Alpha - Bases Weren't Always Poorly Laid Out

i didn't see you posting anything as good as this, so shut up please and watch this threads first page in awe

i could not think of one single reason why bases that grant the defenders an advantage were removed, it would improve infantry impact so much you wouldn't believe it, unless of course you played in alpha or PS1

agreed

And yet SOE will never answer our questions about these bases being removed. I bet they regret releasing that photo from alpha.

I can't wait until they release this alpha stuff, it looks so much better than what we have now lol.

I think you don't quite get it

The footage you see on the first page was completely THROWN AWAY and will NEVER make it to the game if people keep being satisfied with the bases we have right now

SOE was concerned with large attacks being just repelled by these good-to-defend bases, but they overreacted and made the bases so bad to defend, it's better to not bother defending and capping instead, resulting in circle-capping and zergs avoiding each other to keep the XP coming

they had concepts to prevent vehiclespam and spawnroomfarming, but they rather have a fast-paced game where tactics or skill doesn't matter that much

now that the playerbase is getting thinner, i think they might be better off returning to alpha, seriously

heh no kidding. Everything here is made to be done extremely quickly. if youre not dying in 2 seconds or taking a base in 8mins then nothings getting done.

I'm not sure what kind of super powers we had in PS1 but we had the brain power to take over "real" fortress like bases. Maybe our brains were OP back then and the next generation of gamer got theirs nerfed. Thus everything is too hard....

It was called "zerging" ISTR.

I think the worst part is the artwork that was thrown out the base walls and towers are ugly as hell the old alpha stuff looks 1000x better the old layout looks great but i would be happy with the old looking walls.

I agree with OP and thats why the game play is boring

the funny thing is those bases closely resemble planetside 1 bases .. they were really trying to distance themselves from ps1 at the start i think .

The big issues in my mind are:

Large facilities should be something that you have to peel like an onion in order to take. Amp stations are (somewhat) designed this way, as are some of the bio-labs (those with walls & towers). However, the developers failed when they implemented these locations to make them true fortifications:

- Wall cover was almost non-existent at the start
- Jump pads were useable by attackers
- Most of the vehicle blocking shields could be easily bypassed
- Too many entry points for infantry
- Base turrets on the walls were horribly exposed and still lack enough hitpoints to go toe-to-toe with enemy armor
- Jump pads or teleporters that bypass the outer wall
- Base turrets should be upgradeable by engineers to make them automated (with 1/4 rate of fire and 90% accuracy)
- Base turrets should be upgradeable by infiltrators to make them more difficult to hack
- Wall segments should have an interior corridor to allow movement between towers
- Lack of 2nd/3rd story bridges between structures / buildings
- Lack of underground tunnels connecting things

Some of those points have been addressed, but a lot of those short-falls still exist.

A secondary issue is that instead of adding more mini-objectives within the large facilities, they keep stripping them out. There should be things like:

- Generators at the bottom of each wall tower that power the (outbound) jump pads on that tower, destroy the generator and now those pads don't work

- A jump pad IFF computer, somewhere inside the walls, that has to be hacked or destroyed. After which, infiltrators can hack the jump pads on the walls to make them work for the attackers. Even better would be one IFF computer per wall section (or a collection of sections) so that the attackers can only take control of 1/4 or 1/3 of the perimeter.

- Separate vehicle generators for each vehicle-blocking gate.

- IFF computers for the base turrets, hack those and the wall turrets change faction. Best would be if each wall segment had its own IFF computer.

- All large facilities should have (5) or (6) control points. Control points should revert to the defender if no attacker is within range for 15 seconds.

- Bring back nanites as a logistical resource with storage tanks, generators, player placed generators, player hauled nanites, etc.

The above poster is mostly right.

+1

You can ask for better bases all you want, remember the anticipation when they announced tunnels?
What we wanted were complexes under the large bases for infantry fighting, what we got were underground sideways jumppads.

Just imagine what SOE would come up with for better defences.

..

I was going to make a sarcastic list about walls with holes for the enemy to drive through and inaccurate high RPM machine gun nests placed on towers instead of ground level at chokepoints but then I realized nothing I can think of is worse then what we have now.

yep, pretty much the worst design of a place you want to defend
holes everywhere, where a bloody SUNDERER can go through, and even is closer to the important generators than the defender spawn
no infantry areas most of the time, and when, its so small that shotguns rule out everything else, even maxes die in split seconds to C4

the only explanation is that soe made the bases impossible to defend on purpose and ignores every voices coming up pointing out how bad this design choice is

all of my Yes for this post

Wow! The Alpha base looks ******* awesome, what happen to games that penalize dying and favor the smart? This base is out standing, we need this to be brought back, I played beta but damn I never saw that. If you won't give us XP to defend a base than give us a good *** base that we WANT to defend and not say it's just another base.

I really hope Hossin has some better bases. It has been SOE's chance to start fresh on a new continent. If the bases somehow ended up too defensible, there would still be Indar, Esamir, and Amerish.

From the looks of this design, it was probably because it made the base to easy to defend from or 'counter attack' from. With the bubble shields, you see exactly what we had with Cap Shields back in Planetside 1, where fliers would duck in and out of there to take out vehicles. Probably even shooting 'out' from it.

This also pretty much rendered Galaxy drops moot for bases like that.

The full covered walkways, not so sure how much of a benefit or con they were, but the fully shielded entries were the same in planetside one when people got the shield module, HOWEVER, there was a back door into the base infantry can push to.

What I see here, though, is that they wanted to make bases bigger, but the big gaping holes in defense was to make attacking possible. What should have been done was make the spawn room and the critical points remain underground, but make the upper buildings be the possible breach points. The Armor Shield Generators still reachable from the outside for the attackers, but also allow defenders a means to get to the generator that isn't only defendable from the outside. This forces a larger force of attackers to make sure they dedicate some of their attacking force to hold the generator being down, same with the other critical generators.

The problem I see here is that with everything above ground and stripping out the means to allow the defenders to provide proper defense, it becomes moot having to wait for the base to convert over because the local defense cannot do much more than sit in the spawn room and pot shot at the more stupid attackers because the risk is more than what the reward is worth... IE: They get nothing out of dying trying, and rewarding the attacker with just free kills because it is mostly vehicles controlling the exits versus infantry.

The tunnel system does allow a little more proper defense for the Amp station, but its weakest points now are the big breaches in the back area for vehicles and the inability to really get to the back wall area to do defense. It also prevents the defenders from putting vehicles back there to counter vehicles planted there, so it relegates to suicide LAs with C4 to do it or the lucky engineer who gets out there.

If they bothered to look at how the Planetside 1 bases were... The biggest complaint was with the Biolab and the interlink bases. The Biolab because of the big gaping flaw of the base generator way out in the open that made defense of the base difficult once there was enough air and vehicles surrounding the base to suppress defenders from defending it, and the Interlink, due to how much effort it took to push into a base where there was enough radar to make most attacks take an extreme amount of time to accomplish.

With the introduction of Light Assaults, with the jet packs, the lower TTKs on infantry as a whole and now with capture points fairly exposed to vehicles, with no real reward for defense other than the daily achievement.... Defense is basically no longer viable as it is right now. It is not reasonably possible to hold the line short of putting 2x the amount of defenders or an equal number of an organized group to do so.

Wait..nope. Hours and hours of tug of war and being bested by good strats. Well planned max crashes, teams of combat engineers / adv hackers, well placed orbital strikes and old fashioned team work.

When someone says a base was taken over by zerging in ps1..they never played it. Zerg into a field of mines, zerg into a wall of maxes, zerg into spit fire turret after spit fire turret..oh and the cloaked turrets.. yeah no..you werent zerging to take over a base and it wasnt gonna be done in 10 mins.

you are right, making bases exactly like PS1 copies would be overkill though against attackers i think, as casual players would drop out very fast

however the sad thing is, that they also completely removed the interesting side objectives and fun things like the implementation of a Capture-the-flag mechanic, and made infiltrators as useless as they are now in not having any doors in bases
(one thing i hate about tech plants and amp stations, the small doors on the bac of a TP scream "MAKE ME A HACKABLE DOOR" in my dreams, as well as the holes in the bacl of an AMP station")
In PS1 LLUs were a big part that made infiltrators usefull and have a CTF mechanic, which was extremely fun to do
seeing about 15 tanks chasing behind a rouge guy stealing the LLU was awesome