Alpha - Bases Weren't Always Poorly Laid Out

Yea the old tech plant layout was defensible but also primitive. We want defensible bases that can be breached with with smart play and not just brute force.

I was wondering why base walls had no cover for infantry

Now i know.

all i have to say is god damn.

Old Tech plant was fine, except the sunderer "exploit"
If sundy were placed inside shields, a blockade? sundy could enter and blow it up easily aka a small squad could cripple the whole zergs defence

Regarding base designs, PS1 fights were much more fun, cause even if you had the full zerg with you, it could take hours to get that base..
But it also felt much more rewarding when you took the base, not to mention that base capture xp were dynamic, so if you took the base with no fighting = no xp
If we had good hold on the base while capturing we would keep generator and spawn tubes up for that extra xp (every kill added to more base xp) and good defence were a must, cause if they resecured the base, all that xp would be lost

PS2 is easy mode and PS1 is hardmode
In PS2 you get 1500 xp no matter what you do, all you have to do is show up and jump from base to base
in PS1 you get 1500 ish xp if you were in the soi/hex the whole capture time and/or most of squad were there and you just joined, also called TEAMWORK

PS1, a 10 year old game, has doors and indoor infantry battles were vehicles cant go, not even ATVs
Bases had no holes in walls (with shield mod, aka gen today), not for infantry and not for vehicles and there were no light assault that could fly over the walls
Generators is inside locked rooms, why would you put gens inside open "rooms" where tanks can kill you?
Gens should have 1 entrance, with a lockable door and no windows

etc etc etc.... PS1 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>PS2

So air can farm infantry.

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I would LOVE the old layout! Capturing a base isn't something a team should be able to do quickly. Certain bases change hands so often, it's ridiculous.

I want to feel like I'm hunkered down in a base defending with my all, not running from point A to point B trying to recap generators while dodging air bombardments. And when I'm attacking a base I want to feel like my life is important and I need to accomplish something, not running in wildly trying to cap generators who cares if I die there is a sunderer 30 feet away.

If they are too well defended at a station that means you can try to cap around them, which isn't so much the case now you just throw more at the station until you inevitably capture it.

Base captures are something that should take several hours if not days, each foot of the front line gained is a victory. Capturing a Continent should be something that takes weeks or months. That's what war is.

Sadly there are many kids who play this game and demand instant gratification and they can't comprehend that something difficult to achieve is much more gratifying.

Just wondering, does the alpha base layout still have the jump pad on top of of the outer defense wall? Infantry enemy jumping like mario is really annoying. On the side note, I liked the alpha base concept more than the current one. That's what a base should be.

I wasnt in Alpha, but afaik there werent any jump pads back then

After seeing this I wonder, petition to have a "test" server were they throw in the old bases and see how they work for people!?

They will work for the average gamer, but wont for for the useless devs that think they are so good at this yet people are fleeing the game

I always wondered why they didn't add more shields to make the gate diffuser sundies more worth while I mean, it used to get used in tech plants occasionally. Now you can just zerg via AMS.

I can't think of an actual time where anyone would use the gate diffuser over a AMS.

I can just image 6 full sundies all lining up all ready to bust though that shield and take down the gens......
NO!!! PEOPLE HAVE TO THINK!!!!.

God forbin people use a brain once in a while

Allow me to be devil's advocate here - the new design is better. Currently my take on it is that the design favors the attacker. It doesn't make sense IRL and it DOESN'T HAVE TO. There are servers like mallory where in indar usually 30-60 percent of the map is covered by TR but imagine with better defenses we'd take so much longer just to take an area back. Its not impossible because of this design. WIth your suggested plan we'd likely have more situations where certain maps would just be completely controlled by a single faction. I don't know if I'd like that at all.

For the mother of the holy hand grenade, what kind of screwery is this?! All alpha screenshots make me question where did all that goodies go. Seriously, weapon skins, player models, base designs...

IMHO blanket bubble shields should be used sparingly. Shields that cover all the important places from air spam but can be brought down by attackers getting some boots on the ground and\or destructible/deployable modules to plug the holes in (even the old HL TF had places where demoman could blast through a wall to create a new vector of attack!) on the other hand...

What we need is more turrets in smaller bases.

Frankly, I think larger bases are OK. Provided even population on both factions (unless the 3rd faction joined in the fray), the bases can be defended, but it can be stormed easily enough by small outfits/randoms that it doesn't bog down the game.

The smaller bases, however....really needs more turrets.

Check the Lithcorp Secure Mine in Amerish...

Very unique, and without Lib spam forces an infantry battle in buildings and mountains.
I had one 8 vs 8 or so yesterday over there, took us half an hour to push the Vanus into their spawn building and was one of the best fights I had in PS 2, probably the best one ever on foot.
They blew up like 2 of our Sundys, somehow kept on sneaking past us and captured control points behind us and it took a systematic blockade on each approach a couple times (they just kept breaking through until we coordinated better than they did) before we captured the base for good.

Good thing nobody brought planes into the equation, they'd get camped as there's a good 50 meters of running to get from the spawn building to the nearest building/cave that's bomb proof.
This also shows how much non-fragile planes and no shields above the bases take away from this game.

There's also quite a few other good bases on that continent which lead to awesome infantry fights if there's no planes around, but I don't recall their names now.

They're actually planning on doing that, you could google that up.

I like this idea a lot, personally. Vehicle convoys and ambushes for said convoys in order to keep supply up is exactly the kind of depth this game needs. The way supply works right now is stupid as far as I'm concerned. Aside from poor base design, it is the biggest reason vehicle spamming is so popular.

Hopefully these are things they will add into the game as it ages -- I suspect their goal from the get go was to try and bait people in (specifically the CoD/BF3 crowd) at launch. That much is obvious, but I doubt they are going to leave it at the shallow mess it is. My guess is the "depth" features are things they will add later. The game won't survive if they don't for one, and two, it does make sense from a business standpoint to do it that way. Sorry, that's getting a bit OT, but anyways.

+1 for those old alpha bases. They don't need to just copy and paste them, bu the concept behind them is certainly better than what we have now.

These look much better than what we have right now.
But then again, it can't get much worse than the zergfest we have right now.

Yes. Yes it could.

last day i told myself let's see some footage from totalbiscuit, then i realized it was alpha footage, and man those bases aren't bad at all! much more cover from air and stuff!