Lattice System and the Value Proposition of PS2

Whilst the large scale fighting is appealing to me as well one of the things that I liked about Planetside 2, at least early on, was the potential for a strategic element to the game. I'm thinking cutting off territory and supplies here. It's pretty simplistic though, hopefully other future changes can enhance this, with or without the lattice system. I am a strategy gamer at heart though, with the exception of Arma I don't play fps games.

I wouldn't label myself as someone that is unhappy with the lattice system though, I was dubious about it initially. Now I can see a potential benefit in terms of the battle flow for defense and hopefully it will address solo ghost-capping (though I believe that could have been dealt with directly in other ways), beyond that I don't think it will have any impact (positive or negative) on my play experience and I'm at the point of not really caring any more. What will be, will be.

I haven't been involved on any of the tests but I would say it's not just a numbers game, at least on base defence. I've held bases against numerically superior forces many times and even better equipped forces (MBT versus no MBT.) but the problem is while defending the position you will get flanked and cut off. We held the vanu zerg at indar excavation for 40 mins with half a platoon while they had 10 libs 15 scythes and 10+ magriders. It came close a few times but use of turret defences, targeted attacks on sunderers, harrasment of any armour or air that got close, and good old fashioned communication we stopped the zerg in it's tracks, though eventually they just took cora med, indar com, and quartz ridge cutting us off. We can defend points tactically and skill fully but ultimately it's the 4 small squads that break off and ghost cap all the surrounding posts so they can just ignore you and move one that make it very frustrating currently.

I doubt the lattice system will be perfect but I'm hoping it will solve the ghost capping problem. I see the influence system and ghost capping as the best strategy in PS2 currently which is why it's so popular. Though a game on this scale will work better when it comes down to smaller tactical choices for platoons and squads on the ground, rather than asking people to chose which of the 5 outposts getting capped by small squads they should deal with, alerts become a game of ping pong bouncing between 8 small territories trying to hold the line as small groups or even single men in ESf's try to pick up as much territory as possible.

As for small groups having little effect how much havoc do you think 4 AP vanguards with enforcers and thermal sighted kobalts cause flanking 10 prowlers all sitting shelling a base? as soon as the first few tanks explode or a sunderer or two goes boom they turn round long enough for the defending force to repair the generators or even push out.At tumas tech earlier we were losing against a superior tr force, they had 20-30 on the point, with a minute left to cap. We took 2 medics, 2 engies, a heavy and light assault, we took the lift up to the first exit ran along the sub roof dropped down onto the balcony and ran in to where the old scu gen was, from that balcony we took down atleast 75% of them before they started focus us down, but just as our small squad was wiped out our last guy got to see the other nc pushing up the stairs and the lift and we managed to resecure the base. If you play tactically you make an impact even as a small squad, though you're unlikely to get the best KDR doing it you'll notice the impact you're able to make as opposed to those guys cowering in cover or behind a spawn room spamming LMG's and rockets.

Quoted for Truth my brother, quoted for Truth!
Long live the Tactical Players, for when they leave this game shall truly be dead!

I go to great lengths to explain my view here: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...tion-lattices-lack-of-strategic-depth.118877/

But basically, you make the fight predictable. You allow a faction to adequately defend each an every location. You let the defense know exactly where the attackers will come from. You force all squads into large battles. You prevent flanking sides of territories. You greatly diminish the possibility of cutting enemies off. You lower the skill requirement and ceiling from leading squads/platoons since everyone knows where the battle is, and where it will be.

This is looking at the macro level, not in-combat tactics.

The problem is that Planetside 2 is not big enough to have effective macro strategy, the maps are too large and populations to small for the size of the continents, combine that with the current map systems orgy of base connections leads to ghost capping and undermines the large engagements that are at the very heart of the game. You would need larger pops and true commanders that all the people followed for it to happen.

That's the main reason why imho the lattice hex system is better than the one we currently have on live. Current hex map is such that defenders simply cannot stop enemies from advancing. With such a map personally I feel punished for trying to defend a base for too long: while I struggle to keep every single meter of base with an epic long-lasting fight, my enemy surrounded me and I've lost all the rest of the continent.
As it is today players cannot defend themselves from ghost-capping and zerg waves are often impossible to push back. I often open the map and find out all the bases around are being taken... what should I do? Abandon a great huge harsh battle just to go check if a lonely infiltrator is trying to flip a point? This is just ********. I love the idea of huge "sandboxy" map but as long as a 1 man army can conquer a base this will never work. And with such a map number will always matter too much: if you outnumber your enemy you will always win. It's a little realistic but also very boring.

On the other hand people shouldn't forget the lattice map has been working quite well in PS1 for more something like 10 years

There's a lot of interesting and good posts so far in this thread.

I think I'll weigh in by saying that, on the subject of bases their being more defensible is desirable in my opinion. I would like to see the cap system become an alternate to shutting down its core systems, IE blowing up the SCU would neutralize the base. To counter this the outer defenses of the bases would be made adequate such that they could actually be defended ( might want to add a shield dome over amp stations that is generator powered ).

As you pointed out this would make it easier to defend bases, as a counter to the defensive bonuses other forms of weakening defenses would be added. I never played PS1 but some PS1 Players tell me there was a mechanic for cutting off nanites ( resources ) from bases making them harder to defend. Either way, use a real world example; superior forces have been decimated twice in the cold Russian winter for lack of resources, and in the second case being surrounded.

Someone ( rancid meat or something was his youtube moniker) made a video somewhat along your idea of making resources apply across all continents which included some ways of stealing resources as well as stockpiling them.

Also on the notion of ghost capping, has anyone considered making base defensive turrets automated? Perhaps not as good at shooting as human players, but this would probably help with defending bases and would mean that a group of 3 people attempting to ghost cap a base would have a few obstacles to contend with...

Someone earlier was complaining about the chaotic nature of combat in PS2. I say good, let it be chaotic, because the moment I can predict it like the movements of a clock I, and many others, shall pack our bags and leave. I play the ARMA series a fair bit, and one thing you will discover playing that game against AI or other humans is that the moment you stop moving you loose. AI will always attempt to flank you, and you should be trying to do the same. Expecting enemies to, in a gentlemanly, manner engage you and not try to flank you or gain enfilade is pointless and removes much of the strategic aspect from the game. My #1 biggest complaint with most MMO style games is that everything is 'level based', if you flank and attack from the rear on someone 'Y' levels higher than you, well you still loose. There is no strategy here beyond "have bigger number". Some aspects of the game already resemble the HBN thought process and I resent this as it sucks all strategy out of the game. On a small aside here, the HBN system punishes newer players because no matter how good they play or how hard they try they can't beat the bigger number. It is in its essence a sense of entitlement on behalf of those who have played longer that they should be better than others because they have been there longer. Bringing the analogy out of that, a big and mismanaged group should be capable of loosing to a smaller group. They shouldn't be guaranteed to loose or win, both should be possible; what is the point of playing if you cannot loose.

Whereas I see Lattice as forcing Arena FPS combat all the time when we could have large scale combat going

To me large scale means

- Many concurrent operations with varying objectives happening at the same time in different areas

- Overarching strategy in which players make the decisions about the course of a battle

- Rapid changes in the battlefield that can be exploited by mobile rapid reaction forces

- Engagements happening over wide geographic areas where a single battle might cover a kilometer of ground and involve ground, air, and armor elements

- Enough freedom that maneuver, flanking, and encirclement are valuable and useful.

Whereas Lattice is taking the basic premise of an Arena shooter - Take a bunch of players, shove them into a small area, and have them respawn constantly, and adding a 0 to the end of the server size. That's not "Large Scale Combat". It is combat at the absolute smallest scale - One soldier who doesn't matter and can't do **** except mindlessly shoot at whatever is in front of him right now - only with a lot more players.

Scale isn't just the number of people who are spawn camping you. In Arena games your choices don't matter, your positioning doesn't matter, there are is no strategy and almost no tactics. All that matters is twitch, and numbers. If you twitch faster and have more people on your team you win. In normal scale, 24-36 player Arena shooters a skilled player can actually have an impact. In Lattice, with 200 v 200 crammed into an immensely chaotic battlefield no one matters.

Games like ARMA, Project Reality, Desert Combat, even BF2 and 2142 gave you a large scale in a way that people mattered. Teamwork was important. Having a coherent strategy was important. You have enough room to move around so that choosing when to move and where to go had a direct impact on your chances of winning or losing. You have enough room to sneak around the enemy and ambush them. You could make high speed pushes right through the enemy lines. You had OPTIONS.

Lattice takes the largest scale FPS yet conceived and reduces it to a 400 Player CoD server. It strips all the thinking and intelligence out of it. You might as well chop the large facilities into 1km^2 maps and just do the game as a conventional, albeit large, shooter. There's no point in having a large, persistent world if the only decision you can make is whether to go forward or log out.

- Numbers will win. Always, without exception. TTK is too low, respawn time is too low. If you are numerically outnumbered the rules of war say that you have to find a way to neutralize the numbers advantage. That means you either find force mulipliers or go around. If you can't go around a zerg there is no way for inferior numbers to kill the zerg and keep it dead long enough to make a difference. To take a point you need at least equal numbers or extremely skilled players of nearly equal number because you're going to have to sit on that point for ten minutes when the enemy has the advantage in spawn availability. And like as not even if you somehow manage to kill the SCU they'll just grind out back. Numbers win the game

- Squad tactics, force multipliers, don't matter - Right now a squad can initiated a flank attack, take over a tower, flip some turrets, or lay out an ambush in advance of an enemy push. They can get away with that because there is uncertainty in the game. You don't know for sure where you're going to go next. You don't know what the enemy is going to do next. With lattice you know. You always know. There's only one option; Forward. So if you have a good tactical familiarity with the map you know exactly where every ambush is, where every AA nest is going to be, where every sunderer is parked. Because along a fixed line of advance there are only so many rocks to park a sundy behind, only so many places where AA has clear line of sight. Add to that - Against a 330 player zerg ambushes don't matter. They'll steamroll through anything through shear weight of numbers. If you kill the entire first wave in a brilliant ambush they'll be back in 10s and they'l know exactly where you are. There is no attrition in Planetside. The attackers will never run out of men or tanks. The only way to blunt a zerg advance is to have more people or go around. You can't go around in Lattice. I hope your faction isn't underpopped.

At the end of the day some people just want to play CoD, but bigger. But Planetside has so much more potential than that, It can be truly Large Scale on every level - Individual, tactical, and strategic, where everyone's decisions matter and have an impact on the course of the game.

Lattice kills that. Lattice shoves the game into a straight jacket that totally removes strategic decision making, cuts tactical decision making down to a brutal mathematics of who has more warm bodies, and makes the individual utterly irrelevant and replaceable.

Lattice might not kill Planetside, but it will kill my Planetside. I can jump around shooting people in any FPS. I play Planetside because it lets me do so much more than that.

...I have to ask you, have you ever tried to defend in the current game?
I've TRIED, time and again, to at least SLOW DOWN a steamrolling Zerg...
Rarely are these efforts successful, most of the time the Zerg will just FLOW around whatever Territory you are Defending, requiring that you either launch a counter attack from your now isolated Base to back cap a force that will just as easily turn around and completely obliterate you or dig in and pray that your own Zerg will surge out and reconnect you.

That's the problem with Hexes, they can act like a Lattice but more often then not just create far too many attack vectors to be able to properly defend.
A single Hex could be connected to SIX other Territories, so even if was split evenly between two colliding Empires that still leave one needing to watch THREE Bases while holding that single Hex would have only protected ONE!

No one is forcing you to march straight down the damn Lanes, I've easily ping-ponged between two before, which gives the added benefit of the enemy not knowing where you actually are or what your Force's Strength is.

This all really sounds great in theory - really it does! Sadly I haven't seen anything like it on the live servers.
If you put up a massed defense people will just ghost cap around you. If you split up your defense the enemy will attack in force on a single location... it's pointless 90% of the time! That's why most people jump from taking one empty base to taking the next one and zerrgs often avoid each other.
That's not Sun Tzu or Paton - that's boring gameplay!

In the early days of beta there was no adjacency requirement for capping enemy territories - the result: ghostcapping all over the map... what ever you did it didn't matter because for every territory you took by force two loners capped two undefende territories god knows where.
The adjaceny rule took some freedoms away and reduced the chaos and gave a little more structure to the fights. I'd argue that the huge mayority of ps2 players thinks that the adjacency rule made the game better.
But we still have comparable situations of chaos where your actions do not matter because it's to easy to bypass defenses and just go for an empty base.
And that's the reason I think the lattice system will make the game better by giving it more structure - just like the adjacency rule did.
I too do not want another arena shooter!
I want a game where defending a base (a chokepoint) matters and can't be nullified by 1/10th of the defenders numbers.
I want a game where attacking matters because I know the base we just took during a fierce fight won't be ghostcapped 10 minutes later.
I want persistence - and I think the lattice system is a step in the right direction.

Hex is lattice it's just displayed in a different manner; too many options causing chaos and too few seem to cause the feeling of restriction. All this "hex is better / lattice is better" arguing is a moot argument and point; this is about finding the sweet spot for how many links base to base are needed.
Either system used without that <insert game enhancing mechanic here> doesn't change the fact it's a shallow outlook to game depth and mechanics.

I've said it before but look at the amount of hexes on the current system - it's too un-weildly with far too many options; the current test build is merely a case of one extreme to the next.

So overall if the hex system goes we get lattice, if it stays we get... lattice. Just a case of working out what sits in the sweet spot.

Exactly, but we're already close in this regard.
The Current Hex have around 5-6 Connections per Base, while the Lattice has 2 or 3, with 4 coming off the Crown.

Hmm, some good rebuttals.

I'd like to know what all of you would think about linking together a set number of hex's that all must be capped in order to move on. For examle 2-3 hex's would be one 'superhex'. If you only capped 2/3 you could not cap further spots beyond that until all 3 were capped. This would mean that certain areas could be effectively 'held' by standing off in nearby locations.

Alternatively I'd like to see the hex's redrawn on the maps, locations like split peak pass should have a narrow strip of territory going north and south along the mountain ridges making it a massive territory divide. Basically make a bunch more of the locations on the map 'tactically' important isntead of just places that can be maneuvered around.

Lastly and I realize this is a 'major redesign' but I've had an idea for a territory cap system that I've written up on different forums but I will reiterate here. Think of the current hex system now increase the granularity until you get lots of really small hex's, basically a liquid system. The movement of your ground forces advances your terrain, terrain is held or taken by numbers of active personel in that territory. Meaning if two or three guys try and 'run around you' to flank behind you they do not outnumber your forces and do not have any effect on the territory. However if a large force maneuvers around you they can cap territory behind you and or flank you. Capping has territory ( not necessarily bases ) has nothing to do with sitting on points and everything to do with advancing ground forces to cover territory. This makes it a game of removing enemy numbers and then advancing yourself, strength in numbers means that the more people you have relative to your enemies the easier it is to convert the territory around you. Think of the territory control as somewhat like three rival zerg factions in starcraft all advancing their zerg creep.

Terrain control would have a creep out effect until it met resisting territory control, thus if you were to cap a few locations along the edge of the map you wouldn't have to walk along the edge capping back that territory. You could punch through and remove the enemy numbers and the territory would fix itself. Surrounding enemy territory that was unmanned would cause it to erode quicker, however manned enemy territory would stay hostile until it was cleared out. A set number of people is required for territory to be 'manned' or defended. So one or two people slinking around cannot 'stop' you from taking territory.

Lastly land between clashing forces is defined as 'contested territory' so the map tends to look like three blobs of colour with grey areas making up contested fight zones.

Part of the problem in the current system is that it focuses on cap points to control territory, this system is intuitively tied to ground movements and actual forces. It also makes ground forces a mandatory function of your army, which is proper and somewhat realistic in my opinion.

Defense has a problem mainly because:
-AMS can park closer to the control point than you
-AMS have a faster respawn timer

Many bases that do not follow those two rules are actually defensible.
Of course defense means nothing since you can only "hold" until the AMS is blown up.
And while defense can be exhausted by blowing up gens and SCUs (not even true in Biolabs), offense rarely suffers from losing tanks or any kind of resources.

It's not just a Hex/Lattice issue.
Often there's only a single vector of attack: the enemy Sunderer, and it has only one place to park.
In places like Amerish zergs DO meet.

Claim; "Lattice turns the game into a numbers game".

How is it not one already?
I often find myself in situations where we're trying to defend a position against superior numbers - this isn't usually too hard if we get a minute or so to prepare, but if we are trying to defend against superior numbers the effect the defence currently has is almost exactly like placing a rock in a stream, the water will flow around it.

In this respect, as we're lacking in numbers, we simply do not have the option to defend all the places they're attacking, which means whoever has the most numbers "wins". (you don't really "win" in planetside, though)

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, it just invalidates the claim to an extent.

As for the lattice itself, I'm moderately troubled by the lack of connections - I think it could use a few more.
Influence removal might have been a decent idea, but the removal of "people on points" is something which concerns me as it means people will have no incentive not to sit around the spawn, which will obviously lead people to camp the spawn room which isn't particularly fun for either side.

Not that sitting on the points is fun either, the most fun, I imagine, would be trying to defend the point from a continuous stream of enemies hell-bent on making you and all your comrades quite dead.

In short, I find the removal of "people on points" to be a step in the wrong direction.

Well this is less a problem of Capture Mechanics and more one of Base Design.
As someone over at Planetside Universe pointed out, Base's are suppose to have layered Defenses, and the way I see it is that those layers should be set up like this:

...With the Control Point just outside the inner-most Defensive layer.

Right now however, it's normally the CONTROL POINT located in this inner sanctum, while the Spawns are clear the frack on one side of the base!
So Defenders end up having to fight through most of their OWN Bases just to reclaim them, instead of needing to push out of their Keep and re-securing the other layers.

Yeah well I checked out some the video updates and learned I do not like the LATTICE, what a bummer, my video seems much better and think the lattice is weak.
Much prefer the old HEX maps.

The lattice just proved the base defense guns are a joke also, why would you put a cannon in a wall that can not one shot a tank?

What demographic is the game after, the new video updates seem nice, you now have a good looking zerg on the lattice.
If the old hex maps ran good video would you have changed to the lattice any how?

The new video looks pretty good, not impressed with the lattice.