[Suggestion] To make construction meaningful, we must look at RTS games

Full disclosure, I just play in the Vanguard, Prowler, and occasionally fly Liberators.
While I don't plan to play construction, I am certainly bothered by its current state.

In the past, changes that annoyed me I was able to deal with by just becoming better.
When the Harasser was introduced, well, I just improved my aim.
When Hornets were introduced, I just started using G40-Ranger more often.
When the Chimera was introduced, well, I just started driving under it and cheesed it.
When construction was introduced.... I had to wait for the Zerg to show up so my path could be cleared. Unfortunately, as a one-player Outfit, I at most get 2 OS's and that is good for just one base.
I feel compelled to whine for once.

Enough of my rant.
Here's my plan to make construction meaningful:

1. Delete the Lattice system all together.
2. Delete 2/3 (ok, maybe 3/5, but certainly more than 50%) of the capturable facilities.
3. Flatten the portions of the map taken by these now deleted bases. If there used to be a mountain or hill, reduce it to flat terrain. If the terrain was already flat, turn it into J908. Why? Because the maps are all a bunch of mountains already god&^**(.
4. Fill in the voids of what you just deleted by plagiarizing the map layout of games like the good ol' Starcraft or the good ol' Command & Conquer games. Specifically, place fields of Auraxium, Cortium, Synthium, and Pollystellarite in the voids left by the deleted facilities. Yes, the same "greens", "blues", and "purples" used in the Outfit armory.
5. Construction players build bases near those fields and harvest the resources. The Auraxium, Synthium, and Pollystellarite goes to their outfit. The silos and command center could literally just be copied from Command & Conquer and Starcraft, respectively.
6. Attackers who successfully destroy a loaded silo or command center get to loot the resources. I'm thinking that resources produced for the Outfit who controls the construction are only paid once a silo is filled to 100%. If the silo is destroyed, it will drop 50% of what it had in store as a collectible. Its on the successful attacker to return it to their base or that of another outfit and receive compensation for themselves or their outfit.
7. Ok, even if we all like this, what about alerts? I propose two: (7) and (8) below:
8. In the first one, the non-construction players become "zerglings" tasked with destroying as many zerglings of the other faction and also their player-made structures. Meanwhile, construction players just mine resources like back in one of the missions of the Shattered Warpgate. The winner faction has a combination of highest resources mined, highest players killed, and highest structures destroyed.
9. In the second one, WE ALL become a good ol' RTS deathmatch. The faction who loses all their PLAYER-MADE command centers, loses the alert.

Here's an example of a typical Stacraft map layout. Somewhat even balance of terrain across the map and even features water. The mineral nodes and the Vespene Gas geysers are mined by worker drones. The ancient pyramids see below would be but a limited number of the current capturable bases.

I think the construction players should look like this:

That's an image of a bunch of Terran SCVs mining minerals in Starcraft. They put up Command Centers and the other buildings for that faction in that game. What's the difference between this example and what we have now? In the former, the workers have a designated, protected space. In the latter, I kind just bully them when I run into them (and so do aircraft and everyone else). Why? because Cortium nodes are ALL OVER the place.
I mentioned Command & Conquer. Here:

The green structures are silos just like the ones we have currently. When they fill up, the Outfit of the construction player who made said silo gets an Outfit resource payout. You see the Harvester just outside that tapered structure with three chimneys? That's you current ANT players, producing value for your Outfit. Meanwhile, the standing army is comprised of mean meffers like me who protect your base and otherwise raze that of the opposing factions to the ground. Army units produce value by protecting construction players or looting enemy bases.
I'm done.
Suggestions? Complaints? Thoughts?

the harvester and base building always reminded me on command and conquer.
I think most of your ideas are good if implemented the correct way but I also think that in the eyes of the developers this takes too much effort, is too cost-effective and changes the overall game too much into a different unforeseen direction.

as a constructionbuilder and RTS player myself ....
just NO .... PERIOD ... NO!

this game first and foremost IS a battlefield-esque domination/conquest style FPS ...
as such construction should support the latticebasesetup the game is build uppon for almost a decade now
building PMBs should support a push on a laticebase or be able to defend against one

Player Made Bases themselfes for infantry v infantry fights are boring at best (at the most likely worst it´s throwing numbers of infantry against a meatgrinder or said meatgrinder being HESH sieged which is no fun to anyone on either reciving end) for that you NEED well made nuanced arenas/bases to have a propper back and forth combat (and i say that as an Unreal Tournament player)

the primary reason RPG should take a look at RTS games (specifically games like command and conquer (better Open Red alert) and/or Company of Heroes and WH40k Dawn of War 1&2 and/or similar) is to take their way of balancing weapons/units into account ...
as PS2´s overall Infantry vs Vehicle vs Aircraft balance is sooo out of wack that the moment infantry steps outside of a latice base they become just lemmings ... infantry already severly lacks in antiarmor capability, meanwhile vehicles armored against small arms fire can oneshot infantry on a direct hit with weapons that are meant to fight other vehicles when they also have options specifically against infantry ... where is the rock-paper-scissors aspect in that?

I hear what you're saying but players don't need to be SCV's, that can be automated.

how unfortunate

I understand you have reservations, no problem, lets take it easy.

So, I agree with your characterization that this game is Battlefield-esque, however, the Battlefield series certainly does not/did not have a lattice system. The closest thing to that, in say, Battlefield 3 and Battlefield 4 was the Rush game mode. Rush was an infantry-only linear game mode, which is why it worked IMO. It was one stream of infantry vs. another stream of infantry (back pressure vs. front pressure). What you are implicitly referring to is the Conquest game mode which features combined arms (Vehicles + Infantry + Aircraft). Conquest certainly did not have a lattice system in BF3 or in BF4, and actually, aircraft would be used to skip heavily defended enemy control points and send infantry beyond enemy lines to force retreats from the heavily defended points. I am calling for bringing back this capability to Planetside 2, we used to have it in the better days of Higby.

I 100% agree with your comment on your second paragraph. We cannot achieve good Infantry vs. Infantry fights in Planetside 2 right now owing to several factors (irrespective of the bases being player-made). The first one is the asymmetry in A2G/G2A. In Planetside 2, A2G is king by a longshot, particularly against infantry, whereas successful G2A consist of lucky tank-shell or Decimator snipes on ESFs. The second factor is the sheer incompetence that went into the design of the capturable bases with the biggest culprit perhaps being Nason's Defiance. Lastly, too many facilities just cannot isolate the infantry from the Ground Vehicles and the Aircraft. The infantry spawns are all just exposed to aircraft/tank bombardment and almost never undergound. What I think we need, is that the few bases that remain after my proposed changes be structured like BF3's Rush specifically on the map Operation Metro or BF4's rush specifically on the map Operation Locker. Those were glorious Infantry vs. Infantry fights with persistent flanking and no Vehicle/Aircraft involvement.

Regarding your last paragraph, you know you are implicitly calling for reversing the asymmetry in client side for determining roadkills, right? And you do realize than in at least Red Alert infantry took 10+ tanks shells to die depending on the tank, right?
God I miss that squashy, fart-like sound in Red Alert 2 when you run people over in that game. Sarcasm aside, I disagree. Infantry are actually damn strong against Ground Vehicles, certainly a deterrent at minimum. I'm an MBT main, and the enemies that poke me the most are (in order of effectiveness) are Light Assaults (LAs) (special mention to those who compose C4 flashes), Heavy Assaults (HAs) with lock-ons (special mention to VS Lancer HA), and finally Engineers with AMR (special mention to those who bail out of a dying lightning and toss AV grenades at my Vanguard). Yes, I'm not even listing AV MAXes or other Tanks or even Aircraft. If we sort by annoyance, the order reverses. Anyhow, in Red Alert 2, do you remember Tanya? The hero unit of the Allies that could walk up to armor units and chain one-tap them with C4? Nowadays ALL LAs are basically Tanya thanks to ambusher jets/drifter jets + impulse grenades. While it is true that tanks shells typically one-shot infantry (ahem... Flak Armor), its easier said than done. Lock-on HAs and AMR Engineers can peek out of cover very quickly. TLDR Infantry is pretty damn good AV nowadays.

Might as well get automatic, Cortium then.
Why not just get automatic, Outfit resources then?
Hell, why not also get automatic kills? (#BringBackAIModule)
That's right, you no longer have to walk up to the enemy vehicle ramp yourself and lay tank mines, that can be automated too.

I apologize for getting carried away, but construction players are actually better than SCVs right now. They are more akin to the Soviet Warminer from Red Alert 2 because ANTs have guns. My issue is that unlike the Soviet Warminer proper, they are currently too vulnerable (and hence, whiny). In terms of their planning, they are between a rock and a hard place. They have to choose between building in safe place that will never see any action, or building just before The Gates of Hell and getting Zerg'd (Starcraft 2 Wing's of Liberty reference). I'm sure there are exceptional construction players in the same way that there are exceptional anything players, its just that the norm for them right now is not fun from what you'll gather in these forums.

This is most certainly not the case, infantry-only rush maps in 3 and 4 were the exception, not the rule. And usually the weakest ones, as well. Metro was decent, granted, but 3's maps were overall much higher quality than 4's.

The Frontlines gamemode in BF1 and BFV plays closer to what is in Planetside, and it does just fine with vehicles and aircraft.

Lockers and Metro were popular for players who wanted easy, dumb action where the enemy was always in front of them and they would always get revived. It was the worst parts of all the hallway fights in Planetside hyper-condensed and turned up to 11.

Ah! I forgot about the infantry-only Rush games. I stand corrected.
Even then, I think the worst that could happen was that one side got a single LAV which in that game two engineers could gank.
I never played BF1/BFV, so I can't speak for those. Could the success of Frontlines be attributed to roughly equal team sizes? In Planetside 2, often (even if the factions are perfectly balanced globally at 33% vs 33% vs. 33%, you can still have fights were one side vastly outnumbers the other(s).

Regarding Operation Locker and Operation Metro, I now figure (as you pointed out the easy revives) that it might be noob-friendly. I don't see why we shouldn't try them. You're right, they were hallway fights but with at-least 3X the flanking options than some of the worst hallway bases in Planetside 2. The one thing I forgot was that in Rush, the teams were roughly balanced (the thought of a "Zerg" didn't even come to mind).

RTS should be the base game (not FPS shooters).

But also the ability to transfer cortium from one base to another, that's the supply chain the lattice in Planetside (and WWIIONLINE) badly tries to simulates. And both the mining SCV's and the transportation of cortium from one base to another should be done by NPC's, not players. Nobo

While the player's avatar can magically teleport around the map, the cortium supply should not and should always be local. Same argument I made in WWIIONLINE forums about how logistics should be handled. All movement of supplies should be visible and interdictable. All storage of supply should be visible/destructible/bombable.

"No, I wanna play Battlefield."

You have no imagination/vision whatsoever.

It's not supposed to be an RTS-only game. Doing it how the Original Poster wants will destroy the game.

People also need to realize, the longer you make something, it doesn't mean it has more value and should be considered.

to make construction meaningful as ive suggested over the years we need a Tech building, that allows us to spawn special vehicles/aircraft only, or a way to upgrade current vehicles when they go into the tech building, hence the new tank weapons could of been a new addition to this concept, and they could make them stronger in doing so, the only way to have acess to those tank weapons was by spawning it through a construction tech building.


the effect of this would actually give more incentive for players in the area to defend the base so they can make use of it, as well as new vehicle/aircraft that can only be spawned at the tech building.

as for taking somthing from an RTS, the best thing for an addition to construction is adding a new aircraft that can pick up vehicles and drop them off just like in dune2000 with the spice aircraft carry-alls that could transport vehicles and spice miners across the lands

If there are no RTS elements in this game then get rid of the lattice line. Get rid of lattice line, capturing bases, and spawning of vehicles at buildings.

Some of you are overthinking this. Think about the difference between DOTA and Warcraft 3. What elements of Warcraft 3 were removed to make DOTA? Logistics; the collection of supplies, the building of structures, and turning supplies into units at structures. These are elements WWIIONLINE and PLANETSIDE have badly tried to simulate. Why simulate when you can just have the real deal. That's all we mean when we say RTS elements need to be the base system of logistics in a MMOFPS. And this is the game I play in my head when I build a base.

The lattice was added back in Beta, back when there was no construction at all. The game without lattice was a mess. The only ones who protested that change were the Platoon leaders, who liked cutting small chunks out of enemy territory in a more organic manner. Regular players were having trouble finding places to fight because everyone was doing everything everywhere, which resulted in very few large fights, which Planetside is known for.

We didn't have the player numbers to make the game without lattice anything more than perpetual ghost-capping, back when the game was at peak popularity. Now it's 11 years old.

I played Warcraft 3 maybe once, but I have vague memories of Dota. The original Dota was a custom Warcraft 3 map without worker units. I recall that it was one team vs. another. Each team had those guard towers + additional Warcraft 3 structures and regularly respawning waves of NPCs that would attack the towers (but not build additional structures). Players controlled a hero unit and essentially assisted the NPCs with destroying the enemy base and enemy NPCs.
Bringing Dota into the discussion is certainly an interesting thought (to me at least).

If we Dota-ify Planetside 2 (just a thought), we would need all current capturable bases to be destructible. Unlike Dota though, maybe you also want these bases to be repairable because of the 3- team aspect and the sizes of Planetside2's maps.
One last thing, Dota didn't have a lattice system, people were free to attack the towers/structures in whatever order they chose. Dota, however, did funnel the players and NPCs down certain routes like Planetside 2 currently does (biggest culprit being the center of Amerish).

I don't think we need a lattice system at all if the game were to go full RTS at the macroscopic level.

Holy crap this is NIGHTMARE FUEL.

You want to completely change the entire game for construction, and not even a good way! RTS games are absolutely not designed in any way, shape or form for FPS style combat. Worse is that the map design of RTS games are almost always ultra simplistic coverless expanses to maneuver troops in that can’t use cover anyway and the archetypical ridges that seperate play area’s so you know what and where to fight or build. Even for RTS’s its a big problem that they got stuck with this design and one of the reasons that RTS’s will not have a second golden age until it truly offers a new and more varied map design, among other things.

As for your opening, just because you had your adaptations does not excuse bad gameplay design. Forcing all players to always bring some AA that is by design incapable of destroying aircraft unless the pilot makes mistakes but in reverse the tank can be wiped out just for picking the wrong loadout is not and never will be good design. Similarly “I just got more accuracy” completely ignores the skill requirements and cost/effectiveness of the situation, not to mention the difference in the situation again. If the fight goes badly for the Harasser it has plenty of opportunity to escape and reset the engagement, if the fight goes badly for the tank it has zero options to escape or avoid the Harasser. Especially for the average player this is a big problem. Do not excuse bad gameplay just because you can handle it.

No, I hate DOTA. I said think about what was removed from Warcraft3 to make DOTA: building bases, to mine resources, to build units, you know logistics. Logistics, exactly what MMOFPS needs to fix a hell of a lot of junk plaguing MMOFPS, and you know it because you came to the same conclusion I did.

(looks at Steam stats) I have no idea why DOTA is popular. I could probably enjoy it if everyone wasn't such a try hard. I guess some people like micro more than the macro, I hate micro. I prefer grand strategy games to tactical games, like Paradox Interactive games where I can sit back and enjoy the strategy aspect instead of have my brain be occupied by mad clicking all the time. God I wish someone would make a SLOW multiplayer strategy game. MMORTS, SLOW.

No, you don't.

Those aren't strategy games, those are mobile gacha/clicker games one step removed from Vegas slot machines with graphics.

Yes, that's kind of my point. The words "MMORTS" mean exactly that in today's world.

The closest things I've seen to an actual RTS as an MMO were End of Nations, Age of Empires Online and Company of Heroes Online. Every single one failed very quickly and also failed expectations – they didn't even have an open-world map, but merely standard server-based matches with forced RPG elements.

In the end, you won't get any more "slow" than a gacha game that forces you to wait 24 hours after telling your riflemen to move to the next hex over. Be careful what you wish for.