
The Rebirthing Center seems like it would be hard to fit into a single person building base. Unless of course you increase the limits on the maximum number of walls installed.
It would be nice for the Secure Silo to add a Colossus auto-refuel feature when it is nearby.
I don't see the point in Module Dispenser. Since the radius of Silo is not so large that it would take a long time to get to it for the sake of modules. If the Module Dispenser remembered the location of the modules and automatically restored them when destroyed, it would be useful and comfortable.
And I hope you don't forget about decorations for DBC so that we can support this update with money.
I also hope you will not bypass ANT in terms of new improvements. It would be nice to have a Colossus mini dome when deploying. With the loss of cortium when taking damage to the dome.
Also, many would like a full-fledged return of WASP as a new analogue of ANT only flying. Just close the open seats and install the cortium tank model instead. Of course with new improvements as for a new transport. And don't forget the decorations for this vehicle.

I like what I'm seeing though I really hope you didn't remove the turrets. Like the guy above me say I would love to see more unity for the Ant and Wasp. One of the main issue I have is the Infiltrators when they invade your base they would most likely be holding a device that would use either the Flail or Glaive IPC. When they shoot those weapon out there no way on finding them and the only options is to find their base and destroy their Turret AI Module. I think either the Infiltrators can't use them or make it so when they use the weapon to point they will be seen on the map. The Turrets has never been a issue. Never. Light Assault and Heavy Assault both can destroy them like it is nothing. Tanks will have it easy but at least they are easy to hit. So I think for the use of those Artillery they will have to remain on the base have squad or your faction team locate for you so you can look at your map and point where to shoot your Artillery there will be a cool down on their uses of course so you don't just spam them. We could have the constructions fill more a support role to help your team 1 build base 2 Support your team Logistics from Artillery to supply drop, vehicle drop and recon and maybe you can summon specials vehicles that can only be spawn with constructions.

Now for the Ants I think ability's would be awesome if it can have the options to spawn drones to mine for you. You won't be able to use your main weapon to mine but to rely on your drones to go and collect resource they can be shot down of course so there risk. But in the defense the player in the ant can use it main gun while in the driver seat.

As for the Wasp I think the guy above have the right idea.

So what is going to happen to the people who put a lot of time into this and already enjoy the system in place? are we being reimbursed for the payments we made? / certs we've spent? or is our hard work going to be just removed from our characters? I'm on board with adding more variety, but removing that what some of us are good with kinda just seems a little much.

Let us lock silo. I filled this silo, I put this silo here, this is my base plan, this is my vision, and every other player that plops something down is screwing up my plans regardless if their intentions are good or not. Sometimes intentions are not good, like griefers who intentionally drain silo because they are whiney little ******* who just lost.

Please god just add a snapping function for the walls, towers, gates and bunkers. Also, please make the AI turrets worth a ****, it's sad when a solo lightning can show up to a base with 6 or more AI controlled turrets and just decimate it. It's not fun to stay and guard a base 100% of the time and sometimes you gotta leave your base to help move the bigger fight along. Would also be nice to have more ways to deal with infantry, as it is now, if you happen to put any structures in the interior of your base, the anti-inf turret just ends up shooting your own stuff and never hitting the enemy.

They are going to remove the AI ​​module from the system

I wonder if the devs are looking into the artillery "meta" for attacking/defending a player base. I hate the fact that if you don't have a flail or a glaive IPC built , that your base will pretty much be destroyed when an enemy team first sets one up. This severely limits the amount of different base setups for competitive bases(bases that won't get flail/glaive/OS rolled) and eliminates any freedom to build a Fun base to attack.

I see a lot of people on Reddit say that Builders never build a base to have fun infantry fights at but even if you remove the AI turrets and pain spire the base will simply just get flailed by the enemy team instead of having an infantry siege .Dying to explosives is already not fun and the flail being able to kill through solid walls is completely broken .This kills the fun fight for both parties. what changes does the dev team have in mind if any surrounding this "meta" in the base builder world.

The flail is balanced around trying to hit rapidly moving targets, so when it targets static bases it's totally OP.

Artillery should be weak or almost totally useless against enemy positions that are on the move, artillery should be more like the glaive's persistent firing but just a bit more damage like 30% more.


How it be in real world, how it should be here:

Construction = fortified infantry positions
Artillery = anti fixed enemy positions, particularly soft targets like infantry

This game shouldn't allow the flail to be such a powerful farming tool, since the green smoke sometime doesn't render on time.

the flail is terrible for things like deployed Sundy where multiple people spawn there every second.

The explosion damage goes through the walls of things like sunderer garages. At

the minimum this should be fixed you should not die while you are taking cover inside of a building where other explosions don't kill you.

Take a look at what I'm talking about by watching this video.


It's BS that you can't have a spawn anywhere where the flail is able to shoot at since it easy set flails up. It's another big reason why Oshur west mirror bay Sucks so badly. This aspect of the game shouldn't be like "real life" in this instance. If it was you'll have tank shells killing through walls too.

Another fun fact about the flail Green Smoke From the dart and the explosions themselves do not render sometimes

.

This is what I mean by the artillery meta. It is very boring to build a base and then be forced to stop other builders from the enemy team from potentially building their own base . Who knows what kind of base they were building, but i cannot risk them having a flail or OS. For all we know the builder wanted to build a fun base like the one(it was in a cove on oshur) CMDR cyrious talked about in his construction video. You have to have a flail and a glaive at your base or else your base (and spend a long time using them zzzz) will be toast if an enemy sets one up first. This part of construction is the most unfun for me and kills my motivation to even try to build one since it'll come down to this meta.

Welp, guess I better enjoy my base building now before they kill it.

Glaive might be fine. Flail is not. Flail does not introduce anything else than pain. Flail is way too accurate and deadly for no apparent counterplay other than moving away from infinitely respawning green smoke. Personally I would like to use flail against enemy armor on hilltops, but when it can kill other construction bases or spawn points that is not fun. Then when it is being used to farm infantry I become furious, nothing sucks more than some random explosions passively killing you when there are other 50 enemies actually playing the game.

I'm only saying this, because flail is being changed only on the targeting tool, and possibly on cortium costs. I feel its role is the issue and that makes it net negative experience. I have had 0 enjoyable deaths from flail and 0 enjoyable kills.

Orbitals are cheat codes, and that is fine.

Yeah this is a really bad call imo. Turrets are necessary to prevent players from destroying your base while you're away. Construction shouldn't require players to dedicate themselves to defending it until the end of the match/it's destroyed.

Also I think certain modules should retain the existing functionality, like repair modules having an AOE instead of just repairing one structure..

I think a better way to balance the artillery, rather than switching to a laze system, is to make it less accurate and have the rounds land in a larger area around the designated target. Modify the damage and rate of fire as necessary, but only a small portion of the rounds fired should actually land directly on target and you should have to hammer a position for a while to destroy anything. Artillery should be more of a deterrent than a direct damage weapon.

I think it'll still be easy to sneak a laser designation using a drifter jet light assault or landing in a tree. IMO the damage against infantry and vehicles should be nerfed to zero.

I have a suggestion for the devs regarding construction airpads free A2G spam problem. The airpad should be updated to only spawn a buffed A2A version of the bastion Empire specific ESF, the interceptor . The interceptor loadout should be changed to equip best A2A load out slots: Fire suppression, stealth(with a possible exclusive buff to increase lock on time by 2s), and dogfighter(or the hover one) . Nso can use it to spawn these buffed bastion interceptor ESFs instead of the dervish.

Just read the new proposed balance changes regarding construction and thought it'd be best to provide some feedback since I essentially only play this game for the constructions/logistics sides of it.

A lot of these changes are good and quite a few are clearly well intentioned but If these changes go ahead it'll put construction backs years in design.

Now, nobody wants to read a comprehension list of every single aspect of the patch so I'll just condense it to the key points but even then these will be quite detailed, Be warned walls of text below.

AI turrets, definitely needed to be changed, looking at outfit bases with numerous layers of stacked turrets it was clear to anyone that this wasn't a fun experience to attack. But the complete removal of automated defenses is a drastic solution where there are other avenues to consider. The more reasonable solution to this should of been to make turrets have a exclusion range for turrets of the same type, This would allow the core of the base to have the turret trio that provides the protection needed to deter harassment/repel aggressive galaxy C4 drops. but would make turret stacking impossible. Imagine routers for example, One silo can support numerous routers if they are placed significantly far away from each other, the same logic should apply here.

Pain spires, needed to reined in. The death field is a extremely powerful mechanic that is only seen elsewhere in the game to protect spawn rooms, but is its complete removal the way to address it in its current state? I think not. Two simple changes, It should be similar to the spawn tube in that one silo, can only support one pain spire, the pain spire's weakness to small arms means that vs any real attack it crumbles quickly but it provides a small pocket of safety to a base that repels harassment and overly aggressive drops. Now the other crucial change is not the pain spire itself, but the other half of the scenario which pain spires are frequently used for and that is the Sunderer Garage. It's not a hard fix, just lower the interior ceiling enough so that pan spires/router spires cannot be placed inside, or make routers/pain require more empty above them to be placed. Giving these spires which provide significant impact the absolute protection from range that the Sunderer garage provides is the source of the pain spires problematic behavior, if the only counter to the spire is to walk within the garage and place yourself within the kill range that that scenario should not be possible.

sky shield, in its current state this is just busted, If a base uses the terrain correctly it forces attackers to be EMP'd and provides a significant defenders advantage. So what is the solution to this? It's actually already in the game, it just has poor balancing. The solution is to significantly lower the health pool of the sky shield, A sky shield should only be able to withstand sustained fire from a few liberators for a brief period of time before being disabled, the only time previously a sky shield was disabled in actual gameplay is from the glaive and the removed mauler cannons of the bastion. If the health pool is significantly lowered on this shield it means that bases that utilize it as way to force the EMP effect on infantry that want to attack it can be countered with just a reasonable amount of sustained fire, preferable a sunderer and a MBT level of firepower with some infantry support but without testing a reasonable amount is hard to determine. This shield should be there to give allied air/anti air the opportunity to defend a base and to hamper overly aggressive air drops by EMP'ing the attackers. Not to absolutely negate all forms of attacks from above.

One way shields, These are also busted, the only other time this shield effect is used in the game is in the same situation as the kill field, and that is to protect spawn rooms. But just like the sky shield the solution is already present it just needs balancing and that is to lower the health pools of the shields, in this case because the shielding is utilized by infantry it should be balanced around infantry. Let's use a average health pool of 1000 as a basis, a one way shield should have a health pool of only 2000-ish before being disabled, but a quick reactivation time of less then a couple seconds where its freshly activated health starts from 1 and builds up over 10 seconds or so. This creates a scenario where a single heavy LMG can overwhelm the shield in seconds and then rip into the defenders behind it but due to it reactivating so quickly it prevents a lightning from sniping through the shield by itself as the freshly reactivated shield even with a low health pool in the two digit range is enough to block the shell from getting through. Now consider the combined arms aspect to this, infantry with there small arms can overwhelm the one way shields and kill/suppress the defenders, and then armor can shoot through the downed shields and clear our the positions while damaging the structure.

The Flail, Oh boy, the flail. I wasn't even sure whether to even add this on cause it might detract from my other four main points but seeing it be brought up in the test server notes makes me feel like I must. So the Flail is most likely the main reason Oshur failed, its incredible oppressive nature just made field fights not fun to engage in, every deloyed sunderer, every infantry position, every bridge battle, If it lasted a few minutes it would be getting flail'd. Now this is due to a few combined design flaws working in unison to make the flail so prevalent, so what were these flaws? For ease of reading and to provide some structure I'll need to put these in there own sections.

Ease of construction, The flail is one of the few construction aspects that can be taken advantage of without even using a ANT to gather Cortium, how you ask? well if there was a allied base in the region, or anywhere on the map really, with a silo with more then 22500 Cortium you had access to a Flail in less then 2-3 minutes anywhere on the map, Just spawn in, buy a silo from there silo for 2k Cortium, get a aircraft from the air pad and fly where you want to build your flail base, hop out drop the silo, wait for it to build, buy the flail (used to take a AI module as well but not anymore) slap it down wait for it to build as well, grab the Flail Targeting Dart and hop back in your aircraft and fly to where you wanna farm, almost no setup and you would have minutes of Flail usage from the bases 2k coritum. Fortunately this is being addressed by adding a cost to the Flail's individual volleys and will render this form of it's usage significantly weaker, but the same can be accomplished relatively easily with just actually bringing a ANT full of cortium, it just adds a couple of minutes to the setup at most..

Ease of Use, fire and forget darts which don't have a effective counter, I don't really need to explain this, anyone that plays the game knows how easy the flail is to use as stalker infitlrator, the dev's thinking of making it a held targeting marker with a few seconds channel which is a lot better, and without seeing it implemented is hard comment on, but unless players develop the eyes of a hawk decloaking in a obscure position and targeting a marker on a deployed sundered seems very achievable.

Poor interactions, the Flail shots penetrate all construction objects rendering its targets incapable of finding shelter from its volleys. Now I get that the flail is the premium base counter, it's the flails primary role design wise to break these positions, but the way it currently interacts with construction creates the other problems that kills field fights.

the solution, Mimicking the design of the other dedicated construction counter, the glaive. N-now hear me out, hear me out, Imagine this, you pick the glaive, u slap it down on the enemy base, Bam, sky shield, one ways shields, vehicle shields all gone (Glaive shots should disable AI turrets as well IMO but eh that might be to much), Glaive's doing its intended job, so how can the Flail learn from this design? here's the pitch, you mark a area with a dart like the glaive, and the flail will issue sustained sporadic fire in that region, but these shots carry a HAVOC payload with them, meaning that targets hit one of the spread flail shots (probably only dealing 1000 on direct hit to 500 on max spread) Have there repairs disabled (Or significantly hampered by a % but Don't think that tech's in the game.). This makes the Flail serve its intended role of countering bases by blocking the ability for defenders to repair them effectively and applying pressure in field fights, while also not letting it be a ("so long, ployed sundie"-Flailrio) menace and infantry farming machine.

Conclusion, these are just the five major issues I see as a construction main with the current system and the solutions I think from my experience playing almost exclusively construction since Oshur's release. I could probably put down pages more of this stuff but this is already significantly too long so I am opting to just give these detailed points. I normally never engage with developers on forums and communities on sites due to them being mostly echo chambers but seeing these changes to the flawed construction system that is completely unique in the FPS genre spurred me to at least make this token post to try and provide feedback. If foxhole, a game with significantly more automated defenses in bases, and a pay barrier to play can can out perform a free game like Planetside 2 in player count it means that automated defenses should be tweaked to fit the game rather then be outright removed.

I strongly agree with the flail being changed to a havoc ammo glaive. IMO it would ideally disable the AI module too, but its being removed anyway.

The placing for big stuff is still painful. The Command Center gave me 15 minutes trying to place it, just to realize it was impossible.
About AI: IMO what should be done is make AI range enough to not allow EZ soloing and also protecting the solo builder inside his own base, but the Turrets themselves should have a higher range, so you have a reason to jump inside Turrets. AI can't track that far away, but a player can jump in and fire manually.