I see a few posts on this forum complaining that construction is UP/useless/boring/frustrating. I mainly play construction, and have made an effort to teach some others, but the benefit of that only extend to my own outfit on my server, so I'm going to try to give some pointers for anyone in the community looking to learn or improve their play at construction. **WARNING, LONG POST** But, if you don't have the patience to read this, you don't have the patience to be a builder. First point, don't go it alone. Some folks out there are throwing a base down by themselves, or with a couple friends, then their base gets attacked, no friendly platoon defends, their base gets rolled, and they table flip. Find a platoon to play with who are playing at least a little bit strategically. Not a silent platoon with 90% of the pop in a biolab, they're useless. Find a platoon with decent comms going, and clearly some interest in strategy. Announce your intention to build, and ask if this platoon is interested in having you around. This is an important step, as the PL has a lot going on, has their own plans, and may not be interested in interrupting their own plans to help you if your request for defenders blind sides them. I commonly have a fire team of a couple other people embedded in a platoon. The platoon leader is aware of the existence of the player base, and has an idea that they will keep the associated territory. Now that the PL is bought into the construction, you should actually get help when it's needed. Second point, don't build roadblocks. They don't work. There's more than one road on Auraxis, if enemies can't get through the one you built on, they will go around you. They can also go over you. While I have occasionally made a good fight out of roadblocking an enemy armoured platoon, 9 times out of 10 it has been a flop. Third point, NO BUNKERS! Ever! They are poison pills. They have a terrible footprint, they're next to impossible to snap other building edges to, their sight lines are garbage, good luck placing a module inside them and their console gets hacked, resulting in either AV maxes with unlimited ammo or bottomless cortium bombs. No bunkers, delete them if you see them. I swear, I've seen people I don't know add a bunker to my base who then log off, I delete the bunker, then an enemy infiltrator shows up and goes right to the place where there is no longer a bunker. I'm not accusing, only implying. So, now that I've gone over a few things to not do, I'll start on what you should do, and how to get started, and what the benefits are. While the benefits can have some nuance, it boils down to logistics, firepower, and sometimes fortification. I'll start with logistics, as this requires the fewest unlocks. You can add value to a platoon with as little as just the routing spire unlocked. You will need to piggy back off another constructed base if this is all you own, so try to talk to the owner of the base. They sometimes get grumpy and delete your spire if you don't ask. Also, use the dead time when your platoon is taking bases with 90% pop to refill the silo. Ensure the base you are adding to has an air pad, and a silo close to full (green lights). The benefits of routers is that they add a spawn point to places that sunderers simply can't get to, such as the balcony of tech plants or amp stations, as well as some mountains also provide good firing lines. There are too many places in game to deploy a router to go over them all. Other than spawn points, the other logistical benefit of construction is light vehicles and aircraft. The light air and light vehicle terminals allow players to draw these vehicles without spending personal nanites. Any air squad will appreciate a somewhat centrally located air pad, and if you can anticipate the location of a tank battle, you can serve up an all you can eat buffet of free lightning tanks to your platoon. On to firepower. You'll want the flail, glaive, AV turrets, turret AI module and orbital strike uplink for these bases. Other buildings are useful too, but those are the ones that punch out damage. These can be used in two main ways, either to reinforce your ownership of a static base, or to eliminate an enemy player base. To eliminate enemy bases, I generally leave the flail, glaive, and one of my possible turret AI modules unplaced in my own base. Once I've chosen a target, I need a cooperative partner. This partner does not need any unlocks. Get yourself spawned in as a stalker infiltrator, fill an ant, and get your partner to be a stalker too. Ensure you are within 600 meters of the target (max flail range), have your partner place a silo from your full ant and place your flail and glaive down, power them with an AI module, then throw the rest of the cortium in the silo. The benefit of this minimalist base is your aren't heavily invested in it, so no big deal if it gets wiped. One of you draws flail dart, the other draws glaive dart, and if the target isn't well defended, you will make short work of it. If it is defended, then you have been counter played, and it's up to the PL now to roll armour in, or accept that the enemy base exists. On the flip side, if this is ever happening to you, the best way to counter this is for you and a couple helpers to defend as light assaults with dark light flash lights, while any air units in your platoon look for the enemy flail and eliminate it. For defending static bases, the main weapons are the AV turret, and the orbital strike. For the AV turret, pick a common spot for attacking sunderers to deploy when attacking the base you are protecting, find somewhere buildable with line of sight to this spot, and throw down your AV turret there. For a few examples, if you are playing out of the southern warp gate on Esamir, south of Echo Valley Substation there is a hill with a plateau you can build on, start with an AV turret and go from there. If you are playing out of the eastern warpgate, and can take all of the Mani satellite bases, there is a gap in the no build zones south of Mani tower, try that spot, it also makes it a lot easier to get lightning tanks to the east side of Mani Lake Satellite. If you are on the northern or western warp gate or Indar, Quartz Ridge Camp has a garage on the eastern side, you can build an AV turret that shoots into this garage. For the orbital, find somewhere that is close to the base you are protecting, but screened by terrain. For example, if you are playing from the western warpgate of Indar, and can take Indar Excavation Site, there is a patch of coral south west of it. If you build there, it's not easy to get to, as any enemies reaching that far around Indar Ex. are exposing their flanks to counter attacks. It important to note that the minimum range of the OS is 200 meters, and the max is 800 meters. Generally, you want to pick the nearest part of the base you might want to hit, and build slightly more than 200 meters away from that to maximize your rate of fire. Get your platoon to help you find targets. Squad/platoon waypoints can help paint a target, or squaddies calling and Q spotting targets allows you put your personal waypoint on them. Keep in mind that the OS will not instantly kill an sunderer from full health. However, C4 or tank mines placed after the OS dart is fired make it go boom nicely. Another option is to double tap the Sunderer, by having a ranking outfit member fire an outfit OS in conjunction with your uplinked OS. On to fortifications. I saved this category for last because you need pretty much all the buildings for it. Again no roadblocks, I tried, I thought I had clever spots picked out...Galaxies...every time. They go over your head, attack the base behind you, allies fall back to defend that, armour smashes your roadblock. The only bases you can really build for the sake of fortification are the 1 minute bases the devs intended players to build on, and Ikanam biolab on Amerish. Additionally, not all the 1 minute bases are useful (BL-4 is complete trash), so options are limited. These bases are worth the blue outfit resource, so they shouldn't be a tough sell to your PL. You will want you platoon to capture up to at least 1 base past where you plan to build to buy you some time to get going. Ikanam can be good to build on if you are playing out of the eastern Amerish warp gate, as it is well past the mid point between warp gates, and is on an important intersection of the lattice system. Once you have this point fortified, your western warp gate rivals have to choose between attacking a fortified Ikanam, NC Arsenal, or Crux Headquarters, none of which are soft targets. Do not build on the inviting plateau in the center of the biolab. It looks cool, but it's completely exposed, and there isn't actually anything important up there. Build on B point (the southern one, farthest from your enemies). It's actually important ground to control, and will demonstrate why trench warfare ever became a thing. Trenches are good cover. I build a pillbox in the center, as close to B point as I can with the door facing it. Place it slightly above minimum height, this allows me to build a spawn tube and 4 modules inside the pillbox. Players will be eager to spawn right on a control point, so no problems with your stuff being undefended. Then place a pain spire at each of the doors going to the underground biolab, and an anti-infantry turret where it sight lines to both these entrances. Ensure that the pain spires are placed such that they cannot be seen from underground, they are squish and infantry will want to shoot them from a distance. Do not place anything to try to block infantry from coming out of the tunnel, 1 you can't, 2 clutter is cover, don't provide your enemy with cover, leave the ground open and deadly. With all these pieces together, you have a combination of a pain spire, an automated A.I. turret and shielded pillbox windows all ready to go to suppress infantry trying to come up from underground. By denying the underground approaches you force infantry to come up to the surface where they are exposed. Next point to cover is the approaches to B point from within the trenches, vehicles will happily benefit from the cover of the trench to approach and wreck your base if you don't stop them, but vehicle gates solve this problem, 2 gates for 2 approaches. Place them so that a minimum of the structure is actually exposed, you can completely bury the small pillar. Now vehicles in the trench have a choice, sit still in the trench long enough to blast down the vehicle gate, which tends to make C4 bait out of them, or drive up to the high ground to get around the gates, which exposes them to fire from quite a distance away. Also, once vehicles get into the base, the gates trap them there while defending infantry swarm the cert pinata. Obviously this is only enough to get you started, other buildings are required, but from here I'll just say be creative. From the western warpgate of Indar, Berjess is fantastic to build on. Control of this base extends benefits as far north as Crossroads Watchtower, as ownership of Xenotech means the difference between a two way tank battle and a complete surround. This one takes 2 silos to properly set up, one by the orange boxes by the northern bridge, the other by the western cliff. After the silo, start with pillbox at the southern bridge, offset left (east) and at minimum height. Wait for it to fully deploy, then ensure you can fit a spawn tube and modules inside. If you can't, delete it and try again. Place a pain spire at the door of this pillbox to help fend off attacking infantry. Then place your vehicle gate at a diagonal angle across the right (west) half of the bridge, with the small post screened behind the pillbox, and the right post out to the cliff. Place this gate as deep in the ground as it will let you, as you will want to shoot over it with a short AV turret. Place your short AV turret to the left of the pillbox looking down the bridge, then get a helper to place another by the door of the 1 floor building that's already there. If this lines up right, it shoots over the vehicle gate and down the bridge. Now place rampart walls on either side of this to block vehicles from the bridge from simply going around these structures. So far, this base has strong defense against vehicles crossing the bridge, but galaxies can fly to A point. This is where the second silo comes in. I'm still trying different base designs, but I recommend copious amounts of anti infantry turrets around A point. This is a building everyone owns, so you can get non builders in your platoon to throw them around, then place AI modules after the fact. With this location fully built up, I once held off a multi platoon armoured column which included colossi. The troops were referring to it as "Helm's Deep". The final design I will describe is placed when playing from the northern warp gate of Indar, and is built at Lowland Trading Post. There is a two floor building here, with a ramp on the north side. Place your silo as close as you can to the northern face of this building to shield it from fire from the south, and place it towards the western side to leave room for the next buildings. At the top of the ramp, there are two doors into the building, place your infantry tower at minimum height such that the top floor windows look into these doors. This tower should be as close to the existing structure as possible and the entrance should be on the north side of it. Then place a sunderer garage north of the tower, at maximum height, with the openings facing north and south. Again, as tight to the tower as possible. Test the garage by placing a pain spire inside it, then place your light vehicle terminal immediately north of the garage. Now load up the garage with the spawn tube and modules. There are many tank battles between Indar Ex and Quartz Ridge, your team will have near limitless lightnings now. Now grab your second pain spire and take to the west side of the building which has A point nearby. There is a door here on the starting building, place your spire close to this door, but far enough north that it can't be seen from inside the building. This burns infantry trying to exit this door. Now grab your pillbox and place it immediately south of this spire, door facing north, as tight as you can to the guard rails of the building. Once you have your modules in this thing, it will be great both for denying the south west door and has sight lines to A point. Place your first rampart wall extending west and slightly north from this pillbox, try to snap the edges together. After that wall place a vehicle gate, this is the entrance for ants. 3rd and final pain spire goes on the east side of the building, as close to the first pain spire as allowed and up tight to the building. Now comes the frustrating part you will have to deal with a lot of stress for, the second rampart wall. This goes on the east side of the starting structure, and you have to get the right side of the wall to snap to the side of the structure. If there is a gap, then a platoon of maxes can flood through the gap and that's curtains for the base. If by the 4th time you've tried to place this wall and there is still a gap, you will start wanting to throw things, keep at it. There MUST NOT be a gap here. Don't worry too much about the rocks, it will likely be possible to get over your wall with some jumping, but that will only result in small numbers at a time, if a full platoon tries it most will botch the jump. Once that is up place your flail on the east side of the garage, this will be handy in the tank battles to come, and should be powered by an AI module inside the garage. Then place your infantry turret and aircraft turrets on the other side, with the infantry turret closer to the lowland structure. Next is the air pad between your silo and garage. Then, with your team mates, complete the pen of rampart walls around the north side of the base. Ensure vehicles can exit your pad by using your second gate. You can fit your OS uplink on the east side of this base, get team mates to place sky walls in your pill box and beside your OS. If you have enough builders, you can build a second wall here around the south side, but ensure the northern half of the base is still as enclosed as possible to create defense in depth. If your team captures Quartz ridge camp, this base becomes a lot less relevant, but you can then build the fire base mentioned earlier by the eastern garage up there and put another OS uplink there. You can put another base north west of Quartz Ridge with a 3rd OS for 3 point orbital coverage of Quartz. Meme beams for days son! Ok, I've been at this write up for hours. I'm done for now, I might add more later. I love the construction game, and I wish more people would play it more often. Hopefully those of you who have been struggling will benefit from this. If you want to look for me in game, I'm Rabid, and I play with the Wild Cards on Connery.
Best advice for new players... never get into construction! Construction is a total failure and it's only purpose right now is to provide juicy experience/certifications to your enenies! You will end up in a dead trap that you did make yourself! Orbital Strike bases are not even good anymore, they have become obsolete with outfit updates! Most of times you won't even be able to launch one because enemies will camp your base badly!
Currently every base that's getting built to actually support the lattice system, will get nuked with outfit orbitals as soon as there might be the slightest chance of a fight happening. Construction as of right now you need 4 buildings. Silo, Tube, Router, Airspawn Everything else is obsolete because outfits just nuke it. Outfit orbitals should have never been able to shoot anywhere outside of no-deploy zones of bases. Getting into construction is currently not worth it at all. It's unfun, unrewarding and just a waste of time. I wish the devs would show some foresight when patching things in, or at least listen to feedback - because construction players definitely voiced their concerns about outfit orbitals.
Please don't take what I say as me trying to be an a-hole, I just want to say a few things to help improve the quality of your guide. Firstly, I absolutely love base-building, despite how miserable and unrewarding it can be at times. However, I don't have the patience to read your post a second time through. Not because your content is poor or wrong, but because there's too many walls of text and not enough interactivity. If you want to capture an audience to read your guide, make it enjoyable to read, not a chore. There's that saying, 'A picture is worth a thousand words'. You've gone through a lot of trouble to describe a lot of things that could easily be explained with a single picture and either a single caption or some bullet points. For example, you go into details for 'northern bridge' and 'western cliff'. Remember, you're making this for new players, which means that they're not going to have a clue what you're talking about. Show them! Add a picture and demonstrate what you mean. Separate your content with titles and subtitles. Introduction, Do's & Don'ts, Logisics, Good Places to Build.... and so on. Splitting things up into sections not only makes it easier to read, but people can pick out parts of the guide that interest them the most. Not everything in one single guide is going to be of interest to a person. Some will only have interest in 1-2 parts of it because that's all they want to know. For example, you have a section on good places to create a base near Ikanam. Maybe a person only wants to know the do's and don'ts of building near there. By forcing someone to read that huge wall of text, people will lose interest and find their information from somewhere else that looks more appealing. Again, please don't take what I'm saying as me trying to knock you down or claim anything you've written is bad. I think what you've written has so much potential, it just needs to look more appealing so new players can take full advantage of your hard work.
I am an avid base builder. Bases can be VERY useful when built properly, however there are many mechanics that can improve the experience and tie base building right into the game meta (I cover this in another post). Base building is VERY expensive cert-wise, so not recommended for new players. New players are better off improving someone else's base. You get walls and an AI turret automatically so you can help improve defenses. Good work on trying to help new players, OP....sorry Planetside has become RED vs BLUE vs PURPLE arena-wars (biolabs)....it is what it is...kids have zero attention span these days...so sad.
I suppose I should have specified. When I said new, I meant new to building, not new to Planetside. I covered a lot, but I missed that bit. As for the structure of the post, I got home from work and hammered this out on a whim, after 3 hours I was tired of writing and editing it, point is I didn't have screen shots ready. I'll keep that in mind as I'm playing, and maybe do over some time. Thanks to those who provided positive feedback. For the outfit OS, I fully agree with the frustration, clearly construction wasn't on the radar when those got added, which is unfortunate. The devs do have blind spots. Best I can offer on that front is that once you are established as a builder, you will have some people running cortium for you, yell when the OSs hit and you should get a replacement silo up quickly. It still hurts, but the yell chat gets comically salty when two different outfits have both double OSed you silo and your base isn't dead yet.
The Devs didn't have a blind spot for what would happen to construction. They saw it happen repeatedly during open beta. They knew it was such a huge problem they literally disabled the ability to make OS one weekend, so they could do a photo/movie shoot. after they got the photo/movie shoot done, they re-enabled OS construction and watched the nuking spam happen again. The Devs knew and did nothing to fix it, not even so much as add a 5 minute wait timer before allowing another outfit OS to be fired. They wanted this problem to exist. You shouldn't get into construction, because the devs are actually trying to kill construction, in a slow manner, believing they can avoid the backlash or the brunt of the backlash, when they finally get around to deleting it. So they are slowly breaking construction piece by piece over a long drawn out period of time, to get everyone hating construction. Then when they believe everyone has come to hate construction enough, that will be when they say "oh well, it was a failed mechanic, guess we should delete this broken thing after all!"
