Base Benefits discussed on Higby Pls

So, on Higby Pls today, Higby outlined some ideas for better base benefits that sounded really cool. Here's how it works, in a nutshell:

• There is a tiered system of base benefits, where controlling a certain number of these facilities would grant your faction a certain "level" of benefits, and these benefits would each have their own specific progression set for each facility type.
  • For example, controlling 3 amp stations would grant your faction the first tier for the "power" infrastructure, which could grant a benefit like faster capture timers

• Facilities are broken down into individual "Infrastructures". Amp station has a "Power" infrastructure, tech plants have a "Production" infrastructure, biolabs have a "Science/Research" infrastructure
• Each faction has an "affinity" for one of these infrastructures
  • If a faction has an affinity for an infrastructure, they automatically have a tier in that respective base benefit tree by default
• Potentially, there could be empire-specific top tiers for each infrastructure that grants very strong abilities. Reaching this top tier would mean something like acquiring every tech plant on Auraxis. An idea higby threw out there was the ability for VS to spawn vehicles without the need for vehicle terminals, via interdimensional space magic.

It was very strongly implied that these benefits would be global, rather than continental.

How does Forumside feel about Higby's ideas for metagame?

Sounds ok but need more details ..

Are the base benefits going to be facility ownership only ?

or

Will small benefits ( maybe even multipliers ) be added to smaller bases / outposts to ?

ie : It would be nice to Capture Comm array and that increases your Radar range by 10%

The biggest problem I see with global benefits is that few (if any) server has enough pop to sustain meaningful fighting on more than two continents (most of the time not even that).

Ditching the current benefits also means that Esamir will need some Tech Plant equality on the map, rather than Eisa being its Crown.

Overall, it can be interesting if done properly, and if the game manages to stop its decline.

So make the top empire even stronger on the board. Only thing having more territory should do is give you more territory

Zerg-enabling

I like this idea
However...
Make the benefits for outfits instead of factions. Allow for outfits of the same faction to fight for the territory as well.

Not sure how to allow for a "civil war" but that's what Higby is for : )

Players belong to an outfit, not a faction. They only play as a faction.

Give more strengths to the outfits and you'll give players something to fight for

Do Higby and friends have an 'up-to-date' version of their resource / strategy revamp that they can show us? I'd love to see how this would tie-in with hex-clusters, intercontinental lattice, localized nanite supply, and whatnot.

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These advantages should be STRONG and very noticeable; if you can fight off 60% + (hopefully no less) of the server's population in order to take half of the world's techlabs, you should be rewarded.

However, there should be measures in place to make sure that unskilled ghost cappers aren't able to gobble up all these bonuses for free during the off-hours. When the server's population drops below a certain level, bases that are deep inside a faction's territory should be 'locked' and protected from capture until prime-time arrives. That way, a faction's 'progress' can be 'saved' until the next day.

Why not add in both positives and negatives for capturing territory?

Let facilities give a unique and interesting bonus like improved radar coverage, slightly faster vehicles, etc.

But at the same time the more territory a faction controls, the slower their nanite accumulation ought to be. This simulates the longer supply lines and logistical complications that exist the further you move away from friendly territory.

So if each faction controls 33% of the territory, then the usual 50 nanites per minute is in effect.
But if one faction controls 50% of the territory, then their nanite accumulation drops down to 20 per minute or so. This is because their frontline is now far from the warpgate, so nanites need to be spread across more territories and to power more bases. Relatively few gets to the troops.
On the other hand each of the "losing" factions are now pushed back closer to their warpgate, and so get 70 nanites per minute. This is because their supply lines are shorter and more efficient.

What this does is create an "uphill" battle for the "winning" faction, sort of like how in many other games the fighting climaxes until you hit a boss fight. Except in PS2 the equivalent would be that the "winning" faction would find itself starved of resources in that last stretch to cap the continent, while the other factions could summon legions of tanks and MAXes.

Naturally you'd have to have a time delay introduced so people aren't hopping to a continent where they control no territory to get a bundle of nanites. Might be other flaws. But maybe it'd be worth trying out.

Doesn't having to fight 2 entire factions at once sort of accomplish the same thing? With the rest of the strategy revamp in place, your opponents might not be able to avoid you, since they would have to keep their 'home' continent locked in order to travel to the TR / NC front.

- you could also inversely scale the bonuses with population

I'm not sure if this is what the game needs. It definitely needs some sort of value over capturing territory, currently amp stations are damn near useless, but I think the resource revamp phase 2 would be a better avenue to address this issue.

They should elaborate on nanites and the resource revamp before changing facilities IMO... it'll probably be 6 months untill we see an inkling of new facilities benefits :/

I read the ideas but I think they need to be fleshed out more. My main concern is to avoid giving one particular faction which is winning a very strong advantage which only increases that faction's probability of winning. As other people have stated, there are things which could be used that...while gaining territory does bring in benefits, it should also have some means to prevent it from being overpowering. And I don't say that as in 'OP', I mean, it shouldn't be so overwhelming that it's hard for the other factions to recover from or fight against.

Personally, I think base benefits should be more like...one base could give the linked bases an AOE pulse radar, another base will make the linked bases have A.I. controlled turrets, stuff like that. I'm not too sure if global benefits are the way to go unless Higby is thinking more about what I was thinking when I posted this thread about superweapons.

It's pretty nuts, but then again, the best ideas are usually nuts.

I really like the idea of asymmetrical perks.

NC get all tech plants and our Enforcer gets replaced by a 2nd Titan AP

higby pls

I dunno. I mean I understand that the way it was supposed to work was that the "winning" faction would be tag-teamed by the two "losing" factions.

But in practice what I observe happening the most is that the "winning" faction and the second-most "winning" faction team up to knock the third out, leaving it mostly a 2-faction fight. But of course my own observations are mostly limited to Emerald and to a lesser extent Connery, so maybe it works differently elsewhere.

Not sure this is the right way to go about adding base benefits. Apart from the "snowball effect" someone else expressed where the winning faction gets even stronger, I see this as potentially promoting the "zerg effect" as well. Factions will just throw bigger and bigger zergs at bios/techs/amps to gain benefits. We need a base benefit system that promotes spreading out the zergs and where strategy of which base you capture and when matters. This game has become such a mindless numbers game it has to change, and fast.

Civilization Beyond Earth would like to have a word with you.

Can't fix bases till you fix Redeploy. Its only gotten worse as larger outfits have organized to use it en masse

I'm a bit hesitant about the 'reduced capture timers' part. Especially if one of the teams is gonna have a free tier towards that bonus.

so... Basically the only time you can use these "top tiers" is when you already dominated on every single continent of Auraxis?

I would prefer some kind of cross-continent resource management that includes smaller bases.

An example would be that you can capture bases such as armories and supply bases and get some kind of (small) resource cost reduction, or a resource increase.
There are also bases with lots of antenna's and communication arrays. These could give bonuses to the empire such as faster auto-spotting of vehicles, longer "hear" range when the enemy fires, give a small % chance that during a pulse of a proximity radar or similar you aren't shown on the radar etc.
Things like solar plants, dams etc can give reduced capture timers.

The point would be to co-ordinate the capture of as many facilities as you can. This goes cross-continent, so having only a few bases on one continent doesn't mean your enemy is automatically going to curbstomp you. It also means that you can co-ordinate with friendlies on other continents and ask them to capture specific bases.
Preferably you only get a bonus if you have a certain number of one type of base. The number must be big enough that simply controlling 1/3rd of the area on most continents doesn't guarantee you the bonus. Actively collecting these bases can give you the bonus, which means it needs to be big enough to be worth the trouble.

I find the idea of empire specific affinity to benefits definitely sweet.

It's a step in the right direction... if they manage to implement it before 2017.