New patch, Way to ruin the only Defensible base fight!!

The only time I have worked on holding a tech plant not linked to my warpgate is on Esamir. Why would you not hold the only tech plant even if you are cut off? You want to keep Armor out of the enemies hands and hope that your faction can keep the other bases secure.

Same question to you then:

What happened last night was that while the lemmings held on to Tumas, the TR went around, cut it off and then proceeded up to Mekala and took THAT tech plant.

Result: Tech benefits for the TR, No tech benefits for us. Plus 90% of our forces bottled up inside that worthless facility. How is this a good battle plan?

Here are my stats
Facilities Defended: 651
Facilities Captured: 364
As you can see, I defend all bases rather than just the tech plant. But I know that keeping tech plant is VERY important. I will not defend only the tech plant unless it is on Esamir. I said this already.

first I want to say, what a bad idea, Let the infintry get in to the base eayser but don't make the shild gens out side the walls, whats the point then?

Also, our outfit does defend more than we attack, wile we let the mindless zerg take over. like HM above me, my stats are below.

Facilities Defended: 266
Facilities Captured: 118

Without reading any of the rest of the thread, because 10 page long forum arguments make my soul hurt, I'm just going to +1 the idea of reverting the change. Sure, tech plants were brutal, time-consuming meatgrinders for the zerg, but we've gotta have one kind of base like that. It's just fun, sometimes.

Everybody is a critic Degen....Since your the perfect strategist correct? Here's an idea. Know your role...And shut your mouth.... so we can discuss something that has NOTHING to do with how we play but about something being FIXED without being BROKEN.

My soul hurts Goats!!

12/12/12 - The day Eisa died. Never forget.

What's sad is, even with the changes, TR:Waterson is still so terrible that we can't take a tech plant. Couldn't keep the gens down for very long from the NC, and half of our force was trying to assault the back door the entire time, even when we did get the gens down there was literally nobody at the front door and only about a half-dozen at the garage.

It was not even that complicated, if your outfit has 48 people online you can use them to make the difference on a well defended techplant.

Who ever redesigned the techplant does not play this game, and if he does play this game he has no clue how to play it or what makes a FPS game fun. The sooner they put these guys to work on EQ3 the better so they can bring some people in who know something about shooters.

I don't see the problem, they listened to the wrong people and dumbed down the game even more. The techplant was the only base where you had to plan for.

Organised use of concussion grenades from the top and at the backdoors
Timed max rush right after the grenades
Gate defuse sundies dirving through the shield and unloading troops that go straight up to the elevator to take out the SCU gen
locking down the central vehicle bay long enough to hack the vehicle terminals to pull an ams or a lightning or 2 inside.

all that ... gone
catered to the idiots.

Sorry if I am repeating someone else's point but I cannot read all these comments.

The reduction of turret strength and other changes to reduce defensive capability are definitely a move to zerg swarming in the game and creating little or no value in defending anything. To my mind the most enjoyable times in this game are the desperate defense against an ever increasing enemy presence and the mind blowing assault against staunch defenders.

In swarm attacks armour takes out defending turrets in under 3 minutes, reducing this time is ludicrous. If you are trying to use a turret as a defender (land or air) you need 3 to 4 engineers constantly healing you to be able to stay active for 3-4 minutes. 90% of the time, once the turrets are destroyed, it is useless to repair them again and keep fighting.

Another point is that based on the dynamics of the players en masse, defense had little value before. Any fortification in the game needs at least a good 50 players to effectively defend it against an attack from any sizable group.

The dynamics you are introducing will lead to hundreds attacking tens in a continuous cycle. The thrill and challenge will be significantly reduced. Boredom will set in and challenge seeking players will drift away.

I suggest you reconsider reducing defensive capability and possibly find a way to motivate players to defend a base to encourage some game balance.

Not wanting to sound in anyway ungrateful - because how can you expect to reasonably have a sense of entitlement in a free to play game - but what the hell have you done to the tech plant?

What possible reason could you have to make it so that you have to defend a number of generators outside of the main base, in a faciltity that is both fun to hold and a laugh to attack as it is?

Nothing was wrong with the tech plant, but you change it anyway?

Give us a lattice or give us defensible bases. When you see something is working don't try and change it.

And do not reduce defensive capablilities...if anything friggen increase them. DOORS.

*edit* oh yeah and rip Eisa. Good job.

I'd say both sides of this argument have valid points. Something I did feel even in beta was that the bases needed to be considerably more defensible. Even now, I feel that the fight for most bases goes by far too quickly, especially in the case of the smaller bases, which zergs and organised platoons alike simply breeze through for some free exp on their way to the next big fight.

Then Tech Plants came along. I feel that pre-patch, the problem with the Tech Plants wasn't that they were so defensible, but they were defensible in the wrong way. After some examination, I concluded that there were five entrances into the plant:

- Two gaps over the vehicle bay shields
- Elevator down from the roof
- The often-farme doorways next to the elevator
- The rear shield

The elevator comes down in the same place as the doorways, and the back shield is impassable without a shield diffuser. Therefore, there were only three ways into the facility without a shield diffuser - over each of the vehicle bay shields (in which case your entire team was stuck as Light Assault), or through the infamous farm doors. Since shieldbreaking was a shock tactic and the defenders didn't have to watch the shields constantly, it meant that the entire defending population was concentrated on three points of defense, each within 50ish metres of each other, especially if most of the defenders were positioned at the balcony overlooking the farming doors. I feel that it is this that caused the extreme farminess of Tech Plants pre-patch. In addition, the position of the elevators means that there is little value to the attackers in establishing a foothold on the roof aside from denying turret access, essentially resulting in a whole floor of the Tech Plant being left with no reason to be fought over after the first few minutes.

Tentatively, starting from the Tech Plant layout pre-patch, I would suggest placing a shield generator for the back shield on the roof and moving the elevator position over to an area near the rear shield instead of the farm doors. This would open up the need for defenders to coordinate their attention between the doorways and the new elevator location. It would also promote the use of Galaxy drops and make the roof more of a focal point for infantry combat, giving defenders and attackers alike more of a reason to actually go up there. The defenders, instead of all standing on that one balcony, would now have to divide between roof, doorways and rear shield/elevator sections of the base, creating three key defense hardpoints that must be held instead of the one balcony hardpoint that effectively covers three entry points.

I may not have thought this through completely and I'm suffering from jetlag here, so I may have missed some glaring flaws in this idea. But this has been my two pennies, as it were. What do you guys think?

It's pretty clear the Tech Plant redesign took about 5 minutes of thought... maybe less.

Put 2 generators in the outer buildings and tie them to the garage shields.
Erase the teleporter from the spawn.
Go on X-mas vacation.


Tah dah!



Tech Plant is now an Amp Station without any outer defenses/shieids/turrets.

Exactly the opposite of what PS2 needs...

Disappointed in the change as they're way too easy to cap now.

And erm what are sundie shield defusors for now?

You could have just swapped the location of the SCU and the gen, would be have been interesting.

What the hell is the point of even having a shield if attackers can so easily shut it down? The inanity and thoughtlessness is shocking. If you want to make tech plants easy to assault, put the generator on the top level so attackers can gal drop and take them down.

dumb idea to do this....anyone know why they did this though?
i'd like to say it was the TR's fault for keeping a battle at a tech plant for so long ... but it was probably factions on all servers
but if it was the TR's fault blame the people who shouted "FOR THE ALAMO" at tawrich tech plant on mattherson server
that was an awesome battle that lasted what? 2 days (considering we were deep in enemy territory and attacked by both sides it should have been a losing battle)

anyone else at that battle?

i'm ok with the new changes because the other way is seriously flawed... why on earth would you put the generators inside the building you're defending? would it makes sense to have the SCU inside the spawn room? no.

i think it's rather unbalanced to have a sunderer inside with a team of 400 camping inside, while the attacking team has to squeeze thru 2 small doors to get inside while getting spammed by a constant river of grenades and rockets.

i hope they revert it. they should have looked at what made tech plants defensible bases and made changes to amp stations.
now the only place infantry can get a good fight is a bio lab