Lattice a considered view.

Holy hell that was huge amount of reading.
Now, to talk about it. Especially issues:
I don't believe lattice system ever could do something about population and power of overwhelming numbers. It can't really do that, it restricts movement a bit, however, it doesn't make you just go down the lane, when you started it, you can always change it. And yes, the logistics should fix this, not lattice. Lattice is more for bringing enemies together, easier projection, where enemy goes, not 100% but decent enough. It's easy to project most possible way where huge enemy force will be moving, that wasn't an issue, but not many would do that.
Next thing on ghostcapping: I never viewed it as something bad, it's just meant, you need to keep an eye on a map. Sure hunting people is annoying and guessing amount of people is annoying, but it's not as terrible, as people make it to be.

Thing is, my thoughts not really count, since I don't care about lattice at the moment, since Indar was the most terrible continent to put it in.

LordMondando, first and foremost, thank you for the excellent post. It's nice to see someone who is admittedly on one side of the fence say that the other side has some points and not mindlessly yell at the other side. It was a good read (don't worry to much about the grammatical errors, its bound to happen in a post this long, and its a forum post after all).

I must ask you, after reading all of your post, it seems many of your concerns with the lattice are more that it's not an answer to the meta game issue than with lattice itself, and that the lattice exacerbates an already existing population imbalance issue. Am I mistaken in this assumption? If it is simply that it isn't the meta game answer we've been looking for it gives me hope (as I rather enjoy the lattice) that this system can be successful with those who aren't happy with it right now, maybe via new additions to the game. A sort of "Lattice is another rung on the ladder to success" idea as opposed to it needs to be reverted mindset.

Either way, as some one who has been a big supporter of the lattice, and the large fights it has provided, I'm very pleased to see posts like this from people with your point of view on it. I have hope SOE can make this game enjoyable for us all with feedback like yours and hopefully the constructive discussions that it can produce. I'll try to put some thoughts together and make a post here later about my thoughts and input, I'm kind of scattered at the moment and fear they wouldn't come across too well.

well in the instance im thinking of a defence of Rust Mesa look out from the north. Which on the face of it, its for the attacking force an uphill slog over open terrain. It should be a nightmare to take, and when forces are roughly equal it is.

Now im not Hannibal of carthage, nor were we operating at 100% efficency at the point, but people had enough buster maxs and AV turrets and the like up by the time the TR put the cap through at crimson bluff.

We stood no chance what so ever, they can't have outnumbered us by more than 3 squads at that point, so prehaps 3 to 6 squads maybe slightly more on our side and theirs.

It took one sundy swarm charge, they were at the base of the hill, then mass spawning off the one sundy. Game over. We simply did not have enough men to do anything about it. We should hold off the air and maybe take out 2 sundies at a time tops, even with the best tactical adeptness in the world and IRL army levels of organization. There were too many moves for them to make at once for us to check. Given the ttk being what it is, given the rest of the game mechanics and given our relative numbers, our defeat was inevitable, despite the terrain advantage and prepared defensive posture.

And because of the lattice, with 3 squads, were were defending that base or nothing, the other three or four lanes we had active at that point (getting ***** handed to us on all three) were in a similar situation, so strategically the choice came down to, either leave a lane uncontested, or mount a futile defence in all three.

I appreciate somepeople want to reduce it to a lack of skill on our part. Of course the situation is next to possible for anyone else to perfectly replicate, given the statue of the other lanes and the exact numbers are pretty 'one off'. But I can only say, I think honestly. I'd be very, very, VERY impressed if the best minds on NC miller (I don't think I am one, at best im in the middle) could have done much there, or for that matter any other server.

The odds that mattered were against us, the problem is the game mechanics seem to give a damn about the odds that should have been in our favour, and other odds like say an relatively more unwieldy logistics train that a larger enemy force should have, simply don't come into play.

I saw make the larger force more reliant on a logistics system than the smaller one, allowing the smaller one to interdict this in a way that doesn't stop the larger force, but either forces them to peel men off to defend it, or take the hit in availability of vehicle and men that equals it out.

I fail to see how anyone can object to that as making the game fairer (with skill involved) and more involving.

As i've said though, we have to be careful how its implemented.

I think thats an interesting idea. Thing is though I think a lot of whats going on here thats the problem is the overavability of both men and resources with no way to impact it meaningfully. Just chucking another toy in (and make no mistake, there should be more toys) doesn't really seem to address that fundmentaly problem. Only make it such that sometimes the defenders might have fancier toys.

It went though a few drafts, honestly I couldn't give both sides their due and have it any shorter.

I do thank everyone for taking the time to read it. As i've said, this is me preforming my 'focused feedback' role, and though given the state of debate on forumside, it needed a wider audience than just SoE.

I appreciate that a lot of what im saying comes across as blaming the lattice for the problems. The problems are the games problems and its likely not really ones the lattice can address more one thats exist in game, the lattice might make a bit worse and I'm hoping my point comes across sufficiently that It's something we need another system to properly get a handle on.

You could, you correct, predict enemy movements before to an extent. My issue in mentioning this is that it was doable before, its fairly easier now. But people keep mentioning it as if its suddenly enpowering people to have far richer gameplay at the strategic and tatical level.

At the strategic level, its a double edged sword and i've allready seen and been involved in a far bit of spawn camp jumping, unforunately its boring as hell but makes good strategic sense.

Tatically its largely dependend on the base, the opener (not to say entirely without cover east caynon I think is a great example) the better, broken arch is it at its worst.

I honeslty found ghostcapping to both being boring as hell, but a necessary evil if you wanted to play the objective.

My point in mentioning it was that I'm glad its reduced, but people seem to keep eranously saying lattices major benefit, indeed that its a knock down argument against naysayers, its that its gone.

What appears to happen in the new system, is you can sometimes advance uncontested against a base, even two. Before people suddenly spawn in to contest it. It doesn't unfortunately, make every lane active and contested and have battles on the way to base(the 'flow') every time. Even it appears when the map is 'full' largely because people graviate towards the 3-4 largest battles, regardless.


It be nice if each front (3 lanes) 1 was large and the other two kept at around 2 v 2 squads. But it doesn't happen at present, and nor can I imagine how game mechanics could force it to happen.

First off thanks, secondly yes I think your cutting to the heart of the matter somewhat.

I suppose my intentions can be summed up as followed.

1) with the Lattice and with it making the population problem perhaps slightly worse. I think its time for SoE to get real on it as an issue. People keep saying 'larger numbers should win'. But really, should they. History if full of cases where larger numbers don't win. I mean literally like 40% of the time, unless the larger force is better lead than its opponents and the terrain is at least not to its disadvantage. It should yeah. But the larger, but more disorganised

Problem really comes out when everything but the numbers and the terrain is equal, the defender still looses, and looses most if not all of the time. thats a problem in the game I submit and lattice is making it (perhaps only slightly) worse.

I suppose to put it in military speak, the biggest issue is that the game almost totally lacks force multipliers beyond perhaps the proximity of a spawn to the actual fight. A smaller force, even before tatics and skill come into it, with significant force multipliers on its side (say greater mobility, or seriously advantageous terrain) should normally win against the larger side. Thats also not to say that the battle should be small. I'm thinking situatiosn of a platoon vs. two.

The problem of finding big fights and dispearsal after them might have been solve. Bigger problems now exist.

2) I don't think lattice should be endlessly tweaked. I think to be honest, the current indar iteration is fairly good. I worry that SoE are trying to solve too many problems with one change to game mechanics and are sinking a lot of time and resources into it.

3) Linearity in base capture logic, is not a case for linearity in base and map design making the game as whole more simplified. I think a lost of places on Indar are doing an ok job of this, but it appears the route being take on indar is to largely lobotomize the actual tactical map of the most freeform continent, and I shudder to think what they could do to the already fairly linear Amerish. Just don't SoE. Base capture logic is one thing, actually making the map far less freeform, indeed making it so that travel to the bases and the battles between them might masively disconnect with the battles within is a terrible idea.

4) again like 3) if flow is one of the main objectives of this new system, I think its been a suprising success despite the issues, for the love of god do not not introduce massive speed bumps into it. Please. I'll be prepared to eat a lot my words as I have done here, as at the end of the day I base my opinion on the base avalible evidence. but giant walls and giant shields... as opposed to actually trying to balance vehicle vs. infantry combat more in a combined arms warfare game is not the way to go. The way to which as I and many, many others have been saying for a while, comes down to vehicles being powerful but precious, and the resource revamp, which should for the number of reasons i'm listing be both fairly comprehensive and radical is the way to go .

Don't soe, please don't.

Why bother posting this then?

A waste of space.

Executive summary. Some people make a ton of money with it.

The thing is ....terrain does allow a defensive advantage...but it has to be pretty severe....like the Crown. The problem is, if terrain gives the outnumbered defenders a clear advantage, it makes it almost impossible for an attacker to take if the numbers of attackers v defenders are equal......again..the example being the crown.

This may well transfer into lines of supply. It may mean that it becomes impossible for any team to continent lock (when that gets added) if the teams are equal, as the attacking teams supply lines will stretch from their warp gate and be easily cut, whereas the defenders supply lines, if warpgated, stretch from ...err...their warpgate, and hence impossible to cut.

Balancing against population advantage, yeh..its a tough one... whatever you do to give the smaller number of defenders a chance against a larger force may likely cause a stalemate when the forces are equal. Supply is probably the way to go though, as interdiction is hugely important in war stategy. But only so long as the attacking force is able to negate the disadvantage of a long supply line without committing so many forces to defending it that the actual force trying to secure the objective then becomes lower than the defenders

I love the lattice, and I love lamp.

Outfit "X" ..your job is to get 4 AA maxes on that hill to our west.. keep em off our sundy.
Outfit "Y" .. you guys aren't needed to defend here, but we need "Base B" scouted, get up ahead and let us know what you see..they're going to be there soon, so maybe mine the road, get some AV turrets up and hold em for a few
Outfit Z.. you have half a platoon now, you're going to flank from the west.. you're in charge of the sundy.. in fact, bring 2.
Outfit "A" ... bring as much armor as you can.. get ready to roll to the waypoint on our command.. we need to push them off of that ridge. (and this LITTLE outfit of about 10 guys came in with a few harassers, and then a handful of Lightnings..I want to say 4 tanks, 3 Harassers.. with their small numbers, they had a HUGE impact on the whole picture)

Things that I see happening.. we're finding TONS of ways to integrate smaller outfits, squads, and other platoons into the bigger picture. It just takes good coordination. it's 2013.. gaming isn't new.. get a TS server, talk to the other guys on your server.. and make ti happen.

Actual conversation on our TS server the night of the latest GU:

"So, who are you guys anyhow? From Connery?"
"Yeah, welcome to our TS"
"Cool, we're from Helios, how do you want to run this?"
--discussion about our Outfit leader(s) and theirs, roles.. how TS chatter and coordination will work..--
Then we played a near flawless continent cap. It was prettier than Ashley Judd making out with Jessica Biel.

And the quality of analysis generally in the business world is piss poor, what you going to do eh. As i've said, went though several drafts, the only one that despite the **** grammar and spelling mistakes, gave both sides the proper weighting that justified the relatively strong conclusion came it at 4016.

Sorry, its proper analysis time, as I've said it was written with SoE in mind, but I wanted to open it up to a larger audience. There are plenty of one sided threads full of nonsense out there are the moment, its an ecology richer than the amazon in fact. I wanted to go down the careful analysis route.

If it must be summated.
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There are good points, some surprised me. These are because of reasons 1-3

There are bad points, these largely were obvious from a while back, they are A-C

There are ways people are misunderstanding it, these are X-Y.

Conclusion
On balance given A-C mostly come from the games base mechanics, it is a postive change. However, despite 1-3, the project of reforming the metagame is far from complete, the answer is not to tweak lattice but to start development on a fairly radical revamp of resources that helps to complement 1-3 whilst adressing A-C and 1-3's impact on A-C.
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I was actually hoping for your opinion on it, when I say you'd posted in this thread. I am disappoint, please rediscover the magic of reading.

I agree entirely with this.

We need a population imbalance fix and we need a resource system. We fix the issue of steamrolling if all factions are somewhat equal on the server as a whole. And we give people a REASON to do what they do with a resource system.

I would also like to contribute that destroying and adding links of the lattice, by destruction of generators or deployment of a vehicle, would help the system along, by making people maintain the existing lattice and perhaps expanding on it.

Also, when it comes to the eventual point at which defenses are overwhelmed, there is one Simple answer to this: Combat engineers. Deployables that can be used by the engineer and/or others, shields, walls, etc. Things that can be destroyed by redirect people in the battle, could solve 90% of that problem right there, and make engineer a more fun class to play.

As I say in the piece, outfits that value cooperation with others like my own, are not finding a lack of things to do. Its why its not one of my main points.

I think necessitating a drive from the WG to in effect the other side of the map, would be a bad idea. Likewise making it so literally every base required some form of garrison would also not work.

Ideally, the system would be entirely automated, untill you were about 3-4 bases from the front (so unless you were outright winning, it may be from the warp gate). However, after that there should be some sort of logistics line, which is vulnerable and the other side if they know what there doing should be aiming to attack.

Yet at the same time, the territory battle is always going to be the main show. And whilst say setting up an ambush and interdicting the movement of ants, to the frontline base of the enemy may result in his attack failing as he can't pull enough vehicles or his spawns even from the forward sundies (link to said forward most base in a lane) are impeded by 2-3 seconds (or whatever) may make the attack fail. It won't win you the lane unless you also fight a good battle.

It'll just make it less of a roflstomp, as the larger force will be having to draw its resources from a finite pool of nanites and in this will be their weakness. Whereas the smaller force can tolerate a few ants lost of a few gens at bases behind the lines down.

Thanks for this, Mondando. You've explained exactly what needs to be done to finish the Lattice, and resources are the key component. I'd like to see spawn times reduce by a few seconds the farther along a link you get from a major facility that provides that particular resource. 4 bases from your Biolab or Warpgate? That's a 4 second spawn penalty. Have a similar restriction for vehicles and air (vehicle timer and increased resource cost) and we're halfway there. It makes the bases strategic targets instead of stops along the way.

Its one of the things I like most about it, the other night we were in a situation where we were fighting at Ns research labs, waiting for the resecure to go through on Vanu archives before we could even cap the point, we ended up getting overwhelmed but it preserved the whole 'need a link to cap thing' in a nice way and forced the Nc as a whole (who were cooperating a lot at the time) to fight on mutliple fronts at once.

Thing, at the end of the day its a base capture logic change and if you start adding in more and more links it becomes the hex system again.

Be interested to see you explore this idea more, but with an eye to avoiding the problems of dispersal.

I imagine that would be a big ask given the engine, though one of the things I think makes defence strangely weak, is there are few few ways to give much concealment to regular infantry. Infact the weird wall thing just before the SCU in amp stations is one of the few things that actually affords it. Deployable but destructible ones of those could be good.


My issue is though, if you come at this by just buffing the hell of defence, and make it so only overwhelming numbers can take most bases, then you've create a new balance problem.

Well not so much finish the lattice, I think it is finished, more finish the metagame redesign.

As to this, what i'd do and the rough system I've got whacked up elsewhere (in my sig is one of the earlier versions). Is:

Every base has a nannite store (or if you want to keep the 3 resource system, that).

Sundies are linked to the closest allied base.

To pull vehicles, depletes it and below a certain threshold cool down shoots up massively.

To pull air, depletes it cool down shoots up massively

and spawn time for infantry both at the base and at linked sundies si a function of the total amount of infantry resources in the store and each spawn depletes it slightly.

Now each base generates a certain amount by itself. However, when there is a large force in essence operating out of the base the demand will massively exceed supply.

Thus, we have an ANT module for the sundy and/or the galaxy (as ash suggesteed we probs don't need a new vehicle). this allows it to transport a lareg amount of nannites/inf/vehicle resources whatever. But makes it super vunerable to fire and (why not) highly explosive.

These can be loaded up at depots, which will be at every 3 or 4'th base and the warpgate. And then driven to the forward base and unloaded into its nannite store for a healthy XP reward.

So in a large battle, 4-5 people running ANT sundies up to the forward base, is going to make that attack or defence going from it far more efficent due to being able to put more vehicles and men on the field, than the side with equal or greater numbers thats just not bothering to.

However, given these sundies are going to be precious and vulnerable. They are going to have to run a gauntlet of mined roads, people setting up ambushes and A2G attack ESF and Libs up to the base. So your going to need people to react to nests of enemies setting up ambushes on roads and people are going to have to fly Combat air patrols in ESF's, if they are to stand a reasonable chance of making it to the front.

Yet at the same time, pull everyone off the front to play logistics your going to get your *** handed to you and warpgated.

So much like a lack of resources in say Total Annihilation or Suprecommander you never find yourself unable to do something, it only runs at a painfully slow speed when you've not bothered to keep your resource system, or in this case a logistics network, up to scratch.

-how gens work into this system is up for debate, i think its important the system should never be completely destroyable and made slower.
-Need to be made non-spamable but also non-griefable, but we can do that allready to an extent with AMS sundies so I don't think avoiding potential issues is a show stopper.

Well simply put, the way to balance it out, is to grant it only to select people, make it very expensive (Yet rewarding), to make the options which you can add in new links limited, and to make destruction of these links easy.

Granting it to fewer people (maybe only outfits by outfit certs), means that there is just a smaller number of people that can tap this resource, and have to consider it's use prior to deploying it.

Making it expensive, means that you potentially drain a majority of your resources to draw it, thus tapping you out of other things for a time.

Limiting options is as simple as saying: You have to have adjacency geographically, before the link can be deployed. This way you aren't getting links across the map.

And making the links destructable, means that a LA with C4 can take the thing out. it's high risk because it's so flimsy, but high reward, because your talking about openning up another front in the enemy lines.

And I hesitate to expound on this, as it was/is Hoki's idea.

Well, in PS2 everything is weak. TTK is short, tanks are powerful now, but are still quite easily destroyed. Aircraft fall out of the sky if there is a strong wind. And deployable base defenses would have to be the same. Simply expanding the options for deployables to engineers and allowing multiple things to be put out at once, will only at best Channel, redirect, or stop a limited portion of the base. I only can think of 1-2 locations where they could potentially just STOP the ground war... and in those cases, they are Never going to stop air support. Example: Scarred Mesa. I could see deployables making infantry rushes on Scarred Mesa very very difficult. This would be balanced out though, as the easiest way to take scarred mesa now, is to use Air drops. I don't see that changing, and air drops are chaotic by nature, you can't really Counter 12 people dropping randomly over the base, you can't prepare for it, unless you put your own people at a disadvantage.

I just frankly don't see it being possible to make a location in PS2 unassailable, but I do acknowledge the concern, and think that progressing carefully would be the best option.

That said, support deployables in and of themselves would be the simplest and most easily received answer for this particular problem at hand.

Let me put it this way. What necessitates it and what would it add?

Ok so what deployables then? We allready have engi only use AV and AI turrets and its been hinted AA will be around eventually. So what tank traps, miniature bunkers?

Well lets see:

I would say that it could potentially allow for the ability to open up a front behind the enemy line. Currently we have a situation where adjacent bases are not linked by lattice, because geographically and geomorphologically they are separated via mountains, hills, arroyos, etc. This makes sense and is the foundation of the lattice's current set up. But, what if you COULD make two locations adjacent through some sort of warp? A transportation ring that runs between two bases and allows you to hop out of one and start influencing another. It gives people much more of that artificial freedom they are looking for, it would make fights more interesting if the warp links could be limited in their use.

So necessity: Allowing people to influence the world in a tangible way, allowing for quick transport, allowing for a strategic scale influence on outift or platoon leads, allowing for ease of flanking or what have you.

I would say the placement of multiple turrets that could be manned by people who are not the engineer (Maybe smaller, less powerful varients than what you can deploy one of)
Radar deployables that could scan the area (Instead of continually using flashes for this function)
A small wall/barrier that can't be jumped over
Deployable shields that block fire from one direction but are linear
shield domes
Cloaking fields
Transporters (Think of putting one transporter ontop of a hill and the other on the bottom of the hill near a sunderer, quick jumping from location to location)

All of these do not have to be used by the engineer I think. Radar deployables could go to the infiltrator, transporters to the LA, etc.

I would say that the AA turrets for these kind of deployables would be a mistake. What possible use do they have? We already have maxes, ESRLs, RLs, Skyguards, and a slew of small arms to deter aircraft, making it a deployable turret is just needless at this point.

A quick idea/food for thought regarding resources. The goal is to have an automated system that could work in either Lattice or Improved Hex and enables basic play with spread out troops automatically but necessitates player-driven supply transfer if you gather a lot of troops in one area or (with Hex) conquer outside the supply transfer network (lattice). It's also supposed to be more difficult over long distances.

In the following, 'supply' is an abstraction for everything required to maintain an army: food, gas, ammo, clone bodies, energy, batteries, medals, propaganda and whatnot. 'Resources' are anything valuable that's gathered from the terrain: biomass, auraxium, other minerals etc. Numbers haven't been balanced to actually work so don't pay too much attention to them.

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The main points:

- Assign a 'resource generation' value for each region.
- Convert resources into supply at warpgate.
- Create 'supply stockpiles' at each region, with a maximum amount of supply stored.
- Assign a 'bandwidth' value for each region.
- Assign a 'supply transfer cost' to each region.
- Create a vehicle that can move supply around, bypassing the bandwidth limitations and supply transfer cost.
- Make sure supply&resources don't move automatically from/to regions that aren't connected to the warpgate via the (lattice) link.
- Bases under capture contention transfer supply back to the warpgate in an emergency (as SCU is disabled)
- Players are limited in how much supply each individual can use up over a period of time, but there would be no cooldowns on vehicles.

Supply is used up over time as players are in a region. Activity (respawning, resupplying etc) may change the rate of supply usage. The idea here is to enable attrition through kills and from gathering lots of players in one region (with warpgate as an exception: we don't want afk people to use up resources).

Higher amounts of resources are generally produced near warpgates, but not as a strict rule: some areas need to be more valuable.

The resources are routed first to a warpgate before they become useful as supply. This is to ensure extending far from your warpgate increases the supply route distance even when you close with enemy warpgate and grab their higher resource generating regions. Not every region needs to generate resources.. for example the major facilities don't need to produce any, while they could actually use up supply just to keep powered up and providing their benefit.

Bandwidth is the total amount of supply units that can be (automatically) routed through a region. If region X and region Y each have a current drain of 1000 supply over time and they need to route their supply through region Z which has only 1000 bandwidth, they will only receive 500 supply each, thus losing supply from the stockpile.

The total amount of supply being used is actually more than 500 though, as the act of transporting it also uses up supply. The total route to regions X and Y also include regions A,B,C and D, giving a total supply route length of 5 regions. Each link in the supply chain uses up a percentage of the total, which varies by region size (for simple approach) or actual distance through the region. An example could be 3%, 8%, 10%, 8% and 10% supply transfer costs, requiring a 500/(0.97*0.92*0.9*0.92*0.9)= ~752 total supply from the warpgate. There would have to be some prioritising about where supply is routed to when multiple areas need supply.. the frontline areas should probably receive most of the supply even if territories right next to the warpgate are almost empty.

It may sound complex but it can be so since this is the automated part. All players really need to know is the amount of supply left in a stockpile and whether it's increasing or not, and at what rate (timers to empty/full aren't necessary since the rate of consumption would be variable, leading to inaccurate/wildly shifting timers).

The vehicle to move supply around is for those moments when you're using up supply faster than it can be automatically routed to where it's needed. Although I haven't played PS1, I envision this to be ANT. Not going to touch on this a lot, but it should be costly to pull so that everyone doesn't do it all the time and that hunting them wouldn't only destroy their carried supply but by itself be a drain on supply.

Bases under contention would transfer any remaining supply back to warpgate when/if the SCU is disabled, as long as they have a connection. This feature would be breaking the logic of the supply chain system, but I feel it's necessary to not punish the losing side too much while making counterattacks easier (since the newly captured base will start at zero supply in stockpile unless players bring more in). Should an attacking faction lose a base far away from their warpgate, keep in mind that routing the supply back there again (automatically) incurs the higher supply transfer cost.

Capturing cut off bases would let the attackers keep any supply still left in the base although I think it's likely

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This system is supposed to work on improved Hex or Lattice, although the cutting off portion works better in Hex, I think. The improved Hex system would have a Lattice-like supply transfer network (which could be modeled as pipes or something on the actual map).

In a Hex system, captures could be done outside the supply network (lattice). The bases would utilise supply as usual, but none would get there automatically - Players would need to do the supply transporting themselves. An out-of-supply base reverts to neutral in a few minutes (and is clearly displayed on the map). Out-of-supply bases would not enable further conquest of territory, nor would neutral bases.

It's likely any base captured while bypassing the supply network (lattice) would be connected to the network of the original owners should they take it back. Capture times on bases that aren't connected to the supply network would be longer, so the original owners wouldn't spend as much time recovering the base either - This makes ghost capping (assuming players still don't find territory valuable enough otherwise) without a supply network link (lattice) take more manpowertime than recovering it would, making it a bad choice. On the other hand, these sort of captures could disrupt the enemy supply transfer network, cutting off supplies to a main battlefield and the enemy could respond by defending at this new base or by using ANTs to bring supplies to the main battlefield itself.

Exp bonuses for capturing territory would be delayed until supply stockpile reaches a certain level, higher than a single vehicle can bring in.

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New types of alerts/events could include stuff like:
- Rare resources found in <random areas>, only transportable by players. Resources can't normally be collected by players. Faction to collect most gets a moderate exp bonus in addition to the direct supply bonus.
- Weather conditions increase supply transfer cost!
- Off-world resource convoys from far away lands increase warpgate supply production a lot, go wild with vehicles!

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Argh, been writing this too long, need to stop now, my brain is buzzing. I probably forgot to include a ton of thoughts because I just can't type that fast. Hope it makes some sense to someone at least.

edit: you guys posted half a thread more stuff in the meanwhile