Continental Lattice- Warpgate Capture

This right here is the most important reason for the existence of Sanctuaries that I've see anyone come up with. It's the logical (to me anyway) solution. That will, of course, have to have some kind of interplay with the new resource system being designed so that any faction that gets zerobased doesn't end up with no resources AND no territory (catch 22).


As to the system overall, Linking a base (or bases, doesn't have to be a tech plant, although that'd be nice) to the WG and using that as your barometer for the 'faction' of the WG a la Planetside.

The towers at the WG should stay and must play a part in any WG fight. There was usually naught but a few scarce trees and two massive armies staring at each other with less than 100m distance. Fun for a bit but usually devolved into Reavers diving in and out of the WG shields.

Tower hopping, a popular NC tactic (although everyone did it from time to time) was a huge pain in the *** to stop. You could crush one tower only to have the entire enemy faction spawn into the one other tower they owned on the other side of the cont.
Removing the ability to push out from a base on a enemy locked continent would limit the ability to hop from base to base. If the NC lock Indar then the TR shouldn't be able to ghost and backhack for the next hour if all they own is Camp Waterson. The TR would have to make a last stand because they've no link to anywhere else.

As a final note: The ability to drain a base and open up another front was a MASSIVE part of the overall strategic game and solved the problem of stalemates. I sincerely hope this makes a return in PS2.

The issue with the slow auto-capture is that it doesn't solve the initial problem. With or without it, you would still need to stay back and capture those territories. I agree that at the very least a slow auto-capture would be needed (if not an instant auto-capture). But I don't believe it removes the downside of players bogged down in capturing undefended territories.

As an alternative, the mechanic could be that all six (three on the defensive front) adjacent territories must be held to OWN the warpgate. Lose any one of the adjacent outposts and the warpgate becomes neutral, allowing both empires to flow back and forth. If one empire is able to push through the gate and take all three of the outposts on the far side as well all defend all of the outposts on their own side, then they gain ownership of the gate and "Lock" the continent from that direction.


The reasoning something I stated in my original thread - Warpgates should be as little of a road block to movement between continents as possible. I think this system would lead to warpgates being open more often than not, and it would making locking out an entire continent a very difficult task. One very interesting side effect of this type of system is that it allows a force to drive to the warpgate as a means of connecting to the other two bases that attach to the gate.

This is exactly why I proposed the "Instant Capture" mechanic. It is awkward to have opposing forces sitting in the same warp bubble looking at each other. The instant capture solves this problem by granting both sides of the gate to the winning team and forcing out the losers if they are inside the bubble on either end. The empire the lost the gate have the ability to start trying to capture the tower back and the winners are force to rush through the gate and defend the tower on the far side. I like this because it does have a more predictable flow of battle with the potential to see-saw back and forth through the gate until a winner emerges.

On the other hand, the neutral gates did work ok in PS1 and had the unintended bonus of allowing enemies to get close and see each other. That is even more of a bonus in PS2 where players have customized appearances, so that just adds a touch of fun. However, it does lead to stand-offs at the gate, which we saw a lot of in PS1.

Wow, these are some tough ones.

1. Downtime - A solution to this could be a derivative of the "Territory Influence" mechanic. Instead of keying off of adjacent territory control, it could key on Continental Population of the defending empire. So if the continental population of an empire dropped below 10%, any attacking empire would gain a bonus to capture speed on any of that empires territories on the continent. The population threshold and capture speed bonuses could be tweaked to balance it out.

2. One way to solve warpgate camping is to allow the controlling empire to shoot out. This goes back to the "Instant Control" mechanic because it doesn't really work with a neutral warpgate. With neutral warpgates, we are stuck doing it the PS1 way, which is building a massive force before swarming out of the game. That's fine if you have a bunch of players, but it's a trap if there is just a few.

3. Obviously from my post, I'd like to see all warpgates up for grabs and empires battling to control them. I've never been much of a fan of the "Warpgate Rotations". I'd much rather see them be more static because that leads to more of a sense of ownership. I think I'll be in the minority on this one. Maybe fewer rotations through out the year is a better compromise. A rotation every 4 months would give each Empire a long time at each warpgate.

4. Empire Compression - Honestly the thought had never occurred to me. But now that I'm thinking about it, this is obviously a HUGE problem for implementing the global lattice in any iteration. No matter which way I turn it, I can only think of one way to protect against it, and that's not to implement the global lattice until at least 6 full size continents are available. Even more troublesome is that if the current zoning method is kept, how do you integrate Battle Islands? By their nature they need to sit on a lattice line. This is a really tough one and I'm going to have to think about it for a while.
Thanks for the great reply!

1. Downtime will just have to happen. It's unfortunate, but it is a part of Planetside. You can always go through the battle island to get to another continent.Or, maybe find a way to speed up cap times once enemy population on the "home continent" drops below a certain percentage, say 15% or so. I still believe that bases that are cut off from connecting territory should slowly flip to "neutral," say over the course of 20 minutes, which will both help cut down on downtime, and stop factions from turtling into a cut off territory half way across a continent.

2. Say TR controls a gate, but is getting pushed out by both the VS and NC. VS take 2 sides of the gate, NC takes the other. TR will be locked out of spawning in that warpgate, but the other two have to fight each other to gain access to that gate, making it easier for TR to push back into the continent. If this is how it works, then a territory or two from the warpgate, needs to be lattice jumps to the other three territories so you don't have to go through another 2 hours of capping to get to the other side

3. I would like to see each faction have a "home warpgate" on one continent. Then you can just rotate home warpgates. In the future, I would like to see sanctuaries like PS1 had, that you can rotate which warpgate they link to.

4. This shouldn't be too big of a deal IMO, because rarely will TWO factions push onto one empire's home continent, therefore, you should have more room for players. This is something that you guys will either have to find a way to deal with, or you might not be able to implement continent locking until Searhus is finished.

On Warpgate Capture and Neutrality

The problem with netural warpgates is that a warpgate represensts the location that someone spawns into a map. Spawning, like in a spawn room, is a disorienting affair and frought with some interesting timing issues: I may 'exist' on the map, but my computer hasn't caught up yet so for a few crucial seconds I'm essentially AFK. This means it'd quickly devolve into people camping on each side, which is going to bog down WG fights rather than push them forward.

This is why I suggested the idea that while a WG is being contested, it actually swaps ownership back and forth on a timer: giving the attackers a fixed time to secure their beachhead, then giving the defenders the same time to re-secure back on their original continent. It's somewhat game-y, but it keeps the actual fighting exclusively on one continent at a time and keeps the zoning / reloading away from the actual fighting.

On Downtime

This could work, and was my original thought. The reason I discarded it in favor of the 'go anywhere!' approach is because the 'go anywhere!' approach means you're always dealing with a fixed amount of time to lock that faction out of the continent: the time it takes to secure the three WG bases, plus the time it takes to secure the WG itself. The slow 'auto-capture' of the rest of the bases means that if the faction that left comes back fairly quickly they're not completely ruined, and it provides for some much more interesting fights if there's two factions left on the continent and it was only abandoned by faction #3. It also means that in the event of a false-positive for 'faction has abandoned' it only creates a temporary interesting scenario rather than totally trashing that faction's progress.

On Rotations

I agree! I'd love to see them fixed too. It promotes a sense of ownership, and a sense of 'this is our turf!'

On Compression

I really like the sanctuary approach here, because it gives a faction a guaranteed choice of a continent and a battle-island to attack at any given time. This splits that faction between two maps even if they've been driven right back to having nothing. The idea of a third 'alert' lattice link forming to a temporary fourth WG on certain continents also provides a really nice release valve here, where that link only opens if the faction is really getting slammed - and even then only intermittently.

Slow auto-capture is only half of the solution. The other half is that if a population is recognised as being no longer on a continent, then a faction that does meet the on-continent criteria can launch an attack on any territory belonging to the off-continent faction irrespective of lattice links.

Thus, if the TR are on an continent and the VS leave, the TR can go directly from where they are now to the VS WG-bases and start taking the VS warpgate, ignoring all the bases in between and letting the auto-capture worry about those. I'm sure 1-2 ghost-cappers will probably also go and cap those forgotten territories for their capture xp, but the important thing is the faction itself doesn't have to hang around.

Where this solution becomes interesting is if you have the TR, NC and VS all on the continent together and the VS pull out. This means that all VS territory is now open to both the TR and the NC. Do you go for the VS turf that's adjacent to the TR? Do you go for the WG? What are the TR going to do? So not only does it solve the issue in a 2-faction squabble, but it also instantly pushes the two remaining factions into direct conflict in the case of a faction pulling out of a 3-way squabble.

And to restate:

A faction is considered 'off' a continent if their on-continent population is below ~15%. However, for a faction to initiate a capture with the grab-anything mechanic, that faction must in turn have at least 100 people (tune-able value) on the continent at the time the capture is initiated. This is to stop 2 people insta-grab-ghost-capping an entire continent at 4am.



The alternative to the slow-cap method is to say that if a single faction controls all WGs onto a continent, then all territory instantly becomes owned by that faction. However, for this to work the 'ignore lattice' mechanic also needs to be in place.

Sanctuaries only the solve the problem of where to put players it doesn't solve a the problem of what to do with them ..

The only way Sanc's would work is to have the " lock " time so short it would be worthless to have it in the first place .. The greatest killer to the game would be to have people clicking their heels in a sanc or VR or w/e for any period of time ..

Take Connery for example on weekends .. It's get pretty full so you can't with any logic have 500 players on one cont ( w/e the lowered pop is ), 300 players on a BI and 700 in a Sanc

I am going to be an old fart and say I would prefer PS1 style mechanics. In PS1 you could travel to continents you didn't own, but couldn't hack anything but towers (which were not on a lattice). Other than that, your ideas look good.

I think that there should be a massive fights for warp gates, giving the enemy one final chance for defense. The Massive warpgate sheild should flicker, and all hell should break lose. The Warpgate would of course need an update, made into an actual base that could be fought over. Would be a lot of work, but seeing what you and the other level designers have done with Amerish, i'm sure you could make the warpgates really interesting fights. 3 Capture points. Spawn time would also be normalized and not instant like it is now for fights when the shield flickers out. A large generator should be at the central area of the Warpgate, (the big glowing platform where the vanu have their raves), and the platform's lights will turn off with a massive electrical boom. The large spawn area will then be able to be raided, while the enemies make their final stand attempting to repair the generator. When the base is captured, a spawn tube will open up for use, and allow teleportation to a battle island. On the battle island, 250 of each empire will be allowed, and the enemies could either push back, or be pushed to the warpgate of the next continent. Those who cannot make it to the battle island would be taken to a forward spawn on the next continent , where they could start fighting for it against the opposing faction who couldn't make it to the island. If the island is lost, then the forward spawn is lost, and the newly captured territory is deprived of resources, removing the attacking factions momentum, and eventually taken back, unless your faction can push back into the battle island. Just an idea, probably far more complicated then it needs to be .

Sanctuaries can help with the "what to do with them"-problem. Think of it is a gateway to go to a battle. If we would have "homebases" like in the first concept picture, what would happen if those never change? Or if that continent is full? Or if it is getting camped from all sides?

It can be used to direct the flow by opening extra doorways that you can't shut down, because you can't capture them. Those routes can be channeling the numbers from one faction to another.

What if the NC Sanc has been pushed off by the TR from their own "natural" continent? A link through a battle Island to get to the "natural" continent of the VS would allow for a way out.

But if your homebase get's camped, you can't go anywhere ...

So in theory cont's may never be able to be locked ( depending on population and number of cont's ) so basically it's not something worth implementing until there is enough cont's for locks to happen and still retain full play ability for the player base. Four would not be enough unless you had 5 or 6 battle islands as well.

1. Players should not be locked out automatically. Remaining players should remain on the continent, and would have a (albeit small) chance of unlocking the warpgate. However, those who have taken over the warpgate would be given the task of securing unconquered territories.
2. Warpgates should be incredibly fortified (let your level designers run wild) and an attacker would require overwhelming numbers and/or skillful tactics to take it. The portal itself would be inside the main structure. If a different faction switches continents into an enemy warpgate, they will be in control of this interior and would have to push outward to seize the entire warpgate.
3. Have them remain the same, but have different positions for different servers (for variety). It must be an epic struggle to take over a warpgate.
4. Probably the most difficult question. Sanctuaries would help to an extent, but no one wants to sit around there indefinitely.

I hope you make it so that holding three adjacent outposts would only take down the shield, allowing entry. To actually take the warpgate should require going through intricate and layered defenses. To prevent enemies from warping in reinforcements would require taking down some kind of generator. To actually sieze the warpgate would require some modified kind of capture point.

I'm thinking that you can't lock a continent that is attached to someone else's sanctuary at all. You can own it (taking the requisite percentage of territory), but you can never capture the warp-gate so you can never stop them from launching a counter-attack.

Anyway...

this is where the 'emergency lattice' link comes into play. If a faction population is over 500, and they're being pushed back so far that they only have their 'home' continents, then opening an emergency link from sanctuary to (say) hossin gives them another front to push. That's another 500 players on a map, meaning if the faction is at maximum capacity you've only got 200 more to house.

Thus introducing the potential for an emergency battle-isle at 1000+ pop while being dominated and you're guaranteed to house the entire faction.

That said, if a faction has 1500 simultaneous log-ins... what the heck are they doing pushed off the entire map on all fronts?!

Intercontinental lattice =/= continent locking.

Actually being able to lock a continent a la PS1 should never happen until we have a scenario where continents are sitting fallow and unplayed at prime-time on the most populated servers.

Which means the game would probably need at least seven continents, and would absolutely need three full-continent lattice links from each faction's starting location that cannot be compromised.

Which is pretty much what PS1 had.

Personally I'll be happy if full-on lockout-timer-based continent locking never happens. The only reason it happened in PS1 was because Warpgates could be used by anyone at any time, and you could start a hack on any base anywhere by draining it.

That's part of the issue I see of any concept without a fixated starting point and not enough continents. In theory you can implement locking with "home bases" with four continents, but the only "lockable" continent would be the one connecting all the others.

Which, under normal circumstances, will almost never happen. The pictured concept of Hossin in the middle will make sure that it will turn into the new Cyssor, it was the continent that meant the least in PS1 because it flipped hands so often and quickly ... it also was in the "center" of the established "home continents" later during the game. It was a constant 3-way fest.

While you still have the Battle Islands to create "flanks", no one will give up his home continent, so once you get past the Battle Island ... you will not really move much further unless your empire has like 45%+ pop and is dominating.

The problem with these "home continents" in PS1 was that you rarely fought over them, because the entire empire would rally to defend it. Which than quickly established a hand full of continents that were fought over, namely Searhus, Esamir, Cyssor and Oshur(Later Battle Islands), if my NC Werner Memory serves me right.

The issue PS1 had was that those Lattice links never changed. Something that NEEDS to happen if we ever learned anything from PS1 ... and you can't really do that with entire home Continents ... unless you add more.

Would it be better not to have home continents at all then . But rather have a central HUB continent that's always open to be contested until they have more continents ?

So for example Hossin being the unlock-able HUB

I really don't think neutral warpgates would work very well. I think the "instant capture" idea when the attacker owns all 3 bases would create less standoff-ish game play.

Give a 5 minute timer for the defenders who were thrown out a chance to head to the linked continent bases and set up some defense lines of some kind, then allow the attackers through. A 30 minute timer for the attackers to acquire at least 1 base linked to the warpgate gives them a "foothold", and the warpgate stays flipped. If they fail, the warpgate flips back to the original owner, and the former attackers are now the defenders again. Same 5 minute timer to head back to the other continent before the counter invasion begins.

The other issue about Empire compression could be solved if it was impossible to have your "home continent" locked against you.

As for breaking into a locked continent, this is more of an issue that I think needs some consideration. Let's say the VS gain total control of Esamir, their home continent, and it "locks". How long until enemy empires are allowed an attempt at attacking it? What would "breaking a lock" entail? Just normal base capturing through warpgates mechanics? Or something more monumental to illustrate the defensive advantage of achieving a continent lock?

Basically, Sanctuaries ...

That said, I think the concept of having home turf is actually really useful. Having an area that forces a faction to pull back because they place higher value on defending another region opens up strategic options.

To make continents themselves not homes all you need to do is ensure each faction has two continents to call home, and that each of those continents is also called home by another faction. However this doesn't make the problem go away, it just changes its scope. Instead of claiming the continent, each faction will claim their corner of the continent...

The only way to totally eliminate the idea that certain areas of the map don't get seen/fought over would be to rotate which continents fulfil which roles. So this month Hossin is the middle continent. Next month Hossin is the NCs home continent and now Amerish is the middle continent. But is this necessarily a good idea? I like the idea of 'this turf is mine' - it gives a sense of ownership, and a real sense of 'oh crap we're being overwhelmed' when the fighting does actually move to the lands you call home.

Bascially ... PS1. Just saying ...

This was a suggestion on how to improve the PS1 Lattice.



And you rotate the 3 Sanctuaries around it every month or so.