Lattice, reducing the game to 3 types of fights?

A lot of people brought up this argument:
"So we were defending X base for a long time then we got cut off by stupid ghost cappers and it ended a fun fight".

If we take the lattice as an attempt to solve that frustrating issue (amongst others) though, in my opinion we risk a situation where we solve one problem and create another and turn that frustration into 'we tried to defend this base but never had a chance because our lane was 75 NC vs 300 TR so a fun fight never happened'

Yes this does happen on live too, but not continuously and you options for retreat/counter attack are not restricted so it is a less frustrating position to be in, you can think about where to defend. Also my other worry is, in a situation like that you'll just have factions leaving a continent when they're outnumbered. There is no incentive to stay and just be steamrollered so we'll just have a merry go round as each faction looks for a continent they can dominate in population.

I felt the game today did not promote a strategic approach to, let's say, "winning the war".

For those who weren't present in the game, I'll try to summarize it from the NC pov.

1) The NC ghostcapped the TR like there was no tomorrow. We took both lanes from crossroads and regent rock garrison on and deadlocked the TR on Tawrich tech plant.
2) BRTD came in and pushed us back. They outnumbered us 3 to 1, and handily took Tawrich back. We fell back, but were swiftly defeated on both lanes until they reached crossroads and regent rock.
3) No one really attacked crossroads. BRTD went to fight the VS rather than fighting the uphill battle Crossroads is.
Meanwhile, ERUD held skydock. The platoon I was in attacked them, but couldn't get through. Since the battle was stacked against us, we decided to wait and draw them to us over at regent rock.
4) THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. There was no attack on regent rock until late in the game, when BRTD returned and assisted. Even then, we pushed them back due to reinforcements arriving just in time. Even with combined forces, we were unable to take skydock.

While this was happening, I'm glad to read something interesting happened over at Hvar. Quite truly, the NC did a remarkable job today.
At the end of the 2 hour zerg grind, we held 34% of all territory, sadly second to the massive 55% the VS had amassed.

What makes our second place so spectacular is that we only had 17% population. Yes, we held double the territory of our population size.

Then again, the VS had over 50% pop, and there was little both us and the TR could do against them.


All in all, I walk away from this with a couple of observations:

A) The lattice as it was today heavily favours the largest population. However, just like today on live, Indar allows smaller defense forces to hold a big zerg back on the important choke points.
Bases like Quartz ridge, skydock, regent rock, crossroads, and many more are easily defensible while others are completely indefensible. Falling back from Tawrich meant respawning at Crossroads, any other base was simply spawn camped to hell and back.

B) The new cap system promotes ghost capping and spawn camping. Due to the tunnels not working on Tawrich, we forced the TR to meet us head on. For them, that meant running into a tech plant swarmed with MAX suits. This was definitely not fun for them.

C) Big zergs rarely meet with other big zergs. They tend to avoid each other and pick another lane if they do meet a zerg halfway across.

D) Tank mines were completely ineffective in delaying any attacking force. My AV engineer turret however, did a fine job.

E) Playing with and against so many experienced and, let me be honest here, good players makes the game a quite different experience. Where before I can sneak up a sundy or tank, there was no chance for me here. These guys have good aim, are aware of their situation, and react in a fraction of a second. Well played.

F) And finally: The TR had a lot of population. Yet, they ended last, and with an absurdly small amount of territory. We didn't push them THAT hard (with the 17% we were), but it certainly looked and felt like it was harder for them to gain any ground. Further tests are required to see if the lower right portion of Indar is balanced compared to the rest, because I'm gravely worried it isn't. As per my previous point, no it was not the player skill that was the problem.


So yeah, we had a great old ghostcapping and zerging game. It wasn't my cup of tea in particular, but I'm glad there are some defensible outposts out there.
Also, it was great seeing a lot of recognisable names from the forums there. Thanks for playing guys, and hope to see you next time as well.

I think lattice system will be great, it will provide some structure to the fighting.
At the moment it is too easy to redeploy and unless a faction is holding a continent or there is an alert, then everything is pretty meaningless.

Currently I play on Miller and fights usually as the following...

1. You have more guys , you steamroll the enemy or they redeploy and fight else where
2. You have less guys , you get steamrolled or redeploy and fight else where
3. sometimes its a cool equal fight, usually this is ruined when one sides zerg turns up

I haven't tried lattice on test server.
However if it can get equal numbers of people fighting in the same area cool, massive numbers fighting each other isn't a problem if the sides are equal. Hopefully small battles will still occur on the fringes on the lanes.

Also taking territory will have more meaning with lattice system as you should have to actually fight for it.

If they then build more tactical depth with resources and benefits on top of the lattice system later on even better.

I could post a real wall of text about it, but I'm not going to right now. I did a wall of text post a week or two ago in the 7 page roadmap thread, which I can't read the comments for anymore. Is that just me btw? Battle Flow Improvements.

Anyway, in short I'll quickly summarize my previous post until I can find the full text for it. I'm completely against the new system, including the removal of influence and number on point. I appreciate the Devs for working on it, but their current system is superior with the current base and continent design.

Right now the new system is just a zerg funnel that removes a huge amount of playable area that will never have a foot stepped on it again. It adds nothing new to the game and only removes options for people that want to stay away from the zerg. No more sustained infantry field fights between bases, no more small squad base caps of to the side, no more last chance recap defenses. It just stuffs as many people into a small area as possible, and if you have less people, you're spawn camped before you know what hits you. Yes, that happens now. But the difference is with the current live design you have a choice to counter from another side or just go to another, less busy area.

Honestly, as someone with easily a month+ /played across my characters, mostly solo and small squad play, if this goes live it is game breaking for me. I'm not calling for special consideration because I know there are people on the flip side with the opposite opinion, but I don't see myself lasting in this game with such a forced zerg and the removal of perfectly playable bases and areas replaced with a generic 'neutral zone' that no one will ever step foot it.

The problem here seems to be that people think that territory gained with no opposition that is easily taken and easily lost is them, "winning against the odds." It is not in my opinion. Winning against the odds is something that is harder to do as seen by NC on the test server system not being that satisfied by "winning" by taking territory unopposed or stopping an advance because their enemies went somewhere else.

Winning against the odds is not really something that comes from strategy changes to the logistics of how forces move across the map. It comes down to the tactical details of how you use terrain, positioning and unit capabilities to win against a superior force. You can't expect these changes to fix that. Can you really say that in the game on live large battles are more often won by superior tactics than by numbers?

While I think the lattice system is a move in the right direction in terms of directed flow it's not some "game saving miracle pill". Now without bringing up too many "this is what worked in PS1" comparisons I think the ingredients missing are base design and the mechanics in capture/defense. I think the lattice system brings up these questions to be a prominent "requirement" that need to be answered on the Test Server builds.

Current hex system with it's team death match arenas hex to hex seem to work because the amount of choices split up zergs (to a degree) and spread everything out (regardless of the chaos it can generate at times); however when you start focusing the player base into lanes albeit with options you need the designs and mechanics adjusting accordingly. Like the OP says things have potential of just falling into 3 categories.

Is lattice ready? No. If this went Live now it'd be potentially disastrous because it doesn't suit the current underlying mechanics. Its mentioned before but it needs the cont locks, Hossin (sanctuaries if applicable) to make that top "this is why we're capping the continent" layer work. For the lower base to base layers it needs to have some more depth, that "magic something" UberBonisseur mentions - without it I don't think lattice quite has it's place yet. That isn't as simple a fix as "change the base cap tickets to timer". NTU/indoor base design(?)/facility perks/objectives to the base and a few more besides that I think all come into it.

I'm not going to pretend to have the magic answer to what fixes the issues that lattice has potential to exacerbate; I mean personally to me it sometimes feels Indar is too cluttered for lattice or it needs more routes to cope with the number of outposts (never put my finger on what that feeling is with the current 3 lane average - maybe it needs something more like the original concept Higby posted that boasted more lanes?).

I will say I had fun tonight on the Test Server though as NC around Regents Rock though - and to be fair its great seeing good discussion generated out of the test events.

Infermaus

I think there are some really productive suggestions in here. I only hope note is taken of them.

This is how it should be , however with current system, too often the difference in size between opposing forces is usually too large for any tactical play to make too much of a difference. Which why some sort of "funnelling" is needed.

The system doesn't solve that issue. It seems to exacerbate it.

Not sure what you mean by this funnelling. You mean some sort of logistical bottleneck where it is really hard to get new troops to an area that is already really busy ?

The problem I saw, was that things were way too focused. Someone mentioned earlier, large zergs avoid each other, and they are right. The 2-3 platoons of VS I was fighting, never dealt with the 2-3 TR platoons. When that did happen the VS fell back and went up another lane, letting the TR push up.

I think the Lattice can Work, I think the design is sound, but something needs to be done mechanically to disperse people, or force larger forces to deal with each other, rather than what is happening now. I think dispersing people will be easier, so why not invest time in that. I would say something that should be experimented with, would be to take out adjacency. Force people to defend lanes they are pushing down, because if they don't defend their lane, the lane will get cut off and they can't progress.

I also think that if you are tech lined you shouldn't still be able to move forward though.

By the way, I have to ask a very important question:


Do you feel those "Flow" issues on Esamir and Amerish ?

Esamir feels like it's too small to ghost cap without being noticed, while Amerish funnels the zergs with terrain.
And the South-East part of Indar with its canyon has a fairly decent flow going on with predictable movement ala Amerish.

Simply put the current spawn system needs to go. People can die and respawn halfway across the map....


You should only be able to respawn at the nearest base / tower. And at an AMS if it's close enough (2-3 hundred meters.)

And then press /suicide to redeploy at another base, and so on, is still faster than getting everyone in a Gal and fly to that outpost.
I don't get it.

If redeploying takes 15 seconds, why can't you just put a 30 second timer to redeploy farther instead of hiding it behind multiple /suicides ? It only makes the thing more tedious.

That's kind of what I was trying to get at when I was saying that Indar feels "cluttered" at times to me albeit not mentioning the other 2 continents in my original post. I don't think that Esamir or Amerish would have too much trouble adopting the lattice flows (only with potential hypothetical base design adjustments and underlay "special ingredient" game mechanics) because they're already "there".

Better parts than fighting? You mean the PVE?

Here is the thing, If we don't have mechanics that allow enemy forces to be cut off, there is no way to force them to divert their forces, and thus, quarter a large zerg off into several smaller parties that can be more appropriately fought.


We can already spot ghostcappers on the world map, this means that you can respond to ghost capping, particularly if it means "WE would be screwed if we don't respond," meaning that... As long as your commander is observant... Ghost capping isn't a valid strategy to beat a 300 man zerg, however, sending say.... 75 people to cut them off would work at forcing them to divide their efforts, and thus allow for large zergs to forcibly be quartered off if they get to large.


For this to work, we need the following: For every lane segment with two connections, we need one with 3.5 (3, or 4, flip a coin.)

This means, no matter where you are, you can be cut off if you are not just leaving the warpgate. This is important, as, without it, there is no discouragement to keep you from taking half your population and going into a single lane zerg, no means of breaking up this monotonous snowball.


More importantly, we need to add reasons for players to use neutral territories.
Neutral bases that can't be capped, but are fully functional for pulling NS gear and vehicles with a shorter cooldown (Barring sunderers.)

Every base taken off the lanes would have these capabilities. This would enhance ones capacity to harass enemy forces in a way to draw off small enemy parties.


People 300 meters off spawning from a sunderer, pulling lightnings, and coming down hard on your zerg? Send some people to 'fix' the issue.


This would fix ease the following issues:
-Small groups would be able to play a very valuable harrassment, and distraction role for larger outfits to take advantage of.

-Zergs would have mechanics for breaking them up into smaller groups, allowing clever commanders to level the playing field against mindless snowballs.

-Neutral territory would become an incredibly valuable, and fought over resource, breaking op the feeling of there being static lanes. Neutral territory 'bandits' would become a very present force which would be difficult to exterminate.

First, i'd like to say that... i completely agree. While we, of course, have these same exact problems on live right now, lattice dosent even get close to fixing or even adressing these problems.. All the same, it is a fairly decent bandade fix. To properly show this, lets do some math...



In the picture above you can see there are exactly 13 connections in this current lattice. If you dont count 2 paths leading into the exact same base (case in point, the crown) as seperate, there are exactly 8 active connections (/battlegrounds).

So, we have 8 battlegrounds, whice will have 2,000 people, at max, divided between them. Thats 250 men per base.

Now, lets look at our current hex system.

http://1.bp.************/--ViwUu7YWKc/UVOhWfPq9uI/AAAAAAAAFTo/-walJqfn_k4/s1600/PlanetSide2+Indar+Continent+Map.png

I count... 18 or so hexes people can be fighting at. The TR frontline in this pic. itself is actully 14 hexes, with the NC frontline being 12. But, all in all, this is roughly 18 hexes for 2,000 people to be fighting at. Thats 111 men per hex.



Now, the fact that our current system should be getting 111 men per hex (from these pics.) DOES show the validity of my math. And thats without even counting in the fact that quenes on some servers are still a long-sought dream. However, by cutting the amount of battlegrounds down by almost a third, and even doubling the amount of people that would, in a perfect distribution, be in a hex...

In short, it really cant be denied here that the lattice is improving on the current situation (not fixing, but certainly improving) and taking just about jack sh*t in return. Really, unless someone here want to cry about the loss of there "super-tactical" ghostcapping, were losing nothing in this conversion. And, while it could still use some more work and features, its still a massive improvement on what we currently have.