There is no front line of battle

The stronghold is a pretty solid base design and i've had good fights there but it's not a particularly important base so a strong defense at it rarely happens.

A few hints:

- If it suddenly got quiet, the enemy is probably sneaking around to your flank.
- If you're not pushing out your flanks, you will be flanked instead.
- If you don't hold the high ground, your enemy will.

The other issues as to why there's no front lines:

- The map changes too fast. Bases capture too quickly (yet are boring as heck because there's only a single control point to fight over, so you've barely started the cap timer by the time you suppress the opposition and get stuck waiting). A fast changing map makes it hard for either side to figure out which way is the front.

- Instant Action drops enemy pods behind your defensive perimeter. At least with Galaxy drops, you can see them coming 15-30 seconds prior. I love seeing 6-10 mostly-full Galaxy aircraft flying towards us. It means that it's about to get really busy and we'd better get prepped. We could have put AA out on that flank to hit them coming in and at least cause some losses before they hit us. Squad spawn beacons requires that someone managed to sneak close enough to plant one. Sunderers can be easily spotted as well and give you 5-15 seconds of warning before troops come boiling out of it. With the current lack of sphere-of-influence, the Instant Action "steel rain" drops are more frustrating then fun (over the long term) as multiple squads suddenly appear among and behind you.

- Ghost capping where you go to a capture point, flip it, then drive/fly away is a problem. You should be required to keep at least 1 person on the cap point in order for the bar to move.

Honestly I don't know why areas arent locked for capture unless they share a border with enemy territory. That would produce well defined battle lines and make it easier to find action. It would also deal with issues such as people xp farming on their infiltrator by knocking out generators and hacking terminals in bases that have no defenders and are way far away from the nearest battle.

OP is correct.

Base design is a shining example of what happens when you base your design decisions off of shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield instead of PlanetSide 1. The former games are shooting galleries, you're not supposed to be able to hold any positions, the idea is to keep moving until you inevitably die to someone that pops up of the woodwork from one of several different angles.

That is an anathema to everything that PlanetSide 1 was and PlanetSide 2 should be, and it's purely the result of developer ignorance and this disease called "appeal to wider audience" that is going around the gaming industry that ultimately stamps out originality to cater to the lowest common denominator instead of trying to get the masses interested in a higher level of gameplay.

I knew since Tech Test that I would despite this and I still do. There are few things I hate more then deciding to log on randomly to PlanetSide 2 then get killed in the middle of my own base because some random guy pops out of nowhere without warning. There are no doors to even keep people out or way to detect people that are around. In the first game, when attacking or defending you had a damn good idea about where people could be any how many entry points there were to an area. There was cover, limited access points and actual barriers that made defense much simpler.

Here is a simple example. I did spec ops multiple times in PS1, and I'm quite familiar with defending the CC of an Interlink facility. You had 3 entry points: the leftmost door that lead underneath the spawn room, a door in the center that led up a narrow corridor to the level above, and a large open area on the right where more of the underground room was. If you kept these 3 points secure you were golden. There were no windows stewn everywhere for people to shoot and throw grenades in. No wide open spaces where vehicles could camp since you were underground, and no teleporters that let people appear out of nowhere unless some lucky bastard managed to stick a Router telepad nearby. You sat your ***** behind some barrels and held the line and you could be confident that superior tactics would win the way against a zerg. That is impossible in this game.

One game I played recently was XCOM: Enemy Unknown. One thing I thought was interesting is that the guy behind the game wanted to do the remake of the original so well that he required all of the developers play and beat the original game.

I wonder what PlanetSide 2 would be like if all the devs had actually played the first game for a decent amount of time.

I checked this out yesterday and yes, it's a little like SST the only issue with this base is that its completely surrounded by huge canyons (shooting fish in a barrel) and there's an easy way in on the north side (you can just walk up the rocks and drop into the base).

So the design is different, I like it but the location sucks donkey balls.

Yep appealing to all makes you're game mediocre - it's the only thing it can be when you try to appeal to as many people as possible. I have great fun playing it but it doesn't have the polish of a classic game yet - here's hoping the devs start making some changed.

Xcom is awesome, played the original and got the new one and other than the alien ships being a little too large sometimes, I think they did a great job upgrading it - just not big on the panic levels but it's not a huge deal.

If I were Smedley I'd set lifespan of PS2 to five years with possible 2-3 years extension and another couple of maintenance mode years on top of that. We're two months into release. Yes we had TT and Beta, here, add another six months. It's still a small fraction of that. Did you honestly expect world design team to have 150 testers fighting over every facility for a week to see if spawn building needed to be moved 10m to the West? Who would be paying them?

Game will evolve, PS1 did. We started with no lattice, remember? So instead of sweeping statements how whole game sucks because defence is underpowered take a single base. Suggest changes. You don't need to achieve the level of Fig's imagination, putting a wall down here and there, moving a building a bit, closing a window here and there ... MS Paint will do.

I don't want drastic changes. I don't want just new spawn building be put down where old one was in every base. I'd like diverse battlefield where preparation, knowledge of the layout gives you advantage, where different tactics work differently at different bases. Where Crux HQ is sufficiently different from Crux Mining not to be just another 3-point base.

And then keep in mind it's bit more work to implement anything than changing few numbers in a text file.

Yep this all adds to no effective front line and just promotes base hopping - it's like the tactical side of the fight shares the same problems as the actual fighting does - it's all over the place and nothing is cohesive.

I see the problems more in game design in generall as in base design. Even organized zergs dont want do defend. Yesterday we took Mao´s Tech plant on Indar with a platoon and instead of holding it we just took base after base, till we had Dahaka, which of course is impossible to defend as NC. So we got our *** kicked in Dahakar while TR took everything back we conquered before. The Problem is instead of defending the zergs just either conquer till they are worn down or they end at the crown. That you don´t get XP for defending isn´t true either. In the time the cap timer for a empty big base runs down, i can make the same amount of xp while just killing/repairing etc. At the moment, most bases just aren´t defensable because people don´t bother to fight for it. There are often long fights for crossroads too, the base isn´t different from most other tower bases, the only reason there are long fights about it, is that NC and Vanu Zerg always meet there.