Well for those who want little or no thought process in tactical decision making will love this map format. It forces people to attack whatever the next point up the road to the objective may happen to be. There are no surprises here, you simply go to where the next objective is and either attack or defend. Everyone will know exactly where to go without the need for squad or platoon leaders. Personally I think this type of map will turn this game into a flat out kill fest. It will definitely favor the faction with the largest population in game at the time. Some will like it, but I won't be one of them.
your concerns/complaints are no different than what's going on in the live server. difference between the two being, the lattice system makes attacking/defending more predictable allowing for more concentrated fighting and hopefully less ghost capping.
First. Solo players want to have big fights so let them zerg against other zergs. Second. What tactics do you see in the old lattice system? Outfits want to have resistance while attacking and while defending. They can make flanking maneuvers and with some fine tuning they can do something behind front lines as well. When this system gets combined with my suggestion it could become even better. And btw, the objectives for outfits don't have to be only points but actual enemies! And when outfits know where the enemy is they can do some really cool stuff. But it needs to be tested first.
And less tactical gamep^lay, something this game destincts from others and where they gonne lose a lot off audience to, not every game has to be a cod clown....
Outfits want to cap continents, resistance doesn't matter, at least all big tr waterson outfits work like that, and i am pritty sure most organized outfifs work the same, waterson tr aint no exception....
Most of the tactical decisions I see in the current system is deciding which bases to ghost cap next followed by the enemy doing the same thing back. Only on the main facilities did I ever see anything requiring a competent commander as he had to split up squads to take the outposts/main facility while having to adapt to the enemies response. Maybe with this new lattice system outfits will instead be coordinating Galaxy drops and strategic sunderer deploys to flank the enemy vehicles/troops in an actual battle. You know... actual combat tactics rather than boring ghost cap flanking maneuvers for influence that while sometimes convenient is ultimately useless. I hope.
The tactics you see on live right now is which base to ghost cap next. The tactics that will begin to unfold in the lattice network will be actual battle tactics. I'm in a rather large outfit, and we ran a test. We had 8 full squads on the test server and decided to split them up. 4 squads went NC and the other 4 stayed TR. We fought between Crossroads and Regent Rock Garrison. As the NC, we were the opfor, our objective was to make it to crossroads and to do that we had to take Xenotech Labs before we could get to crossroads. So, it initiated simply. We got some sundies and drove up. We gained a foothold on a hill and began fighting. The head on attack didn't work, flanks happened back and forth. We lost a couple sundies. So, we had 3 of our squads continue the fighting on the frontlines and my squad went back to get a galaxy and max-crash the point on Xenotech, since the cap point is inside a small building. So, we did that and we were successful. We made it into the point. Because of this the TR were forced to fall back and deal with a bunch of hacksaw Max's. After a volley of multiple types of grenades we fell and the TR re-secured the cap point. However, since they did that, another of our squad's used our diversion to get a sundy behind Xenotech. We then had them surrounded and we pushed from two sides. And while we made it to the point for a short time, we got overrun inside the point. The slow cap times allow the defenders to react and form a strategy in a short amount of time and that's awesome. We would form strategies, they would succeed and then the defender's formed a strat and they succeeded. It was strat after strat until finally we gal dropped yet again on top of the point with scat max's and managed to get a sundy inside the base. Once we did that, we destroyed the enemy defensive AMS and then held the point for a couple minutes under constant and intense fire. Strategy won the fight, under live circumstances we probably would have just back capped them. With the test server lattice network, we had an amazing fight. The next battle at crossroads watchtower was a similar exchange, but you get the idea. TL;DR: Battle Strategy > Ghost Cap Strategy.
If you folks think that forcing bottlenecks isn't going to lead to Zergv vs.Zerg you are going to find you are sorely mistaken. Oh I'm sure there are good outfits in the game that will use tactics in those Zergfests, but for the most part it'll be just masses of people piled up at one spot on the map. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it.
im happy, finally we can get some stuff working on release was going to post up some thoughts on base design later, ill get some screenshots sorted see if we can get it tested @ a single base..
I believe I realize/see what the OP is trying to say: The new lattice system is so linear that when massive organized units clash, there will be this stalemate that cannot truly be broken. In turn it will just degenerate into a bunch of killing and nothing really getting accomplished. This is understandable, but I think its a safe bet to say that the hexes are setup in a way still that this kind of deadlock can be avoided and broken by the smarter, more tactical organized unit.
In this game, i think only very few outfits uses strategie. Because you need multiple platoons to make a strategic decision. Squads, Platoons, Outfits are using tactics in battles, they flank, they support each other, and with this tactics nothing will change. If every faction would have some kind of supreme commander the current system would work, but thats never going to happen ( because 90 % of all players are thinking that only they are the people who know how to play and would never listen to someone they dont know). So the the new system just lead us to the next battle, but we still can flank, split our forces or prepare an ambush. tbh I think that leaders will be more important then before, because you can prepare defense or counter attacks knowing that the enemy MUST atack some base, give you the intel you need to prepare.
Some people seem to don't know what 'ghostcap' actually means. To clarify: one guy comes in on the flash, flips the point and rides off into the sunset. And that darn point continues to cap with 0/n people on point (which is all kinds of BS, by the way). Know the difference.
If ghost capping is a problem there are far better ways to deal with it than force everyone to adopt a completely new system for the sins of a few. It makes it too predictable, like cap there, or there, or dont play/go to other continent. Infact playing on other continents will be the only choice since the far less player numbers will mean theres still a bit of guessing to work out where to go.
Know what's hilarious? The Roadmap shows you guys are the minority by 10 to 1. 500+ up votes 53 downvotes. Guess what fellas... this IS happening. Quit griping and start working on real feedback.
Well my first impressions reading the beta notes. No... Please no. I really like to play strategically and tactically. Sometimes capping points, and sometimes just fighting at RANDOM locations. One time it happened that our zerg got attacked while moving by a TR zerg in the middle of nowhere. That was really fun. But back tp the bases. Every base, every cm of ground, should be capable. The hexagon system like now is very good. But it gives newbies to many opportunities, so they don't know where to go. But I still think that by drawing lines and force everyone to follow these lines, the game will fail. Than it got nothing strategic, nothing tactic, or not tactic maybe still in, but there will be no strategies needed anymore. Oh and no more cutting off That's the worst of that type of "gamemode". PS: I didn't played now on the servers, so keep that in mind. These first impressions just came as i read the beta notes!
There is nothing forcing you to stay in the colored areas, nothing preventing you from going into the "neutral" territories, nothing stopping you from playing strategically. The only limitations this new system adds is what bases are in danger of being captured. Last I checked playing strategically does not require the capture of bases, it may be the desired result, but I am sure those more strategically inclined will still be quite successful in out strategizing others. If you cannot think of how this could be done with the new system, perhaps you have not put enough time into it? The current system is a random clusterf*** of people being "strategic" and ignoring zergs, bypassing combat, and capping empty bases. The few players that do combat oriented strategies now should have no issues with the new system.
Considering a great deal of those votes were cast right after it was announced, by people reflecting on how similar it was to the (so called good) system in PS1 before anyone really knew or thought about then yeah it might look popular, but im seeing more and more switching on to the fact its not just automatically going to imbue the game with win, but actually in the modern setting its going to give us far less choice on huge scale maps. It might have worked well funnelling the handfuls of squads of the old game but this is new territory, we need more bandwidth to choose our path now.
Okay, but I think another similar situation that most people despise (myself included) is when the best tactical decision for an outfit is to leave a fight to go sit on empty bases. This kills my fun and makes me want to log off more than anything else in the game right now.
in response to OP, the game as it stands now is a giant numbers game, and small outfits/squads screwing around in outlying bases are just fooling themselves into thinking they're doing something useful. when you actually want to penetrate deep into enemy territory or take a major base, you bring a zerg. why do indar caps happen at night (or more recently when people are distracted by alerts)? because the numbers aren't there to oppose the small squads and outfits. "small" is useless when the game actually lives up to its potential at primetime and brings hundreds of players to the table. thank god SOE is learning from the same mistake in early PS1 and implementing some way of focusing battles and bringing a method to the madness.
