How can we make unbalanced fights more fun for the underpopulated faction?

It's basically one of the plagues of the game, alongside bases simply not being able to hold 200 people trying to duke it out. However, one issue at a time.

There are times in the day when numbers dip or faction populations are inequal, for whatever reason. Everyone has their time in the sun, this isn't about who's overpopulating which server.

The fact remains: zergs will happen. Bringing superior population to fights will happen. Two factions ganging up on each other for durations of time will happen. So someone is going to get pummeled, hard, at one time or another. It's a fact of the game, and frankly, fixing it is honestly never going to happen. There's no real way to.

Instead, we should focus on how we can make being that one squad versus a platoon more engaging. Fun. Note that I did not say fair. We can't expect to have a small defensive force be able to be bolstered by mechanics to defend against superior numbers forever, it'd stall the game completely. I want to have ideas flow about how we can make it less of a crapshoot.

As it is, the superior faction brings in armor, air, and frequently camps the spawn. The defenders are left with few choices. Run out, maybe gun someone down, and die. Camp the spawn, pop anyone stupid enough to enter the shooting range. Or simply log out or go somewhere else. Boring.

What it could be is a slow, guerrilla fight where losing is inevitable but you make the enemy pay for it. How can we give that? How can we make it so that your only choices in a lopsided fight aren't 'die repeatedly' or 'go elsewhere'?

Perhaps a distress beacon that goes out and enables defenders to drop pod into the base, disrupting enemy lines constantly, making them always guess.

Or, allow active camo to make all classes harder to see (not infiltrator invisible) when certain numbers are reached. More shielding, perhaps, as some nanite infused technology powers the defenders as long as they're small in number?

Throw out suggestions, people. The idea isn't to overpower the defenders to hold against platoons as a single squad, but to make it not such a boring and lopsided enterprise as it currently is. And no, 'base design' isn't the answer either. What sort of base would scale like that anyways?

Try to play to your advantages. Is hard and sometimes it is better to just redeploy somewhere else. For example if the got a lot of people on the point, tanks spawn camping you but not a lot of air pull air. Destroy the two planes flying overhead rek their tanks and sunderers fast. Then after you died go and kill the infantry as they can't respawn. Normally when there is no enemy air there won't be any skyguards around. Or the one that they did pull you can defeat easily. Grouping up and focussing is the key if your are outpopped.
The problem is when you are outpopped everywhere on everything. Air,infantry and tanks everywhere. Yeah better log off. Not a clue how to fix that.

Perhaps a small health or shield boost to players in a hex who are out numbered 2 to 1 or more, something like a 25% boost. Or the ability to drop pod anywhere in the hex when they respawn. Perhaps a bigger buff to points gained when your outnumbered by 2 to 1 or more.

IDK, maybe someone else with come up with a good idea, or maybe I will after I get another cup of coffee

You can't. Depending on the size of battle, individual skills become less important as the battle gets larger, and thus you can no longer defend a facility that has -48% vs 52% pop. Also in fight sizes from medium and up, killing single or squad of infantry makes little difference. They will spawn in after 10 seconds or just get up by magical green grenade and be back at killing you. Unless you are constantly able to stop the waves of infantry that come at you every 10 seconds, you have no hopes of defending anything in this game. In the end the only decisive factor in this game is the number of people; are you bigger than the enemy?

Unless you are able to destroy attacker spawns. Then the attack pretty much stops dead on its tracks. Difficulty of this feat ranges from very easy to nearly impossible depending on the size of battle. Good luck finding and destroying every sunderer those +80 players brought with them before timer runs out.

If we had the PS1 AMS, PS1 mines, PS1 spitfires, PS1 motion detectors 1 squad of infantry could hold off 1 platoon of tanks/air in certain terrain; or slow them down if the defenses put down well thought out and prepared CE.

If. If is a lovely word.

If your aunt had balls she would be your uncle.

OK in a language programmers understand:

IF we had PS1 AMS/CE then you could hold out against larger numbers
ELSE get camped

There are, in my experience, four major obstacles that prevent a small guerrilla force from crippling an enemy zerg rush. I'm also writing this assuming that, since our defenders are a guerrilla force, therefore largely outnumbered and possessing far less resources than the opposing force, we've already ceded/lost air superiority and are unable to mount an effective armored response that's able to do more that die as it rolls off the vehicle pad should it make contact with the enemy.

1. Sunderers: These are fairly easy to defeat for a small guerrilla unit. You'll often take casualties, but them being usually immobilized and (fairly) easy to locate does wonders for crippling an enemy force. If these (especially just 1 or 2) are the only deploy points at a battle, excepting folks arriving via Instant Action, you can very easily turn a battle into a war of attrition that the defenders will win, provided the enemy force's Medics are swiftly and thoroughly eliminated. That said, to really see these off, you also need to cripple the vehicle spawners at all bases with a direct link to the one you are currently defending, a feat that may or may not be viable with your small numbers, as you'd need to not only hack/destroy them, but also prevent them from being returned to action which means a minimum of one body dedicated to each terminal.

2. Medics: Most large forces will have many of these, often such that eliminating all of them at once (or near enough to prevent them from rez'ing each other and maintaining redundancy) that it's highly unlikely you'll be able to actually put a dent in the enemy force, more-or-less eliminating entirely the smaller force's ability to bleed the larger opponent in an effective manner.

3. Spawn Beacons: Often hard to reach, highly likely to have have active enemies around (with more arriving as the occupying force takes casualties that can't be rez'ed), and able to be replaced in seconds just by a change of squad leaders, these are extremely difficult for a small force to police. A coordinated and communicating squad with the squad leader aware of, and keeping an eye on, their beacon is likely going to be able to keep these up and keep reinforcements arriving almost perpetually. Combine with the fact that, in the scenario outlined by the OP, you're highly unlikely to get more than a couple infrequent shots at these, and it becomes almost untouchable in practice.

4. Galaxies: Massively durable, high-flying, and often heavily armed, these extremely mobile spawn points are very difficult to kill for small numbers of Infantry, really only easily dispatched if they get sloppy and land in a place tanks or LA's can get to them. Provided your small force has a large number of Heavy Assaults, you can drive off or destroy them with surface-to-air rockets, though it's unlikely you'll be able to do this swiftly enough to clear the Galaxies completely or fast enough to prevent being wiped out by an airstrike. Like Sunderers, these need their terminals eliminated/policed, unlike Sunderers, their speed and durability makes pulling them from the Warp Gate/far away much more practical, and by extension, much less practical to spread out and police as basically every Galaxy terminal would need to be hacked, destroyed, and camped (actually impossible due to the inability to infiltrate Warp Gates).

JM2c.

This "issue" (and others related to the broader issue of "Faction Overpop") has been raised and discussed by many players over the course of the game's history. And at no time has SOE responded or in any way recognized it as an issue.

This is not issue. It is working as intended by the Devs.

Until you can get the Devs to see it as a problem, it will not get any attention from them. And they are ultimately the only ones who can affect it.

This game is not designed to be fun for small groups, it's not designed to be fun if you want balanced battles. Don't ask me who it's supposed to be fun for but it certainly isn't those players. The devs have gone out of their way to make a game where mob rules. No matter how hard you try, you never make a difference in the battles, you might get a kill or res a guy or repair a tank, but you don't matter, you either join the zerg or you log off. In either case you have the same effect on what happens

Faction underpopulated?

Too bad, log off and make an alt, 4th faction always wins. Faction loyalty is for other games.

If they cared even a tiny bit about squad vs squad or platoon vs platoon battles you would see them in game, instead what happens is you take your platoon, get close to capping somewhere in a great fight and either 50 more defenders turn up or 50 more attackers turn up and it goes the way of every other battle.

It's only going to get worse and worse as more people bail out of this game.

Unbalanced fights are fun for the under popped faction just by being the under dog. It was the reason I joined Waterson VS for the under pop and bigger challenge.

I don't know why people don't revel in the challenge and enjoy the victory that is all the sweeter when you have beaten a larger force

Give all of them free squadboosts.

See: Planetside 1 bases.

Also known as "those bases with spawns that can't be camped in by aircraft."

Also known as "bases that don't suck."

Dome shields could have helped against that but alot of people didn't like them

You beat me to this. Base design is so terrible in this game and they want it to be terrible because it feeds into the ADD. Most bases on this game it's more of a burden on the defenders to hold than it is for the attacker. You know bases aren't designed right when you have to put out Sunderers defensively wherever you go to defend during a big fight. The ONE base that was placed and designed like a base should be, the Crown, was nerfed.

According to Higby, there were some technical issues with the shields' rendering. Personally, I'm a fan of the "put everything underground" approach. Or, if that gets the boring, I like the"put everything in the same big-*** building" direction.

But then again, I don't believe that "combined arms" means camping spawn rooms all day, but what do I know about tanks and vehicles anyway?

I agree, no vehicle should ever have line of sight on the spawn, hell I'd say no infantry should even have line of sight on the actual spawn either and it should be hidden away from all enemy forces. Would also solve the issue of spawn camping heroes to

I am more a fan of having a bit of everything. Some underground, some in big **** buildings, some under shields etc.

I hope they get the rendering issues fixed as they can offer an alternative way to fixing some of the worst offending bases

While not an excuse, I think Forgelight has a lot of trouble with underground elements that made it harder for them to design lots of good underground bases & tunnels. Shield rendering seems to be a perennial issue. I've always thought having a better variety of shields could really add to the combined arms approach, though, ie:

Shields which block everything: Only Destroyable by Armor/Air, maybe located farther inside the base proper.
Shields which block armor: Only destroyable by infantry (also inside the walls, would give something for light assaults to do as well, since they could avoid the chokepoints at the shield itself) and possibly air in some bases (could have these in buildings in some bases, on the rooftop in others).
Shields which block air: Only destroyable by infantry/armor(with some inside buildings away from armor). Instead of being the typical "dome shield" idea, these could basically be light-bridges that cover alleys between buildings, allowing infantry to move more freely through the base.

Little bit more combined arms, little less binary.

If your force is inferior in numbers to the enemy force, then you need a "force multiplier". It can include:

1) Morale- No one likes to be thrown into a meatgrinder. If you can repeatedly kill enemy soldiers in demoralizing ways, then eventually they will pick another base to spawn at. Some of the best weapons for demoralizing the enemy are Liberators, HE tanks, PPAs, mines, shotguns, and rockets to the face.

2) Technology- Namely bring vehicles. A 1-person Lightning will be stronger than if that same person is just running as a regular infantryperson. Vehicles are excellent force multipliers.

3) Geography- If you can take control of chokepoints, the high ground, bridges, etc, you can minimize the disadvantages of inferior numbers. If that chokepoint is narrow enough that they can only get their tanks through two at a time, then you only have to fight two tanks at a time regardless of how many tanks are in that column.

4) Training- If you are fighting as a squad or platoon that is well disciplined, well trained, and used to working together then you can pull off maneuvers that will cripple or at least slow down a large zerg. One common one that my outfit runs is a "boom squad", where you load up a Galaxy with 12 HA's with rockets out. You proceed to drop the entire squad right over an enemy Sunderer and then to unload on the Sunderer. It's a suicide tactic, but it's almost guaranteed to result in a dead Sunderer (sometimes even before the squad hits the ground). If you rotate Galaxies that means you can destroy 12 Sunderers with an entire squad, and it's rare to even find that many in a zerg.

5) Deception- Sneak behind their lines and backcap the base that they're coming from. This prevents them from making progress on capturing your base, and forces them to recall in order to deal with you. Although one ironic part about deception is that it only works if the enemy is organized; most zergs are not.

6) Tactics- Flanking, suppressing, getting nice firing positions are all going to grant an inferior force a bit more power. Try not to fall into a static position; always ask yourself, "what can we do to hurt the enemy the most", make a plan, and act on it. Because if you do fall into a static defense, it's just a matter of time before you lose because you sure as heck aren't doing anything to win.

If you notice some bases now have SCUs (including towers). Meaning if you are overwhelmed, the enemy should take out SCU. No SCU means no more spawn camping, since nobody is spawning. Don't run out of spawn 1000000 times trying to take one of them out before uselessly dying, you've been beaten, move to fallback position.

Pretty clever design choice to reduce spawn camping complaints if you think about it. Also it might be looking out towards resource revamp. Run out of energy, resupply or your SCU shuts down.