Sneak peek of new hex adjacency graph for Indar and a bit more!

Greetings Auraxians -

Many of you have requested that we take a serious look at the shortfalls of our territory control, influence and base connectivity in order to ensure we're routing players into great fights and encouraging a better overall battle flow. We've taken that feedback very seriously and have been working behind the scenes on a few different ideas to make that desire a reality, most of which have been inspired by ideas from the community - including this one that we're ultimately choosing to move forward with. Many of you probably saw a tweet that I sent out several days ago showing the first steps towards limiting the connectivity between regions. I'm going to share a bit more progress and talk a bit about what our plan is for this, answer a few FAQs and talk a bit about how and when you can help with this.

First of all, here's a complete map of Indar with the current prototype connectivity that we're working with.



And here's a slightly more zoomed in image of a specific area:




What we're doing here, in a nutshell, is reducing the number of adjacent territories from an average of around 6 to an average of around 3. Smaller outposts will have 2-3 connections in general, larger "hub" regions will have 3-5. "But, why?" you may ask. We see several benefits to doing this which have also been brought up by many of your fellow players who are advocating for some of these changes:

• This Lane / Corridor approach means that rather than 5 different targets you can attack next or fall back to when defeated, we've got a more limited set of locations to fall back to. This will hopefully encourage fights to progress more often from outpost to outpost instead of "dispersing" after a large battle as often happens today.
• Defenders will have a better idea of what targets attackers will be gunning for next, that predictability should hopefully encourage more active defense of outposts and facilities, as well as allow for proactive deployment of combat engineering.
• Tactical severing of supply lines and base benefits will be more feasible as well as more understandable.

Along with this change we'll be adding & experimenting with several other features to both support and augment the changes to base connectivity:

• Making roads, bridges, etc follow the connectivity more logically than is displayed in the above map - this will involve changes to the connectivity above as well as some changes to Indar's layout.
• You'll also notice that each of the 9 primary facilities are now surrounded by 3 regions that used to be the "Forward Spawn" outposts, those will be turning into full fledged outposts and will be the only connectivity to the facility "core", which we hope adds a bit more back-and-forth to facility capture.
• Standardizing capture times - influence and # of players on the control point will no longer cause the capture time to fluxuate so defenders can have a better timebox to gather reinforcements or set up their next line of defense.
• Making facilities which are under capture contention no longer provide adjacency for capturing other territories. If you are playing TR and own Xenotech Labs but it is being captured by the NC, you will not be able to use it's connection to to Crossroads to begin capturing Crossroads until you've secured Xenotech.
• Enhancements to the Biolab and Amp station base benefits to make them WORTH cutting off.
• Showing more info on the map including:
  • Generator status on facilities
  • SCU status on facilities
  • Friendly as well as enemy troop populations for each region
  • Capture progress and time remaining on the map (in addition to the region "tooltip")

Now, before you start posting "Why isn't X connected to Y, it's connected to Z but that looks dumb!", this is just a first pass on the connectivity, and our next step is getting this played by you guys so we can figure out if 2-3 is the right number of connections or if 3-4 is better, or maybe 1-2! We won't know until you guys get a chance to really PLAY IT. Now, this is still at least several weeks from going live... however...

Within the next week or so (fingers crossed!) we will launch our new Public Test Server. Once we have the Test Server up we will be putting this current iteration of the hex connectivity on there and asking you guys to come play it and let us know how it works. From there we will be making modifications, finalizing the plan for the Indar layout, integrating the other two continents into this flow, and iterating on the other features I mentioned above as well as tuning capture times, rewards, etc. We've been working on a plan to get a Public Test Server up and running for a while now and we'll have more details about how you can access the server as we get a bit closer.

As always, we're very interested in hearing feedback on this, positive, negative or neutral. We couldn't be making this game without you, our amazing community and your ideas and feedback.

Thank you, look forward to hearing the feedback on this system!

-
mh

M Bison puts into words what I cannot.

While I am usually harsh on you guys. In this case? Bravo. I am eager to see all of it in action.


Any ideas on the enhanced Amp / Bio benefits?

Excited, looks great!

I feel that the most direct lanes to major outpost, should for the most part, have at least one segment with 3-4 connections to allow for better strategy overall, to allow for better use of Art of War styled strategies.....

Give me a minute to give one example of this that I did up during the first preview you did..... I just need to look up the territory names which were omitted.

With the Arroyo Torres connection, there is a road shooting up north from the east end of its hexes. This road should connect copper ravine to the old auraxium mines/the stronghold, adding hexes along it, and having the copper ravine eat up three of Arroyos hexes.

This would allow defenders of Tawrich to realize "We cant beat the zerg at Tawrich, but they came from Arroyo, we can cut them off and deny them the capture."

Sot hey go around and take the stronghold (Easier said then done,) go to the copper ravine, and cap it.

All the sudden, the Tawrich-attacking zerg is cut off, and has three strategic choices.

1. They can wait for someone else to retake copper ravine to allow them to capture Tawrich, holding out until that happens (Depending on luck/other people.)

2. They can split their forces to retake copper ravine while holding positions needed to capture Tawrich, making the attackers more vulnerable to a regrouped defending force trying to push them out, but not giving up on any frontier (Risking both objectives, but not surrendering at anything.)

3. They can retreat to copper ravine, sacrificing Arroyo and the Tawrich (No risk, a tactical defeat, but one necessary for the empire to thrive.)

Other ideal connections like this:

Snake ravine to Reagent rock.

Crossroads to TI alloys.

I dont mind 1/2ds of a lane being 2-3 connections, as long as the other half is 3-4.
That is my one condition for me supporting this plan.

So much for flanking and not getting bogged down in 800man battles on every front.
Being able to actually see roads is nice though, and pretty much everything in the text is win

T-the Crossroads.... isn't.... connected... to the CROWN?!?!?

The Holy Trinity, it has been soiled by sacrilige. Worlds will burn for this outrage.



More seriously though everything mentioned looks nothing less than an improvement.

Why is Higby in a nutshell? I'm not sure that was quite deserved or necessary. Someone get the nutcrackers out!

About time we get a PTR. Very much looking forward to the lattice system.

Can't wait! This overall change seems like a very good step in the right direction

this + cont locking + more continents and the game seems like it will finally be fleshed out and out of the current "open beta" feel

NOTHING CAN STOP US except for people like me with horrible computers

Holy jesus yes.

I love this idea and would like it tested before people downgrade it. After testing I think constructive comments (not the majority who may be upset over one thing when they could possibly not understand it) should help if it's needed.

Cool, though you guys should get rid of the hexes, using something else instead to show what is going on, this feels pretty cluttered and doesn't quite fit.

This is amazing! The only thing I would change is to give the bridges between Regent Rock and Scarred Mesa their own hex/outpost. Battles on those bridges would make for very interesting combat.

As long as I have enough choices to force my enemy commanders to make tough choices.... I am happy Higsby.

Give me ample options to force enemies to split up, give up assaults, or otherwise take an alternate path and I will be happy.

Interesting.

JYAAHH!H@$ JOIAOIEOUSFHAIS!!! EEEGIIIEHHYAHEEDH!!!!!

(I am overjoyed)

And here I was, posting a thread suggesting test servers an hour ago.

Nice to see it arriving.

I have to say, as much as I am harsh on you guys some times, in this case you have really pulled through!