Large Outposts are problematic. (semi-rant)

Just to clarify, large outposts are the non-facility bases with multiple capture points (ex: Indar Excavation, Regent Rock, Howling Pass, Crimson Bluff, etc).

I'll start this off by saying that personally, I feel that they're the worst fights in the entire game, short of a biolab filled with unlimited ScatMAXes. (thanks for the PTSD Ceres )

My biggest gripes with them:

1. They take 7 and a half minutes to capture. 21, if you're fighting at a 3 point tower base and you're up against NC.
2. They're harder to take than tech plants and amp stations, and arguably even biolabs (Think about it. With biolabs, you can simply blow the SCU to end the fight, and if you have all points, the cap is less than 3 minutes)
3. They're basically small outposts with more capture points.
4. They just happen to be where 90% of the fights are.
5. They often contain towers; which make the nightmare even more frightening.

However, it's possible for these bases to not be bad. Key example: Splitpeak Pass. This is possibly the only Large Outpost in the entirety of Planetside 2 that isn't a complete nightmare. Splitpeak is probably among the largest of the large outposts, featuring numerous, yet condensed spaces that easily flow into one another. It's situated on two hills that are connected by bridges, and a tunnel in the valley below, which contains the fourth control console. The base is also surrounded by tall mountains and walls.

On the other hand, when you step back into Indar, where the game is actually played, and look at Regent Rock or Indar Excavation, you are faced with a small, yet intangible fortress of death and misery, featuring small scattered buildings, no man's land, and a tower. You are left with no room to establish a foothold, and defenders spawning into the tower have easy access to the B and C points. But the defenders are probably enjoying themselves as much as you are. They are heavily subjected to tank spam, liberators, tower fairies, and doorway death traps. If they dare venture into the ground floor, they will die. Should the attackers ever attempt to venture above the ground floor, they will also die.

So, the only way to see these fights end, if they do end, is to simply wait on the B and C points for well over 20 minutes, or throw 4 platoons at them and hope they forget they have MAXes and explosives.

I think Howling Pass is probably the closest base on Indar to hitting the mark of a good large outpost; however, it still has a few problems:

1. The A point is too close to the spawn room, and the large, overarching landing pad may be giving the defenders a bit too much leverage. And the only way up there is elevators; which as biolabs have shown, are death traps.
2. The lack of good sunderer placement spots, especially for the southern approach.

Attackers from NS Material Storage are forced to put their sunderers behind the hill and hope they have enough forces to throw at the wall. Even if they manage to push past the wall, they don't have much room to move. The smart among them will just ignore that whole area and put a sunderer on the eastern side, where there aren't any walls. Those don't tend to live long though.

My personal suggestion for howling pass would be to remove the entire western road going under the arch up to NS Material (the one that connects to Crimson Bluff), and give the other road more access to the open field at Howling Pass. And more sunderer placement locations. Possibly make that big pipe go through the eastern field, let us put sunderers under it to hide it from aircraft. That sort of thing.

I just felt like I needed to post this for some reason.

I agree that the "tower type" bases need a change but going by this forum mentality your not gonna get alot of support here.

Truth be told in pretty much any of those bases the vast majority of the defending players just sit inside the tower defending A point until they either vastly outnumber the attackers and push out, till the base finally caps with just 2 points, or if the attackers have a large population advantage (over 15-20%) they get pushed to the spawn room.

With that said most players will defend the current desing to death because those bases flawed as it is, are one of the few that can provide defenders a chance against a bigger enemie force. The reason this happens is mostly due to the large time it takes to cap holding just 2 points and how easy it is to hold A buying enough time in most situations for your faction to respond.

There examples of a few good base desings that dont put the defenders in such a massive advantage in the case that they decide to play cheesy, such as the new quartz ridge, it gives defenders and advantage but not as massive as sitting inside a tower racking kills.

I don't mind the odd tower base, but when every large outpost on Indar is one it gets tiring. I do like going shotgun fairy on towers though.

I have completely opposite opinion on all of your points.
Exactly the things that you does not like are the things that I like in this bases.
Without them the Zergs would simply roll over the underpopulated defenders.
The said traits give fair chance for the underpopulated faction to pull up proper defence using tactics and coordination.
According to your statements I guess you were never leading Platoons in 30/70 battlers when you are underpopped.

Regent Rock, Howling Pass, Crimson Bluff - these are really good fighting arenas.. Would be much better with teleport rooms though.
Excavation not so good, too much open for tank shells flying inside the tower, more structures and teleport room to outside the tower must be added.

In my opinion, it's not the large outposts that are the problem it's the towers. They just feel too claustrophobic, especially when you compare them to some of the bases that do close quarters on Amerish after the revamp. The new Quartz ridge is another example and one of my favourite bases to fight at. These outposts are the gateways to the major facilities and should see the bulk of the fighting.

Give us doorways.

Towers are really good at throwing C4 fairies at every vehicle in a 30m radius.

Combined with open ground, it's a lockon party on the airpads


When you finally reach the core, you have to deal with defenders who are about ~5 seconds away from their control point so attackers will only get the advantage via brute force, pushing their way in the most cramped base design to date. As a result, towers are most likely 21 minute caps if the fight is "fair" (no HE spam from weird angles, no overpop).


Behold, I found this in the depths of youtube



Or even this ****** MS paint mockup by me

And thats why we need MORE towers and large hard-to-take outposts and fewer small spam-the-spawn outposts.

Right now most small bases are easily overrun or spammed into submission, while on the other hand towers gives some kinda of high ground and protection from the never ending air and tank spam.

You can actually hold a tower/biolap with an inferior force, something PS2 in general lacks badly.

If you want to remove the towers then:
- Make AA domes over ALL bases (no more lolpodding and zepher/Dalton spam)
- Walls around the bases (no more HE/HEAT spam form tanks)
- Remove high ground outside the bases (no more HE/HEAT spam form tanks)

Xenotech labs and a lot of easmir bases are a good starting point, ohh and make battlements on the walls.

There already are a lot of doorways, with nothing in most of them.

Oh wow. I remember when the vehicle spawn pads were in the center of the ground floor.

And then there's this image from the thread, which must be reposted for emphasis:

The hell that was PS1 tower battles.

What do you mean "hell"? That's beautiful!

Needless to say, you can easily identify the part of PS1 that I found least enjoyable.

At some point, I started exclusively using the back doors to get to the courtyard, even risking a direct charge into the enemy ranks, before I would venture into those god-forsaken stairwells. Confound the orders from that CR5, I would never set foot into the towers.

Towers make it easier for tanks to spam.
Doing that would remove the last thing that vehicles could possibly do to influence a base fight, making this game even more of a one dimensional infantry game.

I actually really like the large outposts for the most part. I like them much more than the facility bases, mainly because they tend to be more unique and different-feeling than the facilities. Some of them can turn into bloody meat grinders when zerg meets zerg, but I just take that as part of the experience.

My only real gripe with the large outposts is that they almost all have towers, and all those towers are functionally identical. They bore me to tears. The game would feel so much fresher had several different "lynchpin" buildings been designed and scattered throughout the bases. Barring that, they could have at least made several very different versions of the tower with different floorplans, heights, defensive armament, etc.

I really do hate sameness. It gets boring very fast.

Vehicles should have zero influence on a base fight: You use vehicles to fight your way to the base, then take the base with infantry. Its not a vehicle simulator.

There is a really good reason why the only bases the zerg hates are tower and biolaps, since they are the only bases a zerg cant use their massive amounts of vehicle to win the day.

So, the vehicles fight their way to the base, and then what do they do? Sit around picking daisies? Wait for an armor push from another base which never happens? I'm not saying that vehicles need to farm, they need to be given something to do that only they can do, like blowing up a generator that only tanks can overload. It would encourage the defenders to bring up armor from behind and keep vehicles from just farming.

They get out of their tanks, and they go where they need to. In PS1, when the fight got past the courtyard, you would see bunches of abandoned tanks and aircraft just sitting there, because those vehicles were useless to them at this point, and staying in them would harm their experience gain. It helped that PS1 wasn't relentlessly unforgiving to vehicle users. No resource system, and 5 minute acquisition timers. That more than allowed for players to just abandon their vehicles, especially when you could be fighting in the base interior for 10-30 minutes at a time.

Though, in PS2, there is no clear flow of battles, so vehicles have free reign to kill everything that moves, regardless of where it tries to hide.

They land their plane/leave their tank and join the fight. PS2 is not a vehicle simulator. Worked in PS1, cant see why it shouldnt work in PS2.

If you look at easmir, you actually see that. Tankers leaving their vehicles and joining the fight...which is probably why "dedicated" tankers dont like easmir anymore. Now we just need an anti-air shield over the bases so the airboys also get the pleasure of fighting a real fight, where skill matters.

My main issue is that the "large hard-to-take outposts" only differ from the "small spam-the-spawn outposts" in terms of number of control consoles. They both suffer from the same issues. At the moment, they're just way too cramped and senseless. If they're going to have large open spaces, the places at each end of these spaces need to be connected in a predictable way. Splitpeak does this almost perfectly. You are either going through a tunnel, a trail, a bridge, or a building. Defenders can actually play defensively with these structures, and attackers have clear methods of progression. There's an actual "flow" to the battles there.

While I'm here, I'm going to pose a fairly simple question: Why should you be able to hold a location with an inferior force? I see a lot of posters here stating that these bases allow for this, but is it really a good thing? Shouldn't we be providing smaller, but competent forces the means to outplay bigger forces, rather than forcing the larger force to throw their heads into a brick wall?

I agree, but as with a lot of bases on Amerish Splitpeak is just too open for aircrafts. They can do a bomb run, hid/repair behind the hills and mountains and then do another bomb run, with little fear of getting shoot down.

Thats why we need an anti-air shield over the bases.

The main reason why you want an inferior force to be able hold/defend for a really long time is to force the zerg to either get more organized(properly not going happen) or disband (what a lot of us want).

Look at the Crown: Its pretty easy to take, IF you got a determined attacker that just sits on point B+C and wait for the defenders to come to them, but nearly all attacks fails on the Crown because ppl dont get the point of attacking towers. Same goes with a lot of other towers.