Orbital strikes should not be allowed against spawn rooms

@FateJH Still a better ping than connery or so I hear.

And once again you quote the least important part of my post and carefully ignore arguing the points.

So you are fine with the cheap *** tactic off spawn room warrioring.... thats just fine but a strike on the spawn that doesnt kill anything inside is a problem?

Nah mate....

Isn't it hypocritical to think Spawnroom Warriors are the problem while the Main Reason with capital letters why spawnroom warriors exist is because of the spawncampers?

The best way to combat spawnroom warriors is to allow a safe and unpredictable exit so it can't be spawncamped, and 90% of the spawnroom warriors will evaporate. Currently most spawnrooms work as chokepoints against the defenders, rather than provide a solid way around their base. One of the few bases that sees far less spawnroom camping are the AMP stations. These offer a range of ways out of the spawnroom, from the towers behind the spawnroom with jumppads and semi-protected walls to a tunnel system to jumppads that launch the player onto the main building. This gives enough range of motion that these spawnrooms are far harder to spawncamp, and lo and behold spawnwarriors in AMP stations happens 1/10th of the time it happens in other bases! So yes this is the answer you are looking for.

Now stop being a butthat and blame the spawnroomwarriors for a problem you are creating by spawncamping.

Honestly, if your base has been overrun to the point that the enemy has you cordoned off in your spawn room then it's time you redeployed to the next base and counter-attacked from the outside. Sure teleporters and tunnels are useful but if the base is truly overrun to the point a 20-30 man force can't push out then odds are pretty strong they have enough guys to cover 3-4 different locations.

Eh, you don't need much force to quarantine a spawn room.
Quite a few can be shelled from outside, most have LOS from numerous positions, that the defenders to reach are funneled into choke points, that a single man basically gun down several..
And you can literally drop a squad straight at the gate there, and just lock it down pretty easily.
It's not as if the attackers, actually have much land to cover to reach it.

As well, any base that has any LOS near the spawn room outside, is shelled easily, and most that aren't, have singular exists for the Defenders, but dual positions for the attackers.
Hell, some have defenders crest a hill, with near perfect firing positions.
A 20-30 man team can try to bull rush, a grand deal of these, but they need only half if not less, the firepower, and explosives make it even easier.
As the defense is funneled hard into a small-area.

So it's not a feat to reach the spawn room, nor hold it.
It's pretty bloody easy.

As Lordkrelas mentions, you dont need a lot of players to spawncamp the average spawnroom. That is the whole reason I say the spawnroom functions like a chokepoint against the defenders: you need more defenders than attackers to break through.

And as the AMP station proves: if you give enough exits it becomes harder to spawncamp and the defenders stand a far better chance at retaking the base even though in a normal base they would have been spawncamped under those same circumstances.

People need to stop the circle-reasoning of "because players are unable to retake the base now when they are spawncamped they wont be able to retake the base when the spawncamping is removed".

Also have you ever been part of one of those battles where an ally manages to place a Sunderer before the base is captured, and the moment it is captured the old defenders use the Sunderer to retake the facility? That's more proof that if the defenders aren't boxed in within a chokepoint they would have enough power to retake the facility. Unfortunately they spawn in a spawnroom that's easily camped.

"oh but they could have used that Sunderer before and broken out!".
Yeah, which only proves my point. But it begs the question of why they wouldnt. And that easy to answer: the alternatives arent intuitive to use or easily spotted. No one expects a Sunderer on the defenders side at a base so they dont look for it until they are kicked out. And a natural way of players discovering the Sunderer to spawn at attracts early attention from the attackers and loses you the Sunderer.

Solution: offer ways out of the spawn that cant be spawncamped, make these ways easily accessible (the AMP station jumppads are not intuitive to use for example) and offer more ways around the base for the defenders.

Touche, I'll concede that point, although I'd typically refer to shelling from outside the base as HESH spammers rather than Spawn Camping, which is a term I'd normally associate with (usually infantry) players hovering around waiting to gun down anyone who comes out at fairly close range.

My thinking was mostly that if they were boxed in then it's their responsability to pull a sunderer from the next base and open up a counter attack. Yeah while it'd be nice if DBG improved all their bases ithat's also asking a lot.

The trouble with providing too many ways out is that it becomes altogether too easy for a solo LA to go forth and pick of Sunderers if you have no way of reasonably cutting them off. Anything except Shield and Blocade sunderers is basically toast to a Light Assault.

A great man (or woman?), admitting that you can be wrong. People could learn from you.

I already thought about ways to prevent easy LA bombing. For example the attackers get ways to slowly limit the movement of the defenders. Imagine a drip-pod terminal in the spawnroom. You access it and see multiple circles where you can click and drop in. One circle is the spawnroom, and this circle changes size based on how outnumbered you are. The rest are antennae that are spread out through the region (not just the base). These antennae can be destroyed by enemy forces to limit defender movement. But a single Engineer that escapes the spawn could easily repair one and open up a new avenue of attack. Attackers would do well to take out antennae near the Sunderer and their attack paths.

Should you be completely outnumbered, the defenders might be able to drop-pod right on top of your Sunderer from the spawn, but with that much overwhelming force thats not a problem.

I also think Sundy garages could have similar perks. For example it could have mini-generators on the outside of the garage. These can be desteoyed with small-arms or a short overload (as in 15 sec before it goes boom after overload). As long as the mini-generators are online the garage could have defenses like shields that block enemy infantry access and a turret that needs to be manned nearby. This buys time and gives warnings to the attackers something is up at their Sunderer, and makes the base more of an assault where both teams try to wear down the other's defenses. Such mini-generators could also be available to the defenders, funneling enemies until they beat a secondary objective or offering strong fire support until they destroy the mini-generator.

Many ways out of a spawnroom can as well become a problem...especially with bases with numerous capture points. AMP stations are notorious for being hard to capture unless you got like 65% pop there. Essentially the defender has to protect one of 3 points(2 generators and A)...and can show up at any of them without of being noticed ahead. So if attackers spread on all three and the defenders are very organized, they only need around 1/3 of the numbers of the attackers to be successful. That can become extremely frustrating(and we all have been there!).
Choke points serve a purpose(especially when it comes to multitarget bases)...and sometimes the best choke point is the spawnroom. If there is only 1 capture point(which then is a choke point already) I got to agree tho: No reason to have players get slaughtered at spawnroom gates.

You realize that the lionshare of AMP stations has only one point and that capturing 2 points is enough to cap it eventually?

Also pointrooms being chokepoints is an advantage for the attacker. Defenders gain nothing by camping the pointroom, eventually they get pushed off. They only win by eliminating enough spawnpoints and starting an attack on the next base. On the other hand attackers gain the base by camping the point.

Even your comment about "they need 1/3rd of the population" is wrong. Because the pointrooms are chokepoints you need less population to defend them than to attack. So even if the defenders organize they still need more. And the point cap merry-go-round is one of the best of the best situations you can have as it constantly changes where and how you fight and shows an equal battle.

Spawn room campers are simply a symptom of poor base design and spawn room farmers.

If people don't want defenders spawn camping and want them to come out and give a good fight - then perhaps they need to think about how they attack the base.

Surrounding the spawn room with continuous suppressing fire and raining HESH down from overlooking hillsides (which is how pretty much every base fight ends up) simply encourages spawn campers.

Why would somebody venture out of the spawnroom when they know you won't make it 2ft. They might as well stay behind the safety of the shield and farm cheap kills just like the attackers are doing.

The defenders should realize that the battle is lost and go somewhere else.

The only reason the battle is lost is because the spawnroom is designed against them.

Now can we finally get on and design spawnrooms that aren't death-traps for the defenders that prevent them any chance of a good counter-offensive?

Nope, to every single point of your post. The AMP has either 3 capture point or 2 generators and a capture point. If you hold both generators, who shall capture A? If you are at A you gonna lose one generator and then likely get wiped at A(unless you get all in on A while the generators are down...but in this scenario the attacker group is larger than the defender...so perfect organisation is much harder fpr the attackers). I said you need at least 65%(thats 2to1)...not 75%(which would be 3to1). Tho you would need 75% if the defenders would play it perfectly and attackers didn't.

Ah really? Capture points as chokepoints are an advantage for the attackers? That's exactly what I said. Attackers NEED that advantage cause they got no safe spawn. Attackering should be a bit stronger than defending....cause running against the same wall over and over again is really a bad game experience. Worst case is that both sides just sit in their base and wait for the oither so they can farm them with their defensive advantage.

Merry-go-round is fun? Only for the defenders. As an attacker it sucks to be at one point and have to watch the other going to the enemy cause your faction mates got one brain cell more than an earthworm....and all that over and over again. I do not even join such fights as attacker if we do not have at least 65% pop there. I know I will only get pissed.

I don't believe it takes any skill what so ever, but I'll admit ignorance having never fired an OS myself. But surely it requires no more skill than firing a recon dart. All one must do is shoot the wall of a point room and the massive radius will more than cover the entirety of the point, or does it somehow require great skill in positioning in some way I do not know of?

Balance is not fine, but that's not the focus here. Orbital strikes aren't used because they're "tactical," they're used because they get a whole bunch of kills all at once without any skill or risk involved. It wouldn't serve any purpose to nuke a spawnroom if it killed everyone inside but players would still set them off, because PlanetSide 2 is all about that farm.

Also reminded me of this:

Ok, there are one or two differences which contribute to the difficulty n using over a recon dart.

ADS - Required: So the first major difference is that you can't actually fire his dart gun unless your aiming down sights. Something that if you're reacting to being shot at costs you vital fractions of a second.

ADS - Vision/Range: When you do ADS the first thing you'll ask is where's the world gone because you can see literally about 25m in front of you, his wouldn't be a problem except if the dart doesn't hit something you can see using ADS vision it will not dire the OS. Essentially you have to be at least on the fringe or closer to the centre of the OS when you fire it.

Respawning removes dart gun: Infiltrators spamming recon darts have no fear of death beyond PS2's normal desire not to die. With OS you need to respawn travel to the OS uplink require the dart gun and then carefully not die until the optimal timing to fire the weapon.
Essentially, if you are in a normal fight then see an option to use the OS you have to redeploy, select the OS then walk, drive or fly back to where the option was hoping that the timing will still be good when you get there.

Timing if everything with an OS worthwhile large targets which you can survive getting within ~25m of their centre are not constant, they move with the ebb and flow of battle. By the time you've armed and got there the situation can have easily changed, your other option is to sit as a Stalker waiting on the perfect moment, but then you don't get to do anything for all that time and indeed may never get a good target.

As someone who's built about ~20 OS uplinks, I've had the opportunity to fire the weapon (at a target) about 10 times, about 6 of those got no kills and the most any one of them got was around 5 kills.

As I've brought up with Liewec123 I don't think the charge of farming is fair as farming is about kills/xp per minute, which an individual operator doesn't get much of except in the very rare high kill situations, and even if the charge were true it could be fixed by merely extending the refire time for OS.
I'm perfectly happy to discuss other options to limit the use of OS too, LordKrelas had a good idea about a disruption field in the wake of shots that prevented another OS on the same location within a certain timeframe. My own idea was to make the OS uplink a 3 part structure that three separate players must construct, limiting the ability of solo cowboys spamming uplinks everywhere.

Haha, thanks. I do usually try to come to compromises/understandings with others. It's a rare thing for any individual to consider every angle and perspective which is pretty much the point of these forums.

That's a very interesting idea, I rather like the notion of a central spawn room having options to redeploy around the region it could open up some very interesting plays for the tactically minded squad.

Would they be like Base turrets in that they auto repair after X amount of time or would engineers need to travel the region repairing them after a battle?
Alternatively, they could auto repair upon a base capture.

The garage shields would probably have to be a hackable terminal similar to the hardlight bridge as it wouldn't make sense for the base to have a shield they couldn't pass through. But there's no reason it can't be hackable by all classes liek the hardlight bridge but also destructible by small arms like a terminal is.

Indeed I like your thinking on this, I'm reminded of an Unreal Tournament game mode where you would assault up a map and unlocking each objective would allow you to push to the next.
If you were wanting to implement something along those lines you could make a weaponized version of the terminal that cannot be repaired and only resets after a base capture. This weaponized version might control a Xiphos Anti Infantry Turret inside a large capture point room. Effectively ensuring that short of overwhelming firepower (or stalkers) the room cannot be taken without first destroying it's AI control/generator unit.

I'm not sure I understand why the 25 meters. Is there a sudden drop in render range? Or does the dart gun's model block most of the screen? Or something else?

Ultimately though, it doesn't really impact my beliefs much. A stalker could very easily sneak over with a dart and fire at a target, or simply fire at a target of opportunity if something came up. I've done much the same as a stalker before.

Personally I'd say it still constitutes as farming. People often call spawn camping or massive overpops "farms," even if only a few enemies are killed in a minute or so. Or killing a bunch of newbies or bads who just can't aim well enough to be a threat.

In my mind it's the huge AoE and kill potential which classifies the OS as a farming tool, even if the potential isn't always realized.

I would be OK with them if they did have some kind of limitations. No re-fire penalties, for example, but no orbital strikes can be called down on the same hex for an hour after the first one. That way a good base can still hit multiple bases relatively quickly, but can't just chain-strike the same one over and over.

Would also prevent the awful situations we sometimes see at places like Ti Alloys, where each faction can have their own OS targeting parts of the same base.

I don't really like the three-player requirement idea personally. Feels like either nothing would change or no one would be able to get them to work.

I think the best option would be to regenerate them when the base is without enemy players, and have them repaired manually when enemies are around to encourage the defenders of the base to try and defend and maintain these objects rather than go "well it's destroyed, don't worry when the enemy's back is turned it'll at one point repair and we'll just drop behind them".

I was thinking of spawnshields: Doesn't allow enemy infantry (and tanks) through but it does allow friendly through (this version does block bullets from any direction though). However you don't get to hack shields as otherwise if someone outside hacked the shields suddenly everyone inside the garage had no way out and to hack the generator back. As an alternative each of the generators has a terminal inside the Garage to allow the owners to hack it back, but it would also mean some hectic moments as you are locked up while enemies might pass through your shield at any moment.

It's in a large part based on UT's Assault mode yes. Unlike UT though the defenders get to "reset" the progress of the attackers by repairing up their defenses. By spreading out these objectives you can ensure that 1: There's always something the attackers can attack and 2: There's always something the defenders can repair/maintain while the attackers try to use this opening in the defenses.

One thing though: Just randomly plopping down a bunch of generators and antenae might make small fights rather hard to accomplish as one side is likely going to have it too easy. So I would try to make most of these generators be player-controlled calldowns/deployables that can be placed somewhere in the area. More players means more deployables placed means more objectives to pursue, less players means less deployables and less objectives. This makes these kind of objectives dynamically adapt to the player count.

I would perhaps do it the other way: You can repair the terminal, but it's real easy and natural for the attackers to hold the area towards the terminal. So if the defenders want to reactivate and man the turret they'll have to fight for it, but if successful will get a powerful tool to push the enemy out.