Biolabs are only fun for defenders.

I am not a fan of Biolabs, but I am afraid the next Biolab revamp will turn them into something like those three-point AMP stations we now have.

Maybe we could try an experiment with a Biolab almost completely sunken undeground? With various points of its exterior breached and an uneven mass of earth inside? Abandoned Offices base on Indar has some interesting things about it - a good example of what would happen to a bunch of equipment dropped in the middle of a desert with time - but it is undefendable. The same approach could be good for a Biolab idea though.

Oh and kill any and all teleporter tubes / jumppads. Those are a cancer of PS2 base design.

Biolabs are bad because it becomes, effectively, a five point spawn camp. Two pads, three shielded teleporter rooms. No one wants to push out because you get mowed down by the enemies who can cross fire on those exits... which becomes the best form of defence so everyone does it.

You could possibly crack it with enough maxes, but current maxes are more about pewpew and less about armour which makes this hard to do.

Shielded teleporter rooms are the bane of this game.

I would like Biolabs to be a bit less of a hide-n-seek/MAXRUSH and more of a multi-stage objective thing. Change the shape and take some ideas of the old Unreal Tournament "Assault" gamemode.


As a matter of fact, imagine each Biolab being a different assault map.

I have fun in biolabs regardless of attacking or defending, it is always just an awesome urban battle

I like biolabs as they are. I do not like the 3 point amp stations.

Umm... explain to me how its shallow compared to every other base in the game. Biolabs work like this:

Brute force it by taking everything at once. Camping spawnpoint.
Or
Taking down SCU first then going after points, playing defender while the owners try to drop in and dislodge you.

Whereas every other base is brute force it by taking points and camping spawnpoint.


Now if every base had 2-3 different ways of taking them. I might agree that biolabs are rather dull. I would probably agree with you. But the fact is, there's only ONE way to take a base in this game. Biolabs give us at least an option. Amp Stations and Tech Plants give us at least the illusion that there is multiple ways. By dropping the SCU's once they are halfway capped. But... once they are halfway capped... 9 times out of 10 you probably don't need to drop the SCU by then because you've locked it down. All it does is ensure no reinforcements come out of the blue right at 30 seconds. Which as I said, only happens about 10% of the time unless its an alert for one of those bases.

Remember when I said it takes a spawn hop or Gal drop to get to the biolab once the SCU drops? Sometimes that happens. And you know what? That's an awesome fight when it does. Have you ever tried to defend a base you don't own yet? A base you can't spawn at because you're trying to take it? A base who's resources you can't repair or use unless hacked? Its a straight up fight. Sometimes you're spawning from Sundies under one pad and the ticked off defenders are spawning from the other.

That's a crazy fight. No ones protected by the spawn shields. Everyone's fighting man to man. And yet you're saying I'm proposing a ghost cap? I'm proposing doing something that requires a directed response from the enemy.

Beating back a zerg is easy. Put up enough resistance and they get bored and scatter. Beating back a coordinated counter attack. Not so easy. But alot of fun. And pretty badass if you pull it off.

But like I said, give me 2-3 different ways to attack a base, and I'll jump on the Biolab suck bandwagon. But until then. Right now they're the closest thing we have to a dynamic assault. And you know what? Even if the Biolab caps without much resistance. How ticked off is the enemy going to be after you take it? You still have the hold the prize once you take it. If the enemy pours in before you repair the SCU you better hope to god your sundies are still up.

The depth comes from an absence of non-skill factors.

At a balanced base, no non-skill elements exist. This means that every single decision, good or bad, by each player contributes to how the battle turns out. Whether you play 5% better or 50% better than your opponents, you will win.

At a Biolab, a significant non-skill element exists (the base is lopsided in favor of defenders.) This means that playing 5% better than your opponents no longer matters. That's why the base is shallower: it sometimes awards victory to the team that doesn't deserve it.

This problem also exists at bases which are too easy to attack, but it's much more noticeable (which makes it worse) at bases where the defenders easily win obviously, since it makes battles last forever (or as long as the attackers are willing to waste their own time, but in PS2 that's usually quite a while.

You're so fixated on this zoomed-out view of the game having more than one capture method that it's blinding you from seeing that Bio Labs are a terribly-designed base. If you hate the fundamental near-universal way bases are capped in PS2, you might be playing the wrong game. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with king of the hill style caps, but it comes down to base balance to determine whether the fights become dynamic enough and fun enough.

I like biolabs because they are the only place I can get even a reasonable amount of kills with the Trac-5 Burst. Oh, and MAX crashes that are waiting to go are big blobs of certs for C4 fairies. Gonna have to try my new PA shotgun in the biolabs, too. Tried it at a small outpost and had some fun with it despite being camped to all hell.

There is nothing wrong with having a more defendable base either. You just want to walk through ever base you come across huh? So maybe you have to attack with 55% pop at a bio lab big deal man. Like come on man grow a pair!

bio-labs should be removed from the game entirely.


they stop all movement and fighting on each part of the continent they are on.

The saving grace of biolabs is players parking Sunderers under the lift, allowing me excess numbers of densely packed squishies begging to be roadkilled. If only my gunners could understand my uncontrollable attraction to these greasy cert-pinatas..