Besides the lack of continents hurting this game, their is too many sub-bases.

Indar still has too many bases close to one another, but Esamir and Amerish are fine. I dont like some of the absurd walls on Esamir and Amerish needs the Lettuce, but there are a lot of dedicated players that also need more FPS.

I still see a lot of large Armor engagements on Indar. Having so many towers so close together actually facilitates those battles as you can spawn nearby and grab a tank. I see big ones on both other continents too, but they are fewer and further between - on Esamir due to the distance between bases and on Amerish the same, but because the roads are so twisty turny that it is almost painful to drive there.

I have been asking for reduced per-empire pop caps since beta. I never understood why "2000" was a needed number, especially since the game really doesn't run well with a full continent. I have also read that they did silently reduce the pop caps after OMFG started causing performance issues with the servers.

The other issue is the facility density on Indar, it's just too much. There is little room for moving armor battles. As it is now, if one tank chases another, they are backing up against another facility almost immediately. At that point, base turrets, and heavies get involved and vehicle combat "fun" heads to the crapper. This gets no help from the current driver = main gunner tanks. In PS1, the driver would be all "fast & furious" through trees and around obstacles while the gunner shot back at the pursing tank. That was WAY more fun than the B.S. tank combat we have now. Shame really.

I play allot of infantry and on Indar the bases are so close together (for the most part) that "foot zerging" to the next objective is the standard. Why? Because by the time you have pushed out and destroyed the last enemy AMS, you're about 1/4 of the way (or more) to the enemy base. What's the point in running back the the vehicle terminal when you can just keep running and be there quicker? Indar is a mess IMO. Bring out Hossin and take Indar totally offline for a rework. That will also solve late-night gameplay from being "Indarside" every night (which is really getting old).

I really think PS2 would have been more successful if they waited and released with 12+ conts (& global lattice), kept the pop caps to under 900 per continent, and followed PS1 base design / lattice /objective ideas (but larger scale). As far as the gunplay, PS2 is excellent, minus all the cheezy OHK weapons.

On a side note, has anybody else noticed that they downgraded just about every environmental texture in the game? PS2 is really starting to look crappy (and I run every setting on high/ultra except for shadows). Even though they did this in the name of "performance enhancements" I suspect the real reason is they needed more texture memory for custom camos.

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Another element of an expectation to be entitled to the most gratifying game experience possible: battlefield engineering.

It's called Sunderers. Those are spawn points. I know its a novel concept to most, but you would need to defend your sunderer. Boring? Sure. Necessary? Absolutely.

It would be awesome ot also have the Galaxy AMS back, I saw one of those....it was kinda neat to....big sky whale sitting there. I flanked and killed it to =D old Prowler HEAT ftw.

/Agree less sub bases would be a good thing
/Disagree about the HEX working with more continents. Actually it probably would have been much worse.

What I think would work is a Hybrid Hex/Lattice system. All the main bases are part of the lattice system and the sub bases surrounding each main lattice link base are part of the HEX system. Attackers can't circumvent the main lattice linked bases, but putting the sub bases around each main base on an adjacency capture mechanic would allow the fighting to be more fluid around each main base.

Hybrid Hex/Lattice Amerish Map Remade

do you know what a hard spawn is?

as for temporary spawns, like sunderers, you can see some of that action even now (sundies behind rocks between excavation site and quartz ridge, etc.), but from my experience those are nothing but a farm fest for ESF's and liberators and harassers and HEAT prowlers, etc. they even had to put a building between those two bases without cap point just to give infantry some cover

sure you'd like some of that, wouldn't you? but what if you're infantry and not a farming pilot?

So a partial lattice. Major bases (Amp,Tech,etc) on the lattice and the smaller bases treated more like towers from PS1. Interesting...

Gentlemen:


This is a 4kmx4km map from a first-person shooter. It has exactly two hard spawns: one for each team. It has seven capture zones, two of which are for the large base in the center. It uses a lattice-like system where only one base is open for capture at a time (though when the center base is open, both of its zones are open at the same time). Gameplay on it is absolutely *brilliant*, probably the most fun I've had in any video game. Honestly, I should probably try to get Mumble and Punkbuster working so I can get back to it, but that's off topic.

How does this game handle a 4kmx4km map, one quarter (due to how area works) the size of a PS2 continent, with only one spawn per team? Like this:


See those green triangles? Those are FOBs. They pretty much do the same thing a Sunderer does, but you build them with supply crates and a shovel instead of driving them. They're a tad harder to kill permanently, since any guy with a shovel can build it back up from its wrecked state if he can get to it before the wreck de-spawns.

Trust me, we don't need very many hard spawns when we can make our own soft spawns. You just have to learn to play smarter with them, and to accept that a safe spawn point will mean going for a bit of a walk.

I agree completely. Once they've properly built the meta-game, to include continent locking and whatnot, I sorely hope they remove some of the small outposts, to allow the battle lines to progress more quickly. Their value in resources could also be transferred to the larger bases, making those bases more valuable. Bigger fights at bigger locations, less stalling and stalemating at tiny insignificant outposts, more value for large bases, and a lot greater opportunity for field battles. What's not to like?

Yeah, there really is no fix for the Libby and ESF Farming....except make flak better.

Not just that, but PS1 was pretty much about making forward operating bases with engineers and vehicle control.


But you can't tell a team that has spent manhours redesigning 3 continents over and over to remove them.
The best compromise would be to tie-in their upcoming resource system with current outposts by making them resource nodes instead of actual outposts and turning spawn rooms into shielded garages.