Hello, I'm new to the game and was hoping somebody could help me. I know that the game is a persistent battle, but how do you win or lose territories. I was playing a game on the snow planet and all we did was defend. How long would it take until we were attacking?
lol there is no win or loose. Its a modern MMO, that means there is no end. Also its the internetz, you dont have to def, just join somwhere attacking. (do whatever you want) I suggest you go for the Crown, its always a nice place to farm certs like crazy!
If you want to attack press M and locate a base under enemy control. Grab some teammates, maybe some vehicles, and go attack it.
Sadly that is a big problem this game has. It is essentially a tug o war battle over bases which are just there to have something to take over for the sake of it. They give no rewards and have no reason to stay behind and defend. You can't take over a warpgate so there is no sense of victory. You will go and take over a base and an hour later it will be in the enemies hands. They are meaningless and too easy to take over.
Ok. These are actually two different things. If you are defending, the only two ways that will en the fight is losing the territory, and driving the enemy out. The latter will only be done if you remove all of their spawn points. This means deployed AMS'es (sunderers with equipment terminals on the sides), and static spawn points. AMSes is easy: You blow them up! The static spawn points you got to capture. Capture mechanics can get somewhat complex in bases because of the extra rules that can apply (like the layered shields at an amp station), but the basics are simple. Fight your way to the control point and hold it until it flips. If you aren't at a base, you then simply hold it a while longer until the territory flips. In bases it is more difficult. You have control points that affect the capture of the whole base, and you have some that affect just the ownership of one of the small outposts surrounding it. The former are labeled A to C, the latter got an arrow pointing upward as their map/HUD symbol. Outposts are there for just one thing: to provide spawns and equipment terminals. Often at least one of these will be taken before the base itself is assaulted. Shields and generators are what make base assaults more complicated. I suggest finding some video tutorials about the capture mechanics to learn more on them. Note that most of these date from beta and the current biolab layout can't have been put in sooner than a week ago, so they won't reflect that, but for amp stations and tech plants they should work fine.
For whole continents, there is the possibility for one faction to conquer the whole thing (holding every territory except for the other factions' warp gates). Sounds like your faction was just getting hit hard, it happens. There's no way to stop an enemy from capturing one of your territories as long as they hold at least one adjacent territory (I think earlier beta builds had a lock-out where, once a territory was claimed, it couldn't be re-captured for about five minutes but that was removed months ago). Best bet in that situation (if I'm reading it right) would've been to try and get a squad and go hit the enemy from somewhere they weren't actively attacking. At best, they won't respond and you'll have captured a lot of territory and at worst, you'll divert forces from the front lines to come stop you, giving the guys defending your territory a chance to push forward into the enemy. As for actually capturing territories - you first need to capture the control nodes inside. These will be marked with an icon on your minimap and HUD, a square with a letter in it. You capture these the same way you capture control points in most other games (Battlefield, TF2, etc - even strategic points in Dawn of War or Company of Heroes) - stand near them until they flip to your faction's colour (Blue for the New Conglomerate, Red for the Terran Republic and Purple for the Vanu Sovereignty). Now, you need to hold those points until the territory as a whole flips. There's a few things that affect how fast this happens (progress bars will appear over your minimap to show how much control each faction is exerting on the territory) - firstly, how many people are near the point. I think the radius was about ten metres or so, but it could be more - I can't remember. It caps out at twelve people, though. Secondly, how many control nodes you hold in the base, pretty straight-forward there. Thirdly, influence; how many neighbouring territories your faction holds. The more territories you hold that are adjacent to the one you're trying to capture, the faster the territory will flip. How much influence each faction has will be shown by a pie chart either on your map screen or above the progress bars I mentioned before. Once you take at least one point inside a base, the enemy's control over it will start to lower. Once that runs out, your empire will start to gain control of it (it's like capturing a single control node but on a larger and slower scale - has to pass through a neutral phase before you can start taking it for your own faction). It can take a while to capture a base, particularly the larger facilities like Tech Plants, Bio Labs or Amp Stations. Those three have some additional things to keep in mind. I could probably fill a whole thread just with stuff about them so I'll get the key points here. Tech Plants may appear impenetrable at first, but there are unshielded doors on the back of the plant allowing entry. Air insertions can also get people inside thanks to grav lifts leading from the roof all the way down to the ground floor. Bio Labs have only two ways in - the landing pads on either side and a trio of teleporters. There are usually two or three sub-bases around the lab, capturing them will provide jump pads to the landing pads and teleporters leading to shielded rooms inside the lab. Amp Stations are tricky with their high walls, though teams of Light Assaults and Infiltrators can get in and overload the tank shield generators, allowing your faction's armour to roll in. From there, two additional generators need to be knocked out to get into the Amp Station itself (these will be marked on your HUD and minimap with an icon that looks like a shield with either three horizontal or vertical lines). The control node is inside the Amp Station on the second floor. A note on generators - you don't damage them with gunfire. Even after this change got added in the beta, I kept seeing people wasting ammo and grenades on generators. You destroy them by walking up to them and holding E while facing them. You'll get a progress bar while holding E and, once it fills, that will start an overload. Enemies will be alerted to the overload and can stop it the same way you started it, so you need to stay and defend the generator until it blows. When it does, whatever shields it was generating will disappear and the enemy will need to get Engineers over to it to repair the generator (and those repairs can take a while). The same thing works for the Spawn Control Units - these are marked with a triangular icon on your HUD and are only in the three large facilities. Destroying an SCU will prevent the base's owners from spawning there. They can still spawn from outside bases or AMS-equipped Sunderers* (or neighbouring territories if things have really gone bad for them) but the facility's spawn room won't see any more use until they can repair the SCU. Anyway, I hope this post helps, despite being a wall of text, but I wanted to get a nice, thorough post about all this here before the L2P crowd got in here. *AMS stands for Advanced Mobile Spawn (or something similar) - it allows a Sunderer APC to deploy and act as a spawn point and equipment terminal. AMS-equipped Sunderers can't deploy within 200 metres of each other, though, so spacing needs to be considered.
Yeah, you can tell you have been playing a bit too much PS2 when you start musing on the complete pointlessness of the battles during lulls in the fighting. Luckily the break between beta and release has cured me of this completely!
I wouldn't worry about the community - from my experience in the beta, the in-game community is a lot friendlier than the forums. And if there was anything my post before didn't help with, let me know.
