Testing Request - Amerish Revamp

**Updated
Join the team to test Amerish Mon-Fri 10am PST.

Test server has been updated with the first drop of the Amerish Revamp. We need your help to find bugs and your feedback to finalize it. This is still a work in progress, so not all bases have been finalized yet, expect to see pink objects, misplaced objects, etc. in areas that aren't listed as complete. If you see things like that in any of the bases listed below please send us a bug.

Here's what is ready so far:

• Crux Headquarters
• The Ascent
• Stone Ridge Reserve
• North Grove Post
• Jagged Lance Mine
• Genudine Physics Lab
• Deepcore Geolab
• Rockslide Outlook
• Silver Valley Arsenal
• Hidden Ridge Mining
• SolTech Charging Station
• Deserted Mine Shaft
• AuraxiCom Network Hub
• Amerish ARX reserve
• Cobalt Communications
• Torremar Storage Yard
• Blackshard Tungsten mine
• Shadespire Farms
• LithCorp Fortress
• LithCorp Central

Here's what we are doing on Amerish:

• Biggest change is the implementation of the Lattice.
• We also separated the Facility Satellite Outposts into individual, standalone Outposts.
• Updated and polished each outpost with latest designs that
• • Isolate spawn rooms to reduce spawn camping
  • Prevent vehicles for directly firing on capture points
  • Provides “safe” spots for attackers to deploy Sunderers.
• All world based Performance upgrades from O:MFG

AWESOME! Can't wait!

EDIT: FIRST!

I like the idea of standalone outposts. I'd asked for that in the past, particularly because towers in PS1 were really crucial to holding territory.

There are two things that standalone outposts provide.

One is a place to establish a foothold in the area even if the lattices don't make it happen with ease. The target base may be 2 lattice links away, but capturing the standalone facility and using it to harass the target base and lattice link in between can aid the process or draw enemies away to try to retake the standalone outpost.

The second is providing a second spawn hardpoint for the faction, making it possible to do effective Sunderer and Galaxy transporting and deployment of troops (especially delivering a bus or Galaxy full of MAXs every few minutes) which can be helpful if there's no way to put down any AMS in a reasonable position for any period of time.

I'm looking forward to it. Amerish has needed some love to be less wonky and Ceryshen-like in places. I'm glad that this will wrap up the existing continent optimizations and make way for Hossin to be in focus.

I'm sorry if I seem like I'm being a little counter-productive, but Amerish happens to be my favorite continent and I don't want to see it go / change.

Firstly, the thing that will make me most annoyed is that horrid lattice system. I absolutely despise it! Just the fact that it restricts movements and makes you so much more predictable is a bad thing in itself - but the fact that the enemy know exactly where your coming from and defenses will be set in place (Phalanx turrets, walls, generators, Sunderer "safe" spots etc) means that it will be difficult to assault anywhere. But the lattice system is something I will not be impressed with, and since I've been playing the game around 10-11 months now I'd hate to not have a hex-based continent that I can go on. If the lattice system is added to all four continents, I'll more than likely quit the game for good. And that's not something either of us want to happen...

Next, the base revamps, although cool and new, will be rather pointless. Until all the factions are properly balanced to the point that they need never be touched again for a long time, then bases structure will be a very small part of the game. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many walls are in the room. If I'm a better player with the better weapons, I'm going to win. (This would just result in more zerging eventually). I'd suggest fixing balances before anything. Just experiment with what works, I guess.

Apart from those, I can't really comment on anything else since it isn't set in stone yet. But I'll be sure to make videos voicing my opinions on it. I'll include any bugs or problems that occur too and it should make it easier for you guys to track and fix!

Hope I helped! If anyone disagrees with what I've said, please feel free to reply! I'd love to see some responses and possibly some more work on the lattice/hex map systems since there could be a few things changed. ^_^

Many thanks,
Horkrine

Wait wait wait...
So you hate to attack a base with a prepared defense? A base where there are actual enemies, facing you?
Are you one of those amerish ghostcapper?

The merits of lattice vs Hex have been argued to death and obviously your not on the side of Lattice so I wont try to convince you otherwise. The problem is that we need the ability to drain bases or attack a base along a supposedly secured lattice link. That's what a resource revamp + continental lattice will bring when they finally bring it out. You may have to wait a bit longer to see what it looks like if you never played PS1. It will be much better than HEX ever was.

Going to be good to see this come together over the next couple weeks. Kudos on the changes, looking forward to my favorite continent getting updated

That's great news new bases look so promising!

Btw I've been playing ps1 and ps2 since beta and I say: the earliee we get rid of the hex map the better it is.

Double XP or some fights on a unfinished, buggy amerish?
there is only one decision for this.















DOWNLOAD FASTER

Can I ask what places aren't finished? You said they'd be detailed but I can only see the ones that are finished.

No! I enjoy a good fight. But one of the rules of the UN is "You are not to begin a war without a reasonable chance of success" and if bases have such defenses in place, this WON'T be a reasonable chance of success. It will be a minute amount of success... I do like a good fight. I just hate when fights are no longer fights, and it's literally just the two factions flinging poop all day until people get bored and leave to go to a different continent.

Hehe, I know right?

It's not even a choice...

I'm really excited for The Ascent being changed. The run up and down from Rockslide was... a rockslide... It kills you half the time.

A safety advice for fellow LAs:

You can fly into the drill hole at the base east of Ikanam Biolab, but you can not fly back out.

I am so Excited

Thanks world Design team!

As requested:

• Stone Ridge Reserve

Lack of walls and insufficient tank barriers allows the point and spawn to be shelled from outside of the base, and allows vehicles to drive directly up to the point. Consider adding more walls or tank barriers.

• North Grove Post

Complete lack of walls allow vehicles to enter from either side of the base (with some careful jockeying from the west bypassing the vehicle pad gate), allowing them to drive directly up to the point and shell it, as well as camping the spawn room. Consider adding walls around the base to prevent vehicle access.

• Crux Headquarters

Lack of vehicle barriers allows them to enter the base, gentle slopes allow them to easily climb to second level where they can move about almost completely unhindered. Maybe not MBTs, but Lightnings and Harassers will easily be able to hit every point and the spawn. It goes without saying, though, that the lack of walls or cover around the base will make distant shelling easy as well. Honestly this looks like nightmare for infantry play, not really sure what could be done to fix it besides adding a ton of interior and exterior infantry walls, maybe just make all of the points elevated on walls like other bases on Amerish?

• Jagged Lance Mine

Vehicles are able to see the point directly, the only routes for the attackers are across the road, or using a bridge, both of which can be easily camped by vehicles, especially attackers from the eastern Warpgate. An underground path would be appreciated here. Better cover for the point is probably necessary.

• Silver Valley Arsenal

Wall coverage inconveniences point spam and prevents vehicles from easily shooting defenders attempting to perform a point hold. However, there is little cover provided for defenders attempting to reach the point from the spawn room, as there are slopes on either side of the base. Add more walls and objects between the spawn and capture point or lower the height of the adjacent hills.

• The Ascent

C point can be spammed by vehicles easily, it even is clearly visible from the road. Add a wall.

• Rockslide Outlook

Using the infantry routes to their advantage, vehicles can actually drive directly onto the point from either side of the road. Add tank guards.



And that's it. The servers shut down before I could hit any other bases, but from what I recall from flying around they looked relatively difficult/impossible to hit with vehicles. So far these bases still need a lot of work, assuming that the goal is to make vehicles unable to shell defenders attempting to hold a point, or shell spawn rooms.

Bonus Arx Reserve, only possible thanks to the complete lack of tank guards near the front steps:

Nice!

https://imgur.com/a/sexBt The Accent cave

Questions:

- What was the reason for segregating the satellite bases into different hexes? I must be missing something here.

- I'm still downloading the test client so I can't yet see for myself if this has been addressed already, but could we please eradicate any and all bases of 'situated in a depression' type while we have the chance? Kill it dead, please? Why is it a good deal of bases have tank-accessible hills overlooking their position - often outside of base AV turret firing angles to boot? Landscape features like J908 certainly look cool but the sorry collection of shacks on the bottom of it is a nightmare to defend; most other such cases don't even have the advantage of looking cool though.

Uhh so Clegg said on FNO that apparently tanks being able to drive up and camp the spawn point at North Grove and similar bases is intentional because "combined arms" or something like that. I think you guys should seriously reconsider that being a thing, because when I heard that the first thing I thought of upon hearing that was Frontier Psychologist.

From the perspective of someone with 1200 hours clocked in on live alone, not counting beta or test gameplay, and who's in a top tier outfit globally, I can tell you what my biggest problem with the base design in PS2 is. That is, basically, that there are bases in this game where vehicles alone can completely dictate the flow of a battle. If Dasanfall is doing a point hold against two or three times our numbers there are plenty of times when we aren't done in by a Max crash, or because of mistakes on our side, but because so many tanks are shooting into the windows of the building we're trying to defend that we're eventually killed by splash damage, even running flak and even if we stay away from where they're hitting.

I like tank gameplay, I think it's pretty fun when it works, but it goes really horribly wrong when you get situations like the following:



This was recorded in beta, but the same thing still happens day in and day out in live on Indar and Amerish, and to a smaller extent on Esamir. This isn't fun for anyone besides the people in the tanks. There isn't really a way to realistically fight back against spawn room spamming like this besides to pull vehicles from another base, and either try to kill the tanks or perform a point hold with a galaxy drop or spawn beacon, but even then it's rare to get back to the base with pulled vehicles in time, or to even survive on a capture point with so many tanks shelling it. In a game with infinite ammo, there isn't anything that will prevent this behavior in the first place besides making it impossible.

Because of this I think the decision to design bases around both infantry and vehicles coexisting is a really bad idea, especially when the rest of the game design seems to be intentionally focused around creating 48+ zerg fests, which will naturally include a ton of tanks. A lot of the people I know who quit this game early on quit it because of both performance and because of the terrible vehicle camping of spawn rooms, and honestly I get incredibly frustrated every time I get shot inside of a building defending a capture point by a tank.

What's even more frustrating is that a lot of the bases on Amerish basically solve this problem by completely removing tanks from a base fight once it progresses to the capture point. That's a good idea. They can dominate outside of a base, and be ineffective inside of it. Tanks shelling a base is not fun for infantry players (who will be making up the majority of the population at a base, generally), and it feels incredibly unfair and terrible. Why you guys are encouraging what is basically the worst aspect of this game (infantry farming) on a continent with so many bases that are seemingly vastly improved is honestly baffling. Even the southern Heyoka outpost that at least prevents tanks from entering the base because of a moat and energy bridges is vastly preferable than things like Crux Headquarters or North Grove, both of which I and other people in my outfit thought were unfinished the first time we looked at them.

I really don't want Amerish to be a continent of good bases with random, intentional Abandoned NS Offices sprinkled between them to appease people who want to pad their KD by shooting at a spawn shield all day. I just don't even understand why that's being considered, either. It's just not fun for half of the people involved, and the entire point of video games is to be fun.