Base Building is not worth the time and effort

Base building has some good aspects, but it is ruined by one of the poorest implementations of a game feature I have ever seen.

I won't go into detail as many others have.

Suffice to say that the risk vs reward, effort vs payoff, time spent vs how fast they are destroyed, are so obviously off in relation that it boggles the mind it hasn't been addressed.

DBG, you need to play the game. No...I don't mean playing VS and exploiting the game engine and your position at DBG, I mean, play the game...like players do.

Players = Customers by the way.

So veer away from your inner Patrick Soderlund.

You hit the nail on the head: effort and time versus payoff.

You could spend half an hour building a base and the fight likely has moved away, or has rolled over or passed your base. A static base can become obsolete in minutes, but takes more than minutes to build.

So the solution is simple as all hell: Allow players to build them faster.

Allow players to control a limited-range drone that has access to all your building schematics so you can quickly place everything with an overview and from the air. Also allow players to save their own templates, where a specific setup of base structures you already made once can be selected and placed. If the terrain doesn't allow, you can then drag the individual pieces up/down until they are at a placeable height to keep the template somewhat the same. Make the first X components dirt cheap to place so players can get going faster etc.

Besides that, a bit more integration into the base game of capturing bases would be pretty much mandatory.

Give us a Heavy Vehicle Pad and Heavy Aircraft Factory that uses 2000 cordium to pull heavy vehicles without a tech lab, so I can put up forward outposts for randos during large fights, and I will be happy personally.

The problem is the devs don’t like construction and do not want it to impact the game. The updates showed this very clearly.

Construction has potential, could be anything but these devs will do nothing sadly.

The solution to construction would be to refund it all and remove it temporarily from the game until they fix what they ruined.

Imho they should scrap OS (it ruins the game) and bring back wall/fortification immunity while effected by a repair module.

This simple change would be great for lattice fights since we'd no longer have idiots nuking bases killing all allies and enemies,
And it would also give construction the role that it should have, roadblock!

Some of the most fun times over the recent years (but before the wall nerf) have been attacking/defending construction bases blocking the path to the next base, it really gave construction a valuable purpose.
The current OS spam crap is just annoying, ruins the game for everyone in lattice bases and only serves farmers and trolls.

So scrap OS and bring back stalwart strongholds!
"YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

I was just getting into construction and spent quite a lot of certs unlocking stuff, when they introduced the decay, which effectively killed it off for me. It decays far too quickly and means you have to constantly top up cortium which just gets tedious.

Good ideas and good points.

The problem we face is the "Designer" for Planetside 2, Wrel, hates player choice. He removes player choice whenever possible and inserts his own choice in its place. He knows better than 1000's of people. He can make decisions better for everyone.

Construction has the potential of opening this game up--of correcting for same-map fatigue without a central planner (Wrel) making a new and highly planned continent (Oshur).

So I suspect Construction will remain a failure.

Building a largely pointless base faster only means you'll have a pointless base quicker. The solution is better integration.

Let players build current bases, and give them an option to add real current buildings with points in them. Make those buildings have big no build zones around them so they can be assaulted by infantry. Make each building require a Sunderers garage to activate the point. Let that base have a single build able spawn room. The large buildings mean they could only be built out in the open, not in a mountain.

That might take some serious coding, so I'm not sure if that's realistic. But it would be cool for sure.

DBG could remove or lessen the limitations to build close/around permanent bases to begin with.

That would integrate construction into the tactical flow because bases could be reinforced and better protected. If an high number of 3D elements is a performance problem they could simply introduce an hard limitation into the number of elements within a certain area. (like Fallout)

I actually liked the way player bases were used when they would give points for your faction to win alerts. That concept was very fitting and with some changes(like making them a bit more durable) maybe they could make it work better.

I think both are of equal importance right now. You can integrate it as much as you want, if the time investment remains the same it'll barely be used. It's a bit like the people who clamored for empty continents that would function solely on PMB's as well as the people asking for bases to be removed so we could build our own bases on top of points. We got that last one and it can be days before someone actually builds a PMB on one of those area's.

The core of the issue is that these things aren't that fun to attack. They need real buildings to fight in and around. Each building would also need a Sundy garage for attackers. If a capture point base is built, they could make it invulnerable till it's capturable, to stop the solo infil/tank destroying the whole thing and keep builders from having to babysit the thing just in case someone happens to attack it. But as long as they're these little turtle shell annoying things that you can just bypass, they won't succeed.

The glory days of the PMB faded with the removal of the Hive.

Ah yes, the glory days of nigh impenetrable fortresses in a ditch somewhere trying to be as removed from the game as possible sucking the fun out of anyone who tried to play the objective of destroying them in a system that allowed 10 or less people to do more for the continent capture than 300 people who concerted their effort outside of PMB's. Such glory, such glory...

But is a lattice base fun to attack? Like 20 players barricaded inside a building holding the point....is that a fun battle? It repeats over and over.
The Player Made Base battles where at least unique.

I'm not the biggest fan of our bases, but it is what it is. My suggested player bases could still be unique. Current generic bases would be in different places. Sunderers garages would be in different places. Spawn rooms would be in different places. And they'd be in different places around the map.

I don't disagree with you. It was great fun to try bringing them down.

The real problem there was the unbelievably bad game design of HIVES and Victory Points.

I have NEVER seen a game design (HIVES) that did the exact OPPOSITE of the what the game was supposed to be about.

How half this stuff gets into production is amazing.

Even the "small" things....DBG "fixes" jump pads for NS robots and doesn't even bother to perform a 5 second (FIVE. SECOND.) test of having TR/VS/NC use the "fixed" jump pads.

DBG management has no oversight of this game. How these things get into production is an absolute shame.

Don't they realize how poorly this stuff speaks about Planetside in general as they try to release PS:M, Planetside:Microtranscations? I mean..PS:A?

Please hire a Producer or Product Manager or Project Manager...whatever you call it there...who ensures the BASIC steps are taken during design, build, test and release stages.

And get rid of your shop's fad of Agile DBG.

lol, someone got footage of how much the turrets suck.
This actually happened to me sometimes...Just one Lib flew under the shield and took out all my turrets. Just not many players do it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/d1ytj2/phalanx_base_turret_is_utter_garbage/

bases can have a huge impact for the time spent on them, it's just the diminishing rate of returns is pretty steep. 1 silo 1 aircraft pad 2 routing spires and one garage with a rep module and a spawn tube.

From the sky it looks almost like an abandoned base. Takes almost no cortium. Allows a PL and a SL to have a router plus backup router at every fight for the next two hours, with free valks for transportation (bonus points if you both use the same valk to save cortium).

Having two routers per base, if not more, for a whole continent cap alert is amazing value.

The problem arises when you want to make your base a permanent, and prominent fixture of the map. The bigger your base = the more attention, doubly so if you have an OS spire. So just don't build a giant base if you don't want to have 2-3 guys constantly topping off the cortium, with a squad waiting to redeploy every time an armor column gets close.