I know that a bunch of this went out when the shattered warpgate update was released, but it needs to be talked about again. Initially the southern warpgate won the most because the other two warpgates had easier access to carrot picking, so only the southern warpgate had their population. Recently however, there has been a different problem. Since Episode 2 came out (and people stopped picking carrots) I have seen more battles for Old Shore Checkpoint than Ymir Ruins. Regardless of which faction is there, the southern warpgate keeps getting ruined over and over again. The problem is that they have the fewest buffers. The east gets Excavion at the border to start, the north doesn't have to lose too much ground before they can crutch on Snowshear Fort, and even Grey Heron Shipping allows the eastern faction to underpop that front for a while. The south however, has nothing but 1 point, 4 minute bases all the way from their starting front back to their warpgate. Additionally, once they get warpgated, they only have two ways out of their warpgate, not 3 like the others. Each of Crystal Ridge Comm. Array and Nott Communications go somewhere, but Frostbite Harbour goes nowhere. The other major balance issue is with the BL-4 line of territories. Excavion and Echo Valley are two bases which are worth 5 bases due to the territory line that is cut off by them. This was a problem with the old Esamir, and I was hopeful that this would get addressed when they made a new Esamir. I've gone over this problem before in detail, more than once, so I won't repeat myself yet again here. The things that are needed to give the southern warpgate a chance to breathe are that we need a large base back at Jaegers, and we need Elli Amp station back so that there are positions on each of those approaches where defenders can make a sizeable hold out. This would result in 4 amp stations on the continent, but honestly both the new ones are a bit weird. I wouldn't miss either of them, and I do miss East River Sky Station, so I would get rid of Jord. A final issue I'll bring up is that while I can clearly see that the junked bio labs are intended to be construction locations, they are infuriating to try to build on, as much of the decorative debris collides with construction objects. If something could be fixed so that the debris can be there for decorative purposes, but constructables be allowed to pass through it, that would help a lot.
It's a bad redesign of what was once a great continent, agreed. But other than the planned "megastructures" I don't want them to try to balance esamir anymore. They ruined it the first time, they'll just make it even worse the second time. The best change for esamir (which is never going to happen) would be a revert to before Wrel ruined it. Imho the reason SW warpgate won more alerts wasn't because their warpgate was further away than the other two, But because the other two had the incredibly fun mani-triangle to fight at. The mani-triangle was the esamir equivalent to TI Alloys (before Wrel ruined it in the same patch that he ruined esamir) Mani Fortress and "The Bridge of Death" to the east were especially fun to wage war at. But yeah, a revert would never happen, so the best thing now is for them not to "fix" it any more than they already have.
took me about half a second to realize there was a big problem with the revamp. They cut off so many territories as soon as a faction caps the tech plant there's an alert. And then there's the fact most the bases look decent but are completely trash to fight at, or aren't even bases at all (I'm thinking of andvari ruins). Idk why he hates bios so much, but I know the new esamir is 100000000x worse than the old one, which was perfectly fine.
Ok, guys, Esamir was NOT fine. It needed a revamp, but the revamp needed to be done by...how to put this?...somebody who understands the game? Now, the actual base design is something I would pass on doing, I probably wouldn't be good at that. I would review and critique the work of whoever I hired, but my own strength is on the grand scale strategy, not so much the nitty gritty of base detail. I'll toss in a screen shot of something that just kept happening. This is an extreme example, where we cut the NC out of Mani entirely and they still didn't leave (NC owned the bio lab until 10 seconds before the screen cap was taken). Less extreme versions of this were pretty much a daily occurrence, it was NOT fine.
Again, you're attempting to solve the symptoms, not the actual problem. On every continent, people would flock to bios. On every continent, few people care about alerts. Molesting the bases and chopping off half the continent might solve the symptoms, but it's definitely no going to solve the problem. Alerts need to be more meaningful. Back then, locking a continent would actually provide you with a tactical advantage, and generally people would try to lock the continent to get the -50% nanite discount for their faction. What's the point of locking a continent now? Apart from hossin, I don't even think I know what the others do. It's all about finding the right balance between what is good enough to get people motivated to win, while not being TOO good. Esamir was a great continent, although I'll agree a few bases needed to be looked at (most of which weren't with the revamp). However, the main issue it had was with battleflow, as all continents do. The lattice system was supposed to be a temporary fix as they work toward implementing a good battleflow meta. That was years ago. Paired with the spawn system, it's really those two things that are the cause of what is going on. There's not really any incentive to defend bases, the lattices and spawn don't encourage fights to evolve, and in the end, locking the continent only awards you a handful of iso and certs. Motivation for a noob perhaps, but not for the faction as a whole to fight together towards a common objective. The game just becomes 3 zergballs trying to ghostcap down a lattice, avoiding other zergs. People spending their time in biolabs is just another symptom that the other bases are meaningless to fight at, and there's not enough incentive to win. Seriously, people would earn more certs at mani than they would for winning an alert. Obviously when they realize they don't have a hope of winning, they go farm for as long as they can in the bio. It's behavior that's not particular to esamir, it's just the placement of the bios on the lattice meant each time the continent opened, there were 3 available bios to fight at from the start, which was unique to esamir. It's not a bad thing that players fight in bios, if that's what they really find fun, all you're doing by removing them is angering the majority of the playerbase. If you have that one toy you like the most and play with all the time (I guess nowadays for most ppl that'd be your phone), and I confiscated it in return for nothing, how would you feel? If instead of forcingly taking your phone, I came up with alternate ways for you to try to have fun? Instead of deleting what most the playerbase found fun, they could have made other bases better, or actually fixed the fundamental flaws in the system. My first thought when I look at your screenshot is not "OMG MANI BIOLAB IS SO DESTRUCTIVE NC AND TR LOST ALL THEIR TERRITORY BECAUSE OF IT"! It's more along the lines of "wow alerts and the cap system right now are so boring and useless that BOTH NC and TR prefer to have a fun fight and ignore the whole alert, than double-team against VS". Doesn't matter whether the guys prefer fighting at Eisa, Mani, Advairi, Ymir or Rime Analytics. The problem is they aren't interested in the alert, the base they choose to have fun at during that alert isn't the issue, it's the reasons why they don't feel like participating in the alert in the first place! It's really destructive behavior to start making changes without understanding why you're making them. People dislike change, and they will dislike it you aren't able to provide a single valid reason for making that change in the first place. "When you start moving furniture around, people stub their toes and get upset" (Narcos Mexico). You're just wasting your energy, to anger people in the end, for absolutely no reason. The revamp is super trash. But they could've given us the best bases ever, kept the bios or removed them - whatever the best revamp in your eyes looks like - it wouldn't have solved the issue. Because it's not a surface issue specific to Esamir, it's a foundational issue with the core mechanics of the game. That's why you'll experience it on every continent of the game.
