[Feedback] Lattice

Smart analogy.

seriously **** the lattice. I like to be able to choose my battles without ceding previous work. there isn't enough for paratroopers to do out side of dropping onto foward spawns. Seriously if SOE had put in things for small squads to do besides being an auxillery force to the zerg, this might have worked but as is, **** the lattice. kill it, kill it with fire.

Personally, I love the lattice. It also coincided with the merger of Helios into Connery, and I've never seen such balls to the wall, massive firefights like this since I began playing. Seasickness is pleased!

i hoped they could've looked harder to see what was killing the Hex system before adding the lattice... i made another thread about it but in short now the options seem very limiting, it's Spam/Zerg or nothing. I like it at times but not always!!!... most of the underlying problems are still their not much has changed except for taking most thinking out of the game.

The elimination of ghost capping alone should earn a parade for the lattice system however it also encourages MASSIVE battles which is why most people play this game. Those who want the small 5v5s etc have a variety of other game choices they can go to but Planetside is the only one that offers people 100+v100+ and the lattice system provides this.

I don't think that is a good reason to dislike the lattice. Dropping a squad of players behind the lines or pushing in in a tactical way (coke points, grenades, sticking together) could change these battle a lot but currently users are used to the same old point and go there.

They did look at what was killing the HEX. That's why they switched to Lattice. The problem with HEX is too many options. None linearity is not always a good thing. There is a reason every piece is Chess can't move like the Queen. The HEX made it so that at any given time almost every territory you had was vulnerable to attack. There is no good way to defend them all. Not without constant spamming of the redeploy button. This doesn't make for good gameplay. It fits the playstyle of a vocal minority who like to raid empty bases, and kill the few people who spawn to try to defend it.

But the damage it causes is that it makes defense seem pointless. Most outposts have next to no value under the HEX system. Where as now they are vital links in the chain. An outfit can decide to defend it when they know that it's the next target of the advancing enemy army. And defending it matters cause the enemy army can't just send a ghost cap team around the defense. Until now the game was all attacking all the time. Now we have defense added to the game as a viable objective.

As to the "stalemate" issue. Just as in Planetside 1 stalemates are broken by outfits. Doing big coordinated airstrikes, or gal drops, or massive tank pushes, MAX crashes. Yes two Zerg's can butt heads for hours over a base. But it presents an opportunity for the coordinated to get together, and break it with a decisive maneuver.

Bah, PS1 in the beginning pre-lattice was awesome.. When it was still semi-popular and had a population.

The lattice was a Band-Aid added for a dying population to artificially promote the illusion of bigger more populated battles.

That it was implemented here is not a good sign.

Heh, while were at it, the open map is no longer really necessary. Invisible barriers should be added to funnel travel only along linked lattice routes.. Just make 'em out-of-bounds areas. That way we can have true conquest "lanes".

"Pave the way for improvement".. Bah, lattice paved the way for nothing but zergside.

We needed a ->Meta-Game<- for the hex system that would have made tactics dictate the flow of battle.. not some arbitrary programming code.

Yeah.. I can see it now.. Just like PS1.. Log in, check your emps pop.. check the map, see where the zergs have set up camp.. sigh, log out, do something else and check again tomorrow, until you just give up on checking.

-Met

Then why am in massive fights?.....

It work on PS1.>https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/lattice-base-improvement.128395/

do you remember how the game was after being released ? massive fights at every base, there was no need for lattice, then people left, op liberator, op rocketpods, now op maxes.. the lattice and the op maxes,if not fixed soon will make things worse. all there is left in indar are 6 bases were giant zergs meet and fight until they get bored.

Yup.. PS1 - all - over - again

And don't forget (for those of you who were there) there were "Big Plans" for PS1.. Lots of "Promises" were made.. They wouldn't forget their "loyal soldiers".. Yeah.. none of them happened.

PS1's free right now.. go see how those promised base redesigns worked out.. Oh wait.. they didn't.

Brother, from what I've seen so far defense is pointless NOW. We still have people redeploying off the zerg lane the enemy is coming down and onto one where their faction is winning, and we still have giant zergs avoiding each other.

And some of us are STILL left trying to defend towers and bases outnumbered 5:1+ because people (go figure) want to conquer territory in a conquest game, and figure the best way to do that is to -not- hit the enemy where their force are clustered in one supercharged mass.

Bingo. While it may have helped out with Indar's battle flow, that is a result of Indar being terribly designed. On Amerish and Esamir, if the continent is full, the territories are easily big enough and placed well enough to support multiple platoon sized battles across an Empire's entire front line. The problem is:

A) Populations aren't high enough to do this one more than one continent
and
B) Players rather join up with 2+ other platoons, all attack the same place defended by a force a fraction of the size, and then complain they have to back track to stop "ghost capping."

The lattice is nothing but a system to hide the game's dying population. SOE should understand by now that changing the game mechanics doesn't keep the game alive if there is still no meaning to what you are doing. A 4th continent and a continent lock system should have been the primary focus once the player base started falling.

Yeah, I know, this is replying to something from way back in the thread, but I'm tired of seeing these false comparisons to "real life" and just had to throw in my 2 certs.

While pre-lattice may have lacked depth, it wasn't because we could hit any point on the map we wanted. It was because there was no reason to go to any particular place (for the most part). In your "example" here, you say defenders would be bypassed. When that happens, a smart outfit would then sally and hit the enemies attempting to move around them. My outfit does (did) this constantly. We would look at where the fighting was, then hit adjacent territory to provide support (and bonuses) to the rest of our faction (some times the zerg, sometimes the larger outfits), draw away enemy forces to reduce what our main faction forces had to fight, and just generally give the enemy more things they had to deal with and thus weaken their morale if nothing else. Now, we can either follow the zerg to the meatgrinder, or watch from the side lines.

You are correct that the lattice has no actual effect on where an outfit can send its troops. However, it does effect what that outfit can do outside the SOE chosen lanes of attack. If it isn't connected by lattice, the enemy can actually completely ignore what that outfit is doing because they are effectively removing themselves from the fight. At best, a force doing that kind of maneuver with the lattice system can neutralize a small to moderate portion of the enemy forces. It can't weaken the defensive position of the defending force; it can't cut off the defenders from support (they can still spawn in and get resources). It cannot do these things because you can't even take the "opposing" facility at the other end of a dotted lattice link if you are in the process of re-securing your end (found this out today when we defended Hvar; we had to wait the 10 minutes for Hvar proper to (re)cap before would could do anything to Hvar Northern Gate despite the fact there were zero enemies at that location for most of those 10 minutes).

Just allowing the "defenders" the chance to counter attack even if their side was contested would make the lattice a more tolerable system to me.

The problem here wasn't the hex system. The GAME doesn't reward intelligent strategy. You get rewarded for shooting people in the face. Everything else is merely a pittance. I should know since I'm half the battle rank of the face shooters that have been playing as long as I have, but without me they wouldn't get repairs, or revives or galaxy flights to tactically important locations. Sure, I get 5 xp for every person you shoot in the face after you drop from my galaxy. But you get how much per kill? minimum 100 xp, right? Oh, then I get about 75 to 150 xp for repairing the damage to my galaxy doing the drop, assuming I didn't lose it in the attempt. All the lattice does currently is reinforce the reward for face shooting by helping folks mindlessly join the zerg, and penalize (or, at best, hinder) folks that want to make strategic pinpoint attacks at weak spots that would benefit the main assault. And NO this is not the "ghostcapping" fiction some folks like to use as a scapegoat. It's only a "ghost cap" if the enemy decides not to defend its rightfully conquered territory. Don't blame the folks capturing territory. Blame yourself or those members of your faction that ignore it. I've had plenty of good fights, some we've won and others we've lost, by the opposing faction taking exception to my squad hitting a base far from the mindless VS zerg. Taking a base in those situations requires the so called "ghost cappers" to defend the base they are capturing. That is no longer an option with the lattice.

Now here is the part that prompted me to write what has turned into a novel (apologies for that). Meat space armies attack over mountains, major rivers, seas and oceans, as well as through swamps, jungles, and dense forests all the time. It takes more logistically to accomplish, and its difficult and not always strategically useful, but is ALWAYS an option. Claiming "why allow open movement of troops that have to run, drive or fly when it doesn't happen in the real world?" just shows you haven't paid any attention to what really happens in the real work. This may just be something I'm more familiar with since I was in the military for a decade, but the way most folks make this claim it just appears to be an intentional strawman.

The lattice hard-codes in artificial restrictions to focus more players into the meat grinder. It greatly reduces the number of choices the players can pick from in their decision to help their faction "win". As others have stated, just because the lattice could be useful if other features were introduced to the game does not mean it is still useful, or even helpful, without those features actually existing in the game.

If you've actually read this far without deciding "OMG TL;DR" thank you.

The only beef I have is nothing to stop pop locking the continent to put a faction at a severe disadvantage, example 40/40/20. Yea it happens , and that is not really fun when there is zerg lanes now. They need to implement a lock out feature for at least 12 to 24 hours if you plan on faction hopping or some sort of super alpha zeta priorty queue for the underpop faction to bring it up to balance.

The problem with the lattice system as currently implemented is simple: the same battles at the same 3-4 outposts will continue forever and ever and ever. I'm going to get to know a few of the same attack vectors really really well, to the point that its boring and repetitive. Battles just go back in forth for the same 1 or 2 pieces of territory over and over and over. As soon as a faction threatens another's large base everyone rallies to defend it, which is nice if you like being stuck constantly fighting over the same 1 or 2 small bases between large bases. Basically the lattice system will cause players to fight the same battles in the same direction all the time, which will get stale extremely fast. Sure, the battles are large and theres lots of people to kill, but the battle it self will play out the same way pretty much every time because the direction is always the same. It is much more difficult to surround territory.

yup, i remember epic last seconds saves, now you can't do anything, best case, get a max if you are vanu and farm ! first nail in the strategy was the timer that encouraged the gathering of additional troops coming for xp, now you can't take out the scu or attack what base you want, you have to follow the giant zerg !
all i hear is about the ghost cappers, i proposed a really simple solution, infiltrators have already nothing to do, so give them a mine or device that can be placed around the base that will prevent it to be taken from 1 single enemy. most of times the ghostcapping was done by noobs so probably they won't even bother to search for the mine and destroy it, but if they searched for it, in that time, reinforcements could respond. i want a sandbox game, not quake 3 arena !

The problem of the hex never was non linearity. It never was "too many options". For that matter, there wasn't enough in some cases.
Outfits, or even normal players, never had any problem knowing in advance where the enemies were going.
However, except for those that had fun doing last second saves, the masses didn't see the point leaving a current fight for a non-rewarded action such as defense.
It is easy to pull a successful defense, but it's only worth it for glory, not gold.

The funny thing is that you know the solution to fixing the hex as you mention it in your post: "Most outposts have next to no value."
The alerts show that once all base given value, cohesive frontlines form and every territory is fought over.
In those cases, people actually defend territories because there is some form of comprehensible "reward" doing so.

The simplest bandaid fix solution could simply have been a tally of points every X time, like resources, giving a small amount of Xp to players for territory percentage.
Or, give a form of xp proportional to a recaptures dificulty.
Anything to that extent, to make the territory owned matter, and it would have changed the way the game is played.

I hope you do realise that ghostcapping is still possible?