Spawning, the flow of battle.

Spawning:

1) In a real war a front line is determined by how safely and cheaply you can stretch your logistics chain of supply as close to the enemy as possible without being cut off. The enemy is doing the same. This forms a front line. Blitzkrieg and/or deep battle doctrine involves punching a hole in the enemy line to reach your enemy supply logistics.

2) Properly simulating logistics in a FPS videogame where a player spawns out of thin air is almost impossible, but the closest thing you can come up with is doing anything you can to prevent the "enemies magically appearing behind us" effect.

3) Infantry are too stealthy to simply walk through the enemy lines and drop a spawn beacon. This violates traditional logistics.

4) The galaxy dropping infantry is not 'too stealthy', it's the biggest most visible vehicle in the game. This does nto violate traditional logistics.

5) A vehicle like the Sunderer is not 'too stealthy', it's slow, and can be easily intercepted by a watchful enemy. It however has allot of hitpoints which means defenders would have to use an unrealistic amount of players in tanks or infantry AV weapons (ignoring OP air) to form a defensive perimeter.

So what would be perfect? The PS1 AMS, which has 1/3rd the hitpoints of the Sunderer.

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The flow of battle:

(except for the Crown) During the first 2 minutes of any battle the attackers always grossly outnumber the defenders. In every base battle (except for the Crown) it takes 30 seconds from rendering on the defender's computer screen to arriving right in front of their spawn doors to camp.

You know what would be helpful? A cloaked AMS 200 meters away as an alternative spawn point for defenders. You know what would be even more helpful? PS1 style mines, PS1 spitfires, and PS1 motion detectors to delay the attack long enough for more defenders to trickle into the battle.

While you're at it, you shouldn't be able to drop onto an enemy base with the deploy button, and probably not with the spawn beacon either. It's really silly when structures supposedly for defense just turn into hiding places for the attackers as they snipe with rifles or rockets.

I hate those #(*@& who drop on top of the tech plant.

Figment came up with a nice idea of having a SOI around bases that acts kinda like a jammer signal which means all enemy drop pods fall outside the sphere like in PS1 but the bases/outposts would have terminal or generator so it can be disabled by attackers to allow direct drops.
Anything that adds strategy and gameplay is a good idea imo

I do wish that 'Deploy' was a little smarter. Allowing people to drop in on a battle they already lost is a bit frustrating, not to mention pointless for the other team.

Sounds convoluted and counter-intuitive. Be better just to get rid of the squad beacon. Better to use the Galaxy if you absolutely insist on getting strange places, it's what the Galaxy is for anyways. That's what the tactical niche of the Galaxy is, is it not.

Spawning is the most important thing in a multiplayer FPS. How can this possibly be at the bottom of the priority list?

One of the first multiplayer FPS deathmatch Quake you spawned in several places that were easily camped.

Then a mod came out which put spawns inside enclosed rooms so at least you weren't immediately PK'ed on spawn.

Then 2Fort4 came out with 2 spawn rooms, or 2 doors to camp.

Then in 2001 wwiionline comes out and they make the same mistake, have 1 spawn room every 10 square kilometers. Easily camped.

Then later wwiionline adds about 4 extra infantry spawn buildings per town the player can chose from.

Then later (can't remember if it was before or after Planetside 1) wwiionline adds mobile spawning, infantry can now spawn off of a deployed truck.

Then Planetside 1 comes out with a cloaked AMS infantry can spawn off of......Then all FPS development on spawn mechanics stops, or goes backwards like on COD where players randomly spawn all over the map which is megra-lame. I mean what moron came up with the idea of random spawning?

The surviveability of the PS1 cloaking AMS (which has 1/3rd the hitpoints of a sunderer) is inversely proportional to how many player spawn off of it plus newby factor. This means the PS1 AMS is better for defense than offense, where the PS2 AMS/sunderer is absolutely horrible at defense and too effective/spammy on offense.



life span of PS1 AMS = 1 / (players spawned + newby factor)

Newby factor - A newb spawns at your ams then steps 1 meter outside the cloaking bubble tand starts shooting missiles at planes/tanks. Enemy shoots back and the cloak fails for a second or two, then every enemy within 400 meters is shooting at the AMS.

Players spawned - Tracking down an AMS is an artform just as much as AMS'ing. You follow the ant-trail. The more ants, the easier it is to follow the ant-trail to it's source.



Now isn't this more interesting than the sunderer?

This must be too cerebral for most.

Spawn control is the entire meta-game, at its base level.

Control the spawns, and you control the world.

Yeah, it's the most impotant thing in the game, and should be under "command" tools. The real commanders are driving around the AMS, the poser commanders are global-chatting nonsense and putting down stupid little waypoints on the map.