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

First off, I applaud the developers dedication to constantly improving and refining what is already an awesome game. In terms of trying to focus battles, personally, some of my favourite battles are when large opposing forces meet each other and fight it out in an open areas away from facilities. I understand that it would probably be difficult to encourage this more, just thought i'd put it out there.

Or could be the sound of the Zerg dragging their knuckles on the floor in glee

Bravo for posting this on the forums!

Y-you mean... you mean that, for once in their miserable, defeat-ridden lives, Waterson TR is actually going to be forced to defend a base? Dear God, finally. I wonder how the ghost-capping outfits (you damn well know who you are) are going to handle themselves when they can no longer run from fights.

Ghost capping vs. running in the zerg is about as false a dichomty as this community is likely to come up with.

Not that simple, many more ways of playing this game.

I may be less pessimistic as you are.
Or not really, just that currently, small size outfit do not have much to do ANYWAY, so that will not change the deal

But you raise all the valid points THAT HAVE BEEN RAISED SINCE BETA :

We need something else than just "capture area X" objectives!

If I take your Hvar example, what I would really LOVE to be able to, as a small/medium sized outfit, would be to take NS Secure Data Labs, and be given the ability to create a temporary link toward Hvar. By the mean of a Sunderer dropping some kind of Nanite Generator every 500m/1000m toward Hvar East or South outpost from NS SDL.

Ennemy would be warned of the presence of Nanite gens in their territory. Something like that.
A freaking objective that is NOT CAPTURE AREA X.


It's something that has been asked since August. It's something that has been outlined when they said they were adding "metagame" by the means of Facility Benefits, when we told them that without generators taking out the Benefit, this will be useless, until now, NOTHING is done outside of "capture area X"

Some of these changes are good, most of them are horrible.

Indeed, I worry that in bowing to the 'lattice nowe' pressure, indeed a large percentage of which thinks that this shall be the metagame. They are devoting too many resources away from actual metagame, which in being another layer of strategy in the game (no ones saying capturing territory should not be the primary layer) presents more than simply 'CAP BASES GOGOGOGO'. In terms of the larger strategic game, all this proposal is going is simplying the pre-existing strategic field of play, its not actually adding anything to it. Though it might incentivise defending, don't get me wrong. That's making people play the current game mechanics diffrently, its not adding to the game mechanics in a way that enchasing the larger strategic game. You can, if you so choose plonk down and defend/garrison anywhere at present. ITs just that without some sort of command direction, most people wont.



AS i've said here an elsewhere, I think the logical and indeed easier move to give some sort of compelling extra layer of strategy (indeed in a very simple format its in the roadmap) is to make a logistics system, by which the resources actually have to flow across the map, and making a system of movement of these resources to be defended/attacked.

I certaintly have no problem ,with funnealing people towards larger battles, if there are logistic lines that directly impact these which can themselves be effected.

Honeslty, I think we can do better than generators as well. I don't think that really solves the problem a lot of people are having with ghost capping.

It's about damn time.

Now make bases more interesting to fight in (static defenses, making vehicles less important once these are breached) and bring back NTU silos + base benefits that matter and we'll finally have a game worth playing.

I'm still not thrilled about the huge amount of small outposts that nobody really cares about but it is a good stopgap to giving smaller outfits something to do outside of the zerg since this game doesn't have secondary objectives or sabotage in yet.

Love this.

Particularly the map improvements.

The key to the tuning the timers will relate to the feasibilty of when a base if hacked of forming up a resecure team and going and getting it back.

If resecure teams start to work and become popular as I hope they will then maybe the issue of cloaking bubble and/or reducing the size of the deploy zone should be reopened.

I'll be interested in seeing the base benefits you have in mind and if you need any ideas just ask - I think they should be tough!

All of these proposed changes sound great to me. Less of a gamble to know where a fight is going to be, so you can actually utilize some of the defences these bases have. Actually being able to cut off routes. Making the Biolab and Ampstation worth something.

The only thing I'm interested in now is how the access to the test server will work. Will it be like a normal server, and you need to make a new character, or can you access it with any character. I'm hoping the latter, but I doubt it to be honest. Not really that much of a problem anyway, I don't think it's supposed to be played on that much.

No!

Bad, bad idea!

No offense meant to whoever decided on this concept, but do they even play the game?!

With such a system, every fight will degenerate to the state of Ti Alloys. PS2 cannot support such a meatgrinder now (and I'm not talking about the newest GU perfomance issues either). Drawing distance less than a room and fps no more than 15 - is that what you want?!

Ghost capping needs to die, but this is not the way to do it. Alter base capture mechanics instead, no need to reduce base connectivity.

Resource system (and especially its effects on cut off bases) needs to be rehauled before you can even suggest something even remotely limiting as this.

Base defence will not magically get better either. While all possible paths on an outpost from the spawnshack to the cap point can be camped by a score of MBT's and a couple of libs hanging above, none of this will help. HE nerfs won't either. Also, whoever decided that turrets are ok as they are, should get the turret duty during a major Zurvan Amp siege. The moment the fight gets bigger than 10v10, they get exponentially less useful. The only base people even bother with them is the Tech Plant; on all others engineers simply use them as a source of easy repair XP, nothing more.

In the picture shown above, any kind of flanking becomes impossible. Because when you try to advance on the second 'branch', guess what you will meet? The same meatgrinder you've just came from. All fights will stalemate until people get bored and leave.

Thankfully, we will get a chance to playtest it before release and you will see how bad this idea is.

Indeed the best example of how gamey and arbitary this system is as it stands.

Battles betwen Crossroads and Ti alloys, indeed someo of the larger battles in game, and betwen two sites literally down the road from each other, will now have no strategic purpose.

What about XP at base capture? Is it restricted to the colored hex areas? In which case, I foresee a total abandon by players of 70% of the map to only stay inside the funneled colored hexes

Sounds very, very good - in conlusion, with the bringing up of importance of defending, there also should be XP for defending an Facility/Outpost...

What was the word??? Ah! HAAAAAALELUJAH!

Indeed. A fair point.

The point is, I don't want to fight the zerg.
Why? Because their is no such thing as a successful defense in this game, outside of seriously organized Outfit play.
There's retreating, and attacking, everything in between is farming.
I've had the questionable opportunity to 'enjoy' the south east of Indar the last month, where attacking west, your always fighting uphill.
I've had plenty of times where Crossroads was taken, and the majority (everything not going towards the dreadful crown) of attackers moved down to Broken Arch.
Either it was a steamroll anyways, because they wanted to get to tawrich, and defending would just sour your mood at drop your K/D, or they set up shop with a few squads of tanks and started shelling the base, moving up only when they got no points anymore because all the defenders found better things to do with their time.
Defense just isn't, most of the time.
The only time I actually had fun in that situation without switching continent or attacking north (mostly I just logged out for a few hours) was when a few individuals, or a sunderer with a half squad, got up west to Xenotech and capped that, forcing the opponent to divert forces or putting pressure on their positions from behind.
Now, it really can't get any worse there, but it can become equally bad at other bases.
Having more stages of battle in the larger bases is awesome, I'd love that; I'd even like more quirky stuff like shutting off base shields by capturing around them; But I expect the battles to just be stuck at point X, until the zerg on one side reaches a critical mass of "not enough xp farmed per individual", upon which it will just steamroll said large base and disperse itself over two following lanes to reenact the stalemate.

No, it means the opposite. It means that if you so much as started the tiniest sliver of capture progress on a base you're attacking, you can stop defending the base you came from in the most cases, unless there's some other uncontested enemy base adjacent to it. It means the "ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!!!" zerg will have even less incentive to defend anything.