Need more limitations on deployment

It's really bad for the strategic game for players to just be able to instantly teleport across the map to any base that's in trouble. Instead of discipline and clever vehicle use being rewarded, players can simply redeploy and instantly spawn at whatever base happens to be in trouble.

It removes any sense of reward for selecting the right place to fight, because if you're attacking a bunch of players can magically show up out of nowhere, with no effort expended, and easily overwhelm the attackers.

I'm not against having plenty of back-and-forth infantry brawls, so I'd love to add some quality-of-life improvements focused on that in the same patch where spawn options become more reasonable. Cheaper Sunderers, a slight Sundy Spawn XP buff, that sort of thing. It's important that the game provides dense infantry fighting for players who want it, but that doesn't have to come at the cost of the entire strategic game.

I wish that was true more often ... But a lot of the time you can struggle to be allowed to spawn at the base in the bloody hex you died in

The problem with that is that you basically bar the game off from any new comers.

No one wants to run around for three hours, do nothing, then uninstall the game because it is boring.

Sure with most players it is a case of look at the map and check for large battles.

However as it is it is basically just redeploy or if the fight isn't coming up on the spawn list grab a ESF and fly there quickly. All it would be doing is making the ESF the only option rather than redeploy.

In theory it sounds great but in practice all it does is make it irritating to get into a fight and a bit of a chore. You won't improve "logistics" you will just make the game tedious. If someone wants to go to the other side of the map they will just redeploy to a place they can get an ESF and fly to the other fight.

Honestly this wouldn't be as much of an issue if they simply made it easier for players to maintain their position while going on the offensive. As long as a Sunderer can quickly be dispatched by a single person planting C4 or jumping out of an ESF, there will always be little incentive to go on the offensive.

You should be able to spawn everywhere but with different timers; there further the longer the wait.

Maybe make it so that the larger the friendly force that is at the base the longer it takes to get there (excluding hexes with "little" to no enemies in it). A few guys going back to spawn ESFs won't be nearly as punishing as trying to redeploy into an overpopped fight.

The right solution to that isn't to make sunderers individually tougher -- they already become incredibly hard to kill if they're deployed somewhere defensive like a wall tower and spawning a zerg-sized force -- but rather to increase the number of sunderers getting deployed:

• Significantly decrease sunderer cost.
  • For bonus points, improve loadouts so that individual systems can have costs. This means the cost of a base sunderer could be extremely low (even free) while the cost of the more combat-capable sunderers could be closer to what it is right now. The cooldown would still be a limit, as once you destroy any given player's sunderer you deserve a period where you can push back out and attack if they've failed to bring more sunderers.
• Increase sunderer spawn XP.
• Slightly improve sunderer handling (possibly improving the weird floatiness of it in the process.)
• Show deployed friendly sunderers with a different icon on players' maps, so players are more easily able to see how many sunderers are/aren't deployed in an area at a glance.

So the solution results in more sunderers, rather than individually-tougher sunderers.
It's a careful balance though, as the game could easily tip over to attackers-always-win. Which is one of many reasons I feel like hard spawns should universally be really far from capture points at bases. This would result in both attackers and defenders being reliant on soft spawns (sunderers) rather than the defenders having this significant advantage.

Well with ESFs the problem is more that so few bases are aircraft-capable. That should change.

Medium-ranged spawn options should continue to be available, but perhaps with a limit on repeated redeploys that makes it too unwieldy to use repeatedly. (Otherwise you'd just hop there like you used to be able to.)

So between more ESF-capable bases and always being able to spawn at medium-ranged bases, that should solve the ESF problem anyway.

Right, which is why a critical piece of solving this problem would be to provide very obvious options for how you should get to fights.

Maybe even just letting players spawn right into vehicles at the warpgate, just so that decision isn't abstracted behind two separate choices ("spawn at warpgate, then run to terminal, then buy vehicle.") Instead it'd be like "Warpgate spawns: Scythe, Galaxy, ..." with a pulldown.

Even something as simple as having the tutorial be "Pull a vehicle. Drive to destination. Cap the point." Learning to get to the fight in a vehicle is super important in PS2, and it's sort of a bad idea to only train players as infantry. The tutorial really sets players into a certain mindset in their first few moments of the game, so they're surprisingly influential in how players play. I'm not suggesting a vehicle-first tutorial would magically make everyone pull vehicles, but certainly it would result in a noticeable bump.

Thing is that unless you are pushed to warp you are going to be driving for 20-30 minutes through roads that don't have any kind of marker of where to go or where they lead causing you to have to constantly look at the map.

Then once you get there you find there are only a couple guys fighting over a point and you get the idea that the game is just a bunch of driving between points bored only seeing a few people here and there then you exit the game and uninstall. That or people will spawn in the jets and proceed to crash and say **** this and uninstall. Or they will find a place and just ghost cap until they get bored and uninstall. That or they will find a good fight and have their ESF blown up and fight a bit and once the fight is over follow the zerg.

The truth is that this is a game and all you would do by not allowing front line deployment is put off new players and just make things obnoxious for people that know what they are doing.

The real reason logistics aren't possible in a game like this is because you can't in a game. In real life if you decided you were just going to take a military jet, fly into the middle of a battle, get out and abandon it you would be in a ton of trouble and most likely have your life ruined by it. In a game it just means you are out resource points and in a few minutes you can just do it again. The idea of logistics sound nice on paper but the reality is far from fun.

It isn't possible to add in logistics without making the game a pain in the *** and boring for the average player. A game should be fun not tedious.

I've got a better idea - the farther you deploy beyond your closest spawn point, except squad deploy, the more infantry resources you use. Tie spawning to the infantry resource, all of a sudden those who need it for other things are going to want to grab or hitch a ride to the fight, making transport more important and making keeping your resource supplies intact more strategically significant.

Give this thread a gander too, it did not get nearly enough eyes and replies on it as it deserved, it is related to this and the need for the continents to have fewer but better bases as highlighted in a current sticky thread by a Dev.

NO! JUST BLOODY NO!
I am already often lacking infantry resource and I might as well just suicide to go to another base.
Stahp! Just Stahp ok?!

I disagree entirely. Right now there are usually few decent places to park Sunderers as it is unless it's a base where an artificial parking garage has been placed, and even then those are still easy to pop. You need to consider the fact that right now, it's easy for just ONE person to kill a Sunderer by bailing out of an ESF, this says nothing if you have three, four people or even an entire squad dedicated to killing a Sunderer. Not to mention Gal drops.

No, when a Sunderer deploys it needs to gain a massive boost to survivability somehow. Having to partition some people to babysit the Sunderer the whole time on the chance that a single person might slip through and instagib the AMS before you can notice is bad game design, and boring for the people stuck on guard duty. Attacks on a Sunderer need to be able to be reacted to. Off the top of my head, one way they could do this while still keeping Sunderers vulnerable while in transit would be to increase the time it takes for the Sunderer to fully deploy, like a fifteen second countdown. After that, the Sunderer gains a massive health boost/resistance boost and becomes incredibly resilient against tank mines and C4, via some sort of overlay shield or some sh*t.

I dislike the idea of the developers going through the motions of manually adding defensible Sunderer positions because it starts to limit the different ways you can approach a base, and forces you to fight in X area for Y reasons. Also, this tends to eat up time that could be better spent on new content instead of just improving old content in a rather round-about way.

(Image from the awesome Nanite Systems Comics by kogoros, it is also a link to his thread)

We could use an spawning system overhaul, but if you think simply adding layers after layers of restrictions is going to solve the problem, you're dead wrong. This is an MMOFPS with strategic and tactical elements thrown in, not a transport simulator.

How about bloody ******* yes.

The ramifications of limitations playing off each other are a necessity for game design. And further, it has precedent in the game - vehicle spawns are already tied to resources. Hurt a factions resources, you directly impact their ability to send reinforcement vehicles out on that continent, it really shouldn't be any different for infantry spawns.

The disparity between free infantry spawning and vehicle spawning does impact the strategic level of the game of one faction impacting another faction in any meaningful way. And my suggestion still allows for free spawning, it just is a viable answer to "Oh, they out maneuvered us, send reinforcements to defend though the spawn tubes!" endlessly.

Wait, you don't actually think never having to get in a vehicle is fun, do you? Plenty of other games out there that already fill that niche, better ones at the aspects of FPS at that.

Keep instant action, remove redeploy, and make transportation useful!

If newbies want a fight, they use instant action. If they want to go somewhere specific, they use a flash. Pretty smart huh?

Oh great, this again. IMHO, this would ruin the game completely.

Lesser of two evils would be increasing the respawn timer the further away you want to spawn. It's still downtime, but at least I can alt-tab and read news/watch youtube while it happens.

So its time for another "transporterside 2" thread...

a) its not a strategy game, its a fast paced shooter.
b) there are perfectly good transport simulators out there.
c) We dont need even more downtime between fights to drive the pop further down.

so the argument is that it is too easy to hop to a base to defend it.... ok, but on the flip side you'll dumb down attacks.
It is strategic to plan for a mass influx of defenders, not doing so will results in, as you described it, being overwhelmed by defenders.
So now the attackers just shoot down any vehicles approaching the base they are attacking and hey presto, an easy (easier) cap?
You're not increasing the sum of strategy needed, you are moving the onus from the attackers to the defenders when, in my opinion, advantage should always be in the defenders favour. They are bases after all.

The benefit is already naturally in the defenders' favor, because they get x minutes to show up with a bunch of vehicles, blow away all the sunderers, then watch as the infantry at the base win the battle.

So it's actually not necessary to be able to teleport across the continent to have an advantage on defense.