I wanted to make this thread last year, but I lacked the full playtime and access to most of the base Deployables at the time. But now I feel I've had enough experience having unlocked MOST of the base components on two separate Characters: https://imgur.com/qxlyoFS THE GOOD Cortium drains quite a bit slower now. This was honestly the NUMBER ONE BIGGEST ISSUE that nearly all player bases had which was that by the time you finally made it back with a new load of Cortium, your base had already consumed half of the last load you'd just put into it 5 minutes ago. It made Base building feel like a Sisyphean task due to just how common 2000 cortium formations were and how uncommon 6000 and larger ones were. Skywall Emitter - This thing is pretty much Perfect... I tried killing one with a Mustang/Stinger loadout that usually shreds MBT's, and found that the Emitter was more resilient. So if a Skyknight actually manages to kill yours then they should be congratulated as one honestly good Strafing blitzer. Hoplon AA phalanx is already a really balanced Defense hardpoint if you think about it.... It's DPS with a player inside of it kind of a joke compared to a Walker but that's the way it SHOULD be since your risk of dying while manning one is practically next to zero. It's DPS against ESF's from A.I. control meanwhile has some real Teeth which is exactly how an Immobile AI turret should work in an MMO. Vehicle Gates - SUPER ADAPTABLE to the Terrain Geometry, these allow you to shore up any uneven height variances that would otherwise make it impossible for you to close your base in Securely on all sides. DONT LET ITS GEOMETRY CONSTRAINTS EVER GET CHANGED PLZ. PillBox - Very similar to the Vehicle gates and are even better for providing "Cover" for sensitive Modules. Routing Spire - Was kind of a Gimmick last year but they're way more Practical and Helpful in game now thanks to the Spawning System overhaul. Repair Module - Puts out just the right amount of repairs per Tick, you get 3 of them, AND they have a perfect Radius of effect. No reason to ever nerf these. If you want to make them vulnerable to EMP nades.... fine but don't weaken them in any other fashion ever, plz. THE BAD Turret AI module -- Costs too much to unlock for how absolutely crucial they are for any new player to get into Base building. (I unlocked mine with DeyBux b/c it was the logical response). Also has a really terrible Radius that seems like an "Artificial Difficulty" contrivance just to make base building more of a P.I.T.A. Xiphos MachineGun tower - Even the Phalanx "Anti Personnel" on REAL bases rarely ever kill a real human player, but the ONLY time I've ever seen a Xiphos kill any players were when those players didn't seem to understand that the game has a SPRINT button that lets them run. And that's not the worst problem.... the real issue with these is that they OCCUPY a defense Radius just like the AA & AV turrets which should be removed immediately so that multiple players building a Base together can cram these things as close together as they want (within reason). Bunker - Way too big a collision hull ... probably been mentioned 100x by now by other players... yet still no "Scale Down" on it has happened despite the fact that's a really easy thing to change for any seasoned 3D artist (You could just send me the Maya bin File and I'd do it for FREE). ...also needs its "Low' point and "High" point elevation constraints brought closer inside its radius but Stretched farther apart Vertically. "Infantry" Tower -- ...okay I gotta point something out real quick... There's a reason that we've been making castle Bastions ROUND for hundreds of years... while a Square tower near an outside wall is just too much of a juicy BROAD-sided target for Artillery teams as well as for "Sappers" to hide around the edges of. it's just way too wide and I've never seen actual "Infantry" inside them. It should really just be shrunken down into a Sniper tower that's round and really thin and just has a Mag-Lift to take the player up to each flooor. I'm sure that Staircase took a lot of work, but it's so obsolete in this game's meta it's not even cute. Its called a Blast Wall and I guess that's because there's huge holes on either side for Tanks to BLAST through and just farm anyone inside. ...probably needs to behave more like the Vehicle gates to be worth investing in. 1000 certs to unlock THIS?.... WHY??? ...make it 100. Glaive IPC -- (the thing that disables other player's Base shield only) This was a solution looking for a Problem which essentially doesn't exist. Maybe if it worked on Hex main Bases too it would be useful to someone out there and that should probably be the first thing changed about it THE UGLY + ...aka: Class Balance. Light Assault can completely bypass every defense in a player Base, with little effort or risk to themselves and then inflict massive loss of resources for its owner in less than 5 seconds. I wouldn't propose weakening C4's damage against Modules and the main Spawn tube... but I WOULD strongly suggest a small tweak to the.... ..."Pain Spires" These currently aren't a real deterrent and their DOT effects can't be located close enough together to stack AFAIK. 2 things that would fix them immediately: Have them also emit a Slowing field to keep enemies from sprinting in their radius, AND have the Pain Field cause C4 to detonate the INSTANT it leaves a player's hands so that Ambusher LightAssaults always blow themselves up before they can get a second C4 out. No-Deploy zoning. How bout shaving that outer Radius a little? Just a small decrease would open up Pie ~ R ~ Squared of extra building space while still preventing most Base builders from being able to make AV towers that fire down directly into Hex bases. ....speaking of No Deploy boundaries: ^ the Map is really misleading and is all the more reason for the outside Radius to be reduced by atleast a couple Dozen Meters. We all know what this is. And I have no idea what to do about it honestly... But the point I'd like to make is that the MAJORITY of other player's bases I come across have one 90% of the time and I think that says way too much about how Base Builders WANT to have an effect on the Battles taking place inside of normal HEX bases but currently are completely segregated from doing so because as the Above Screenshots show.... Those No Deploy circles are just way too Oppressive and they're also LIARS to boot. . . Honorable Mention for needing a Buff: ^ currently about as effective against Modules as a Pistol.... when common sense dictates that the Archer should be even more effective than a Shotgun against them. . . . I had one last Section I wanted to cover which is about Long Range AV sniping Player base Defense Towers with no risk at all ... especially AP Lightings and Magriders that "Peek and Shoot" and can take out towers that are being actively repaired in a matter of seconds.... but I think that's something I'll append to this Thread later on. Thank you for at least scanning through the images and the first section that Compliments the design team in this post even if you didn't bother to read any of the actual Arguments criticizing the rest
I think that this is a good idea. No-deploy zones need to be reduced. I want to see what happens when they get rid of all of them except for the ones near points and bases. A player-made base should help to defend and attack a base. I want people building more. They should build small outposts that prevent enemies from using that road to get through, like a blockade, or they should build them behind the bases they already have so that they can defend those bases and get it back if they lose it. I have never built a base in my life, but I understand what they should be used for. I have a question: What would be the side effects of everything costing cortium and not certs to unlock? I think that if they did this, there would be more of a fight for getting cortium, more of a point to making bases, more of a purpose in destroying ANTs. Then, enemy intel would be more important. "Hey guys, there is an ANT getting cortium and building a base at X. Can we send in a strike team to destroy it?" "Hey guys, our base at X is being attacked. Can someone help?" I think that PS2 needs some correspondents that give ideas for the games, and those correspondents should be A, those who make content for the game and B, those who play the game and give ideas here, in the forums and reddit.
I would like to note that (unless it's been changed since I last built) the blast wall, while still the worst overall cover imo, does in fact get the benefit of a shield module to close up those doorways from tanks etc. Its only real use to me is to completely block certain ravines or gaps, or prevent people from ramping vehicles over my walls. The ramp is something I use in my bases, when possible, to provide a secondary way out for my Ants and most especially my Harasser, because I always build vehicle terms and seal every cheeky entry point I can conjure up. The Xiphos does pretty much suck on AI, not bad if you man it, but mostly it's a really great alarm bell that also has stubby teeth. As you end up stacking them in a base from multiple builders, they become quite useful. This is more pronounced when you herd your defending cats into the AV turrets to use them against infantry and let the Xiphos clean up. BUT you need to be super conscious of placing all of your modules in a way that someone cannot destroy them from behind cover vs the Xiphos. I'm looking at you, explosive bolt stalkers. I only build infantry towers as specific blockades because in my experience, they just end up being used as a foothold for enemies to dig in. I try to bury the entrance in a hillside when possible. Bunkers are the same except far more annoying, because they're great cover for attacking vehicles/players and literally stupid hard to place effectively via the geometry you talked about. When someone comes to my base and builds one, I delete it. The only exception is when we have 4-5 builders with loaded kits and we can make a "seawall" type of barricade arcing out from the main base (only in certain areas) which provides cover for our vehicles to repair/re-arm and also prevents a direct run at the entrance of the base. I'm with you on greatly (further) reducing the no-deploy zones. With base building, you're often stuck with two bad choices: Build where you can defend well, but never do because everyone just bypasses you OR build where they can't bypass you and you also cannot realistically mount a defense. I rarely ever waste time killing bases when I'm out playing vehicle-side. The ones I build usually take a platoon to destroy, but more than half the time nobody bothers. I think that if you were able to build in much closer conjunction to lattice bases, there would be a reason to bother doing all the gathering and design other than just for fun. My gripes: Placement geometry etc.: Specifically, the difficulty based on the shapes on the blocks we have to build, where if one pixel overlaps between two deployables, you can't place. If I wanted my base to be made of Swiss Cheese, I'd let someone else build it. I'm not saying anything extreme, but ffs at least let me close up the gaps. Also, map geography tends to be super limiting. I'd love a bit more flexibility with the placement spheres, such as not ALL of them needing to be in the ground/air, where you could have one of each not touching for instance. I'd like to build a base ON the (indestructible) Indar bridges, where naturally someone would build one because chokepoint. Dome shield: Amazing. Was more amazing when it gibbed people who tried to air-drop through it. Even more amazing because (unless this has been nerfed) if you place it into a wall/hill (as you should be) and approach it at the right angle/speed, you can drive vehicles on top of it and have a great Halberd/AP/AA platform. SUPER UNAMAZING to learn which angles your turrets WILL fire through it and which angles they WILL NOT. F-U Radius: There's a sensible way to allow more deployables to be placed in a bit more compressed area without going into pincushion territory. If we have three builders, there are great and useful spots we just can't even go because we can't fit enough to make everyone useful. The Shields: I just want consistency guys. Why are player-made shields the black sheep that don't seem to work like every other shield in the game? If you don't want the Sundy garage to be a bunker, then don't give it a shield, or give it a gate shield. If you want to give it a shield that looks an awful lot like spawn room shields, then don't let enemy infantry pass through it. It's already a death box, the only thing I ever used them for was an added layer of protection for HIVEs anyway. The last time I played it was kind of sad to see the map covered in nothing but silos with OS arrays so people could try for cheese on zerg. But with everything else being on the border of "Why bother?" I don't really blame folks. I have a lot of fun wasting my time doing base design and figuring out the challenges of making a successful one, but it's often that the best places for bases are useless for the War.
yah, well that'll definitely be the Case in the new Zone that Wrel keeps teasing... we will surely get to see way more opportunity for player bases on that Continent. But I wouldn't ever ask them to do anything similar to Amerish or Indar. ...and Hossin honestly doesn't need it since there's already all those Plateaus we can build on top of when we run Turbo Ant. I think we may already be heading that direction... take this for example: /JuekFFU3n8Q?t=1148 (timestamp: 19:08) . . . . .. . . . . . .. . . .(I'd really love to sit down with that guy in Discord and try to discuss with him his faulty insistence on giving Medics the Routers...and why it'd lead to sheer Degeneracy) A good Lib crew or a pair of Lightnings / Harassers would be very important for any Infantry Squad to have in this case long as they could get into the Backline territory quickly enough to find the player base that has the Router dispenser and basically 1-clip it. Then that would probably start a real Arms race to have a pair of engies defending that backline base, then sooner or later even the Pubbers will get pulled into PlayerBase hunting and defending.... And it'll almost be like the old days where there wasn't these stupid Lattice-Hex lines funneling the Zerg balls into even BIGGER Zerg balls Yeah that's another thing... there's plenty of people who just aren't born with the Autism and Spatial Geometry capacity to look at a bunch of Rocks and Trees and instantly visualize where every single Wall and Tower will snap in perfectly with no Gaps. Totally understand that it's important not to make these things feel REQUIRED by the rest of the players who just want to "Shoot the Blue Mans in dah Heads" over and over again liek what you see in 95% of that Cyrious guy's footage over and over and over again (And ironically was exactly what you'd see in 90% of Wrel's videos too). . . . . There's ALWAYS a fight to get more Cortium than the other guy though, I've been in multiple 1v1's with other ANTs to the point we both blew up eachother's vehicles and then it ended in a pistol Duel. Frikkin' silly... I've also seen A2G pilots and Magriders who do nothing but hunt in the backlines for ANT drivers because they've taken it on as some kind of personal crusade to keep the Base Sprawl we once had in check these days. (One of them even runs Hacks b/c I guess he's just so passionate about it) I've seen from my own Outfit and Platoons I've been in that people are starting to recognize the really strategic uses of specialized "Silo" support installations whether its for Light-Air spawning or for a mid-Field Shield Dome big enough to land Liberators inside of. Gone are the days of Bases being a PVE exp Grind... you don't see nearly as many Cortium farms ever since they reduced the "Rot" rate of Silo storage and especially since they got rid of the EXP for repairing unpowered Player Structures. And if the components WERE to be unlocked with Cortium?... I think it should only be 1 at a time... like, you get to use that piece that you don't own the Blue-Prints for until it gets blown up, and there was like a 500% markup on your Cortium cost just to use it temporarily.... hope that answer is satisfactory?
I lolled. I'm that guy. The first one. The Base Autist. But if you look at my youtube videos, most of my Planetmans life is just vehicle shenanigans, and a lot of them were drunk. Great times.
