Deeply worried about the amount of walls...

When playing on indar, I already tend to circle around enemy base walls looking for some entrance to get inside. I think this already is bad for the battleflow, fortunately not all bases are affected by it.

However, when I saw the "Esamir Battle Flow" preview, that makes me really, really worried. This will end up badly in a close-quaters spam fest, so well known to me from other games which included too small maps holding too many people at once.

I also have a bad sense that the world is going to split into regions where only one thing can be done:
- At location X you can only run as infantry
- At location Y you can only run in vehicles (or die)
- Location Z is designed to deploy your sunderer
- Location W is the only entrance to X
- Location YY is the only way from this base to that base
etc...

I am deeply worried about that! Please, prove me wrong!

yeah there are Walls everywhere in the Esamir preview, when we'll get our hands on it when PTS gets updated we will try and eventually suggest more openings.

I love the new bases redesign

You can overdo walls. OP is quite correct there. I like to give the example of Material Storage. The Walls there make it easier to hold the capture point as an attacker than to reclaim it as the defender. Putting more or less random walls everywhere does not make for a better map.
Please SOE get a Military Consultant for base design.

If these walls go in everywhere they need to immediately reverse the nerfs on the HE and HEAT cannons. HE is already highly situational right now, this will just make it useless.

If they did that it would be even worse. What kind of military consultant gives advice on how to make it not impossible to attack a base?

Oh no bases that can be defended. How bad would that be. Being able to actually make a stand with a small force against a big one. I would enjoy it very much.
Putting up an offense in one of the few bases that you could actually kind of be defended were always the most fun to me. Sadly there is so few of those bases.

Community and SOE hate high defense bases. Just look at the Crown, it was nerded to hell and back at least 3 times. All cause it was too easy to defend

The community hates defensible bases? Arguable. Most players I know are quite happy to fight a protracted battle over the more interesting bases rather than simply zerging the smaller ones. You probably mean the zerglingers.

I think the walls as such are great. Really like most of the stuff I've seen so far on Indar. However each base should have a reasonable amount of small/medium side-entrances like it is currently done with quite a few (I haven't had really time or rather the peace to take a closer look at all the redesigns) bases on Indar.

2, 3 of those could already provide a valid tactical approach for both defenders and attackers.

I am in favor of small gangways, stairs and platforms like that.


In the end however, no base in PS2 is designed for the current amount of players. If there are too many, nothing matters anymore really unless the bases and quite a bit of the games design is completely re-designed.

Certainly it is better than those snow drifts that allow enemy sunderers to get inside your Biolab outer walls while the gate gen is still up?

Do you know what that means, in the context of the game? What "be defended" means? It means a life span of under one second, constantly being killed by grenades you didn't see and enemies that didn't render, slammed into an awful mess where the game barely functions.

FORCING that kind of extremely, extremely close quarters game play isn't doing this game any favors. It defeats the entire purpose of having a large, open, combined arms game to turn it into a tiny little arena twitch shooter.

So instead we should have an offensively one-sided zergfest where the ONLY way to defend is to smash even MORE people into a single area, or only defend at certain locations such as scarred mesa skydock and the ascent?

Personally, I despise defending places such as Glacier Station and Apex Genetics. They are basically designed such that defense is nothing but being farmed by tanks shelling you, with infantry swarming you from every possible angle, and a gigantic cluster%*^$ of infantry camping your spawn room.

It turns an otherwise fun game into a boring infantry farm for the attackers, and a meatgrinder that makes you want to stop playing all together for the defense.

How is it fun when there's no way for the defenders to fight back, and all you can do is camp a spawn for 10 minutes? How is it fun when all you can do is run out to your death as a defender, and then respawn at the next base for a 10 minute repeat?

Every fun battle has a good defense and a good offense. When it is one-sided nobody has fun. In the current game, it is offensively one-sided far more than defensively.

When it is defensively one-sided, it will eventually turn into offensively after a counter-attack or go back/forth. When it is offensively, it STAYS offensively, and nobody will enjoy it (unless you're a sadist who plays the game for certs by spamming HE tank rounds for hours).

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You're essentially saying that bases shouldn't be defensible because it means you'll have actual battles where both sides have to suffer, instead of only the defense being spam killed.

Flying LAs dropping C4 all over....C4 SPAM FEST !

Oh god

Walls: "We're sorry you can't park a tank outside a base and AFK farm infantry in 10 minute intervals".

HE is meant to be a situational tool that you use when you know you'll only be fighting infantry. HEAT is meant to be a tool for almost every situation. AP is meant to be a tool for you to use when you know you'll mainly be fighting vehicles, or you want to dedicate yourself just to that.

I don't care about the AFK farmers and walls, what I care about is that they nerfed the HE cannon because of fail base design. Now they are correcting that issue so they can now revert the temporary fix.

I have all 3 guns unlocked and almost fully certed and one of them isn't really used. There is never a situation where I feel it's important that I pull an HE cannon. The minimal benefit of a marginally increased splash radius does not outweigh the cost of using it in the field.

The only times I actually do pull HE is on a whim like a fourth car in your garage you only drive when you are exceptionally bored.

I would much like to see PS2's combat be more of a stage by stage thing instead of the BLITZKRIEG tankfest it is now.

Open-field combat into streets into CQB?

Sounds....balanced for everyone!

I like them, but I dont think all bases need so many walls around them. Hope they don't go overboard

Guys.... let me be clear: I am not against defensible bases. I would like to see however that goal to be achieved in some other way than putting walls everywhere.
I believe Quartz Ridge, Indar Excavation, Camp Connery or even the Crown (before the points were moved) or Crossroads or Regent Rock are quite defensible without the pletitude of walls (although the eastern wall of Camp Connery could have one or two more doors already) and I have seen many interesting fights there.
At all those locations, tanks can reach almost every spot, but often it is hard to do so if the defenders adjust accordingly (lancer squads, striker squads, AV turrets etc...). Some of those bases are hard to approach because of huge open spaces. Some places are hard to approach because of narrow passages leading to it. At some bases you simply cannot drive tanks all around the base, so a zerg approaching from one direction end up having a cluster of tank only at one side of the base.

Bottom line - I believe bases can be made harder-on-tanks by simply adjusting the tank-approach terrain and the terrain between the bases, rather than redesigning the base itself by putting walls everywhere.

Going overboard - that's what worries me, based on the video I have seen!

Care to explain why?

Wait, what kind of military consultant gives advice on how to make it possible to attack a base? That doesn't seem like much of a retort once the double negative is removed. Wouldn't the answer to that be: The good kind.

Yeah, a game developer doesn't do this. Otherwise all bases will be harder than the original tech plants to capture and we get a bunch of people whining on the forums.