I really hate the new Esamir. Almost no bases or maps are fun to fight in, bases are either impossible to take with 50% pop, or are designed so attackers can easily farm defenders. There are almost no jump pads, no second teleporters, sometimes you can't even access the spawnroom roof as a defender, and in general defenders are sitting ducks either camping corridors, or being farmed from 8 directions due to bad base design. Some of the open world terrain is cool, but almost never sees combat. Then there are Contaiment sites, bloated, convoluted, 5-minute walk simulator. Could've been great if it had a floor or two less and without corpse runs, and fight there never end. Like, I want to play something that ISN'T a containment site... at least biolabs were mindless fun along with mostly great satellite bases where you could encircle the biolabs, there's no dodging Contaiment sites. The coolest, most fun locations, like some of the construction hexes and the Shattered Warpgate, are really fun to fight in but are mostly irrelevant and inaccessible. They're easily the best locations on the continent, but fights there don't last and don't serve much purpose on the grand scheme of things. Meanwhile most bases left from pre-SW are slogs, and most of the new ones are farm fests. Continent balance has went from "Southern Warpgate is almost guaranteed to win" to "Southern Warpgate is least likely to win". Pre-SW Esamir had a big balance problem with Warpgates, but that could've been easily fixed by shifting the Eastern Warpgate like it was done now, making more lattice links, expanding it a little more to make it hexagon-like instead of trimming down the continent to a triangle, adding a few bases in empty areas, removing some filler rocks and hills and that would be it. Just bring it back and expand upon it, please.
Their was a problem with old Esimir. The starting positions was one of the biggest factors in determining who won the alert. TW factions where set in to a farm fight while the 3rd won. The starting position should not be a factor in winning alerts.
I fully agree. The new Esamir is such a train wreck that we would be better off back peddling and trying again rather than trying to salvage this **** show. Back up to before there was a link between Echo Valley and Nott Comms. That link always gave the south east corner of the continent to the southern warpgate for free. From there start working on Esamir 3.0 with NO LORE! This is a shooter game, not a story game. The new content doesn't need a story reason, it just needs to be better than what it's replacing. The bits they got right were the 3 o'clock position for the eastern warpgate, the new tech plant (major facilities shouldn't have just 1 point) and the new Mattherson's is actually good.
So they should have just moved the warpgate, here is my version, it's old esamir just with the amp station and eastern warpgate swapped, simple! No containment sites, no removed bases, no bad redesigns.
by "old esamir" I thought you meant the one that didn't have base walls and had no lattice lines... that was peak Esamir.
Certainly this would be better than what we have now. I don't entirely like the lattice around the north amp station. It's easily cut off, and the north east corner satellite is pointless. From Northpoint Station the lattice should be forced into the Amp Station.
Also, don't take my criticism the wrong way, the fact that I'm bothering to criticize details means I like the concept. While we're bringing back bio labs, the continent should open with the labs fully secure. Most players take a break after a continent locks, it sucks to come back from a break to see that I've already lost a bio lab. Starting with it fully secure gives a 4 minute buffer after the continent opens. The amp station which is done right here is Elli. If Ymir is taken by the east gate faction there is no way to warpgate the south faction without fighting in the amp station.
Ah yes, back when 2 HE tanks could take most Esamir bases from a platoon of infantry and any time the defenders could actually stop 1 fight the attackers would simply move to one of the adjacent bases where not enough defenders materialized in time. Truly the pinnacle of PS2. We already see the devs trying to bring back that open door policy that made defending anything useless by altering and removing every base that doesn't fall within 10 minutes.
