Hidden Ridge Mining Revamp: Walls on Amerish

Not sure how i should feel about this.

My main fear is that Amerish will be just as empty as esamir & people will just continue Indarside until hossin comes out

..after which they'll play Hossin for all of a week, then continue with Indarside.

If their empire has access to it.

From the parts that are visible on the PTS, Hossin seems half promising... but until they unleash it on us, we'll never know.

Meanwhile... I totally avoid Esamir today unless there's an alert of interest, I just go there to farm repair certs. Amerish gets played when there's enough people on it, but its already mostly Indarside.

Esamir (OLD Esamir) was glorious and so much fun. New Esamir is almost just totally pointless. So many utterly useless bases that are just boring and utter stupid with walls around them.

Indarside it is - until SOE can provide us with another continent that can generate interesting action and combat. High walls and dome shields are beyond dumb. Its so terribly annoying... it does NO ONE any favors, as a defender you have to get outside the walls to actually defend against the incoming enemies. At which point you'll be thoroughly exposed anyways.

Even the low walls on Indar are somewhat annoying - its not like there's not already a ton of cover at Xenotech Labs, but I got to walk a freaking mile just to get into the middle area if I'm on the wrong side outside it and not playing LA.

This. Prior to the ruination of Esamir, it was my favourite continent. Now I basically only go there for alerts etc. So well played SOE - driving players away from continents.

I really miss Old Esamir; it was a good place. It saddens me that they got rid of The Pit. It was an awesome base; enemy vehicles climbing up the side were really exposed to reinforcing allies (they were also pretty unstable on the hilltop), and to infantry inside the base and the large amount of clustered buildings provided a lot of cover. Enemy infantry on top of the hill were at a stalemate: they could attack you from up top, but were pretty exposed and couldn't approach the point without being stuck inside the base. The toroidal hill structure was an awesome way to separate vehicle and infantry combat that felt very natural, that should have been how they surrounded the bases on Esamir. Massive snowdrifts around all of the bases would have looked really cool as well; especially in bases with really tall buildings, where the defenders would have a great view of enemy vehicles and infantry. It would have led to amazing fights and been very visually stimulating: just imagine marching on an enemy base with just the top of a tower rising out of a snowy hilltop.

Seriously, the pit was great; I remember so many amazing fights there that lasted for hours, with both sides galaxy dropping, and libs and ESF's fighting overhead for the right to attack the infantry and tanks on the surrounding plain. It was absolutely what Planetside 2 should be: massive combined arms fights.

They could very easily do this on Amerish; just make them rocky or earthen circular ramparts and they'd look just as good and serve the same purpose. Think more ringfort http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringfort than prison yard. Having the surrounding terrain provide the separation would also look much better visually than ugly walls which tend to clip inside of each other (which is quite immersion-breaking) and look just very artificial. Places with names like Deserted Mineshaft or Deepcore Geolab shouldn't look like they were built as fortified strongholds: they should look like civilian workplaces which happen to have a defensible terrain.

I think that's because most people don't bother to try, they ram their vehicle into the shield and sit there waiting for it to go down. 2 minutes of maneuvering will get you onto the ridges pretty easily and from there you have free reign to shell the base until your ammo runs out. VS have it easier, the Mag is built for that kind of thing.

All I'm saying is designing bases around ignorance is not going to work in the long term. Over time more and more people will learn the tricks and then you're right back to the same problem.

On the other hand Quartz Ridge is positioned so that infantry there can destroy armor all the way out to Indar Excavation, if you ask me it's too infantry friendly in the respect. You can't have any kind of armor fight in that wide open area in between because every vehicle within 500m gets shredded by AV.

And one other thing, you can't have an armor fight between two bases when one of those bases can't spawn tanks. I think once this base design pass is done SOE really needs to go back and re-evaluate all the old anti armor spam changes.

As a tank and Galaxy driver, I use more teamwork (and skill) than most infantryman ever will.

It's not a Call of Duty game, either. If you think driving a tank is easier than running infantry, it's not the infantry class that's the problem.

L2P.

Just keep the walls away from my beautiful happy place on the side of a mountain with a pool. If you've seen it you know what I'm talking about.

I agree with the general sentiment. Biggest vehicle farming sessions i had were almost exclusively on Indar with almost every base having a hill that overlooks it. If you get in trouble, go few m back and repair.

Don't like Esamir at all after the changes. At least on old Esamir, even tho vehicles had easy access to bases, they were pretty exposed to the defenders. Now every base is a freaking maze with like 2 infantry entrances (why this is so i have no idea, at least they could have put more narrow passages to get in) and if you have air superiority it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

As for Amerish, it's already a nightmare for anyone driving a ground vehicle (because apparently, 800 years from now we will base our tank design on a Formula 1 car, i assume because of it's awesome off-road capabilities). Putting walls in will just turn it into what it almost always was, a farming ground for air

This guy says it all.

WHO DARES CHANGING THE ORIGINAL TITLE ?!

@titlechangingcriminal, you just took away all the grandeur of this thread.

I know right ?
Pull out the AT turret from a LUDICROUS distance and shoot at the HUGE TANK ZERG for certs.


Except, neither should be possible.

Amerish? Never heard of it

Incase you didn't know this already. The base is not surrounded by walls

That is the foundation

I see lots of people on here saying. Old Esamir it was glorious before the walls. Esamir back then was the best. This new one is horrible. Funny thing about all that is. Most of you guys which are going on about how great old Esamir is don't seem to recall that Old Esamir was a ghost town....at least on Connery.

I can at least say that with the "new" Esamir there is at least a constant fight going on it in some form of fashion. I could never say the same about old Esamir. So this old Esamir that is so great is a crock of crap IMO. Bring on the New Amerish and lets have some fun.

Good. The wall completely dividing the spawn from the objective looks like a bad idea though (one i noticed on several "new" bases now - walls being added but they cut off the defenders and give attackers yet another advantage). But i can't really comment more untill it's completed.

After that only around ~50 outposts left to redesign. And the spawnrooms and objectives themselves. Because those still suck majorly, that screenshot there is no exception.

BS. It was sparsely populated before and is sparsely populated now except for the occasional platoon that decides to conquer everything practically unopposed because zerging is easier. The only exception, as always, is alerts.

No BS about it. It was a Ghost town before the change to Esamir literally 24/7 minus the occasional Platoon that ghosted it in the middle of the night. At least now it sees people playing on it. Sounds like a success to me.

Walls are terrible.

They do make the bases vehicle-proof, but also work against defenders in the same respect. Now you are funneled into a couple exits that can easily be locked down by LESS tank spam than before, and you also cannot see whats out there. Prior to walls you would have to literally surround a base with tanks shelling it to accomplish what one squad or so can accomplish now. You cannot spawn a vehicle inside a base and easily retreat for repairs when outnumbered or losing a fight. Once you spawn that tank, you are basically exiled from that base and at the mercy of the enemy.

Not to mention some of them like in the towers to block LOS from one end to the other or shield doorways are about the cheesiest thing Ive ever seen, not to mention very tacky. I make Source Mods in my spare time, as an amateur and I would never, ever do something so bad. This is what someone who had never designed a base or map before would do to address problems - and even my first time using a MP Engine's map editor, I knew better than to ooze such cheese.