First off, its probably been said in another thread before, but the capture timer is much too long. Sure, there was no action but there was a lot of thumb-twiddling going on while I was there. SPAWNING I'm serious about the changes to the spawn rooms, by the way. The invincibility fortresses inside bio labs and various outposts simply do not provide for tactical gameplay. Yes, I've seen people bust out once in a while and take the base back, and they should be able to, but more often than not its just a group of hose-heads sitting and killing from their invulnerability. Its even easy to fix. Just move the spawns downstairs one level, have the SCU control the shields where they are now, and put a shield around the corner of the staircase leading into the actual spawn portion. Then move the painfield to the stairs into spawns. This way, an attacker who wants to stare at the forcefield must stand in a pain field to do so, and a defender who wants to farm kills needs to be on the other side of the shield. Where he can be shot. But there are only those ways out and spawn tunnels. So the defenders can be held in. Moving on.... BASE CAPTURING I propose we change the capture mechanics to make facilities feel more.... facility-like and the small outposts to feel more small outpost like. What do I mean? Well, it takes an eternity to take ANYTHING the way this currently is. I understand that they want to give defenders a chance to take their bases back, but if they have no intentions of recovering their territory, then it leaves attackers with nothing to do but camp the spawn fortresses (aka "spawn room"). This also opens up the possibility that nobody will want to leave their current outpost to go defend the next one the initial defenders decided to attack, creating the same problem we have right now with zergs avoiding eachother. Here's my suggestion. First, experience earned is determined by activity in the area for the time before the capture timer and the actual time of the capture. So for example, a 30 second capture timer would determine how contested the base was for the 30 seconds before the timer started and the time the tickets were ticking and reward attackers appropriately. Even if you leave the territory (which could happen VERY EASILY given the current size of the hexes), you still get rewarded for your timer there. Make the small outposts have a ridiculously short timer and a small capture rewards. Like maybe 10 points minimum and 100 points maximum for a capture and 30 second capture timer. This makes them similar to the towers in Planetside 1, where if they've been defended they were mini fortresses that you could fight in. But if they were largely undefended, they got swept up really quickly. Moves the battles faster. Sattelites for main bases maybe take 2-3 minutes to capture. This creates a larger buffer for the defenders to prepare the main facility for an assault if someone tries to break in. And it doesn't keep the attackers sitting around too long. Sattelites could offer 50 for an uncontested fight and up to 200 for a contested fight. A main facility will have a 10 minute hack timer, a minimum of 400exp reward and a maximum of 2000. Again, if you decide to leave the fight early to go secure another territory and the base captures while you're gone, you are rewarded for the experience. And hey, if the spawn mechanics change like I mentioned before and all the defenders left the base to go attack a new place, you could fly a few gals in and take it back. HACKING (Not the cheating kind) Proposed changes to hacking. And a neat-o tool for an infiltrator. He can only have one deployed at a time. It would basically be called a "Nano-Lattice Accelerator", and what it would do is when he's near a point he can hold E to install one. These are consumables, like mines and grenades and cost 100 resources. What they do, based on the level he upgraded the tool, is accelerate the capture speed by 10%-25% for his faction. Only one may be installed per point. And they only affect the capture time at that point. What this means is if we were to take a 3-point bio lab, each point would have "3:33 time" on it. Install a Nano-Lattice Accelerator on point A, and it goes down to maybe "2:40 time". It makes the base capture a little faster, but you'd need one on every point to truly reduce it by the full 25%. Meaning three certed infiltrators. LATTICE I think we can all agree that the people standing at Saurva Fortress really want to attack that little outpost sitting 20 feet away. But they can't. There has to be a better way to do this. Also the road leading from Quartz Ridge/Excavation to West Highlands (the one near allatum, you know what I mean) doesn't have any significance any more. I'd propose adding a travel route there... But don't stop there. The intersection formed by these three bases should be a "flip-flop" zone. They're all mutually disconnected, but the last base to take the hex touching the "flip-flop" zone changes the zone to their empire's color. Think about it, now you can use west highlands to effectively cut off the people invading Hvar, provided they don't have another lattice link. Or add another small outpost there, preferably a closed indoor one, in addition to the linked lattice that's basically a touch-and-go flag. This way if someone wants to be a cheese and has a link there, he can be like "well no more acquiring resources from the south for you!" Or if your squad wants to cut off the enemy's resources but you don't have 60 friends that you play with religiously, you too can do something semi important! There are other places where this could be implemented. Check around and add your ideas? Thats all I can come up with for now. Feedback is appreciated, even though many of my ideas aren't well received. I do think this hex-lattice bastard child is a good direction for the game, but it needs refinement and a bit of work. And we need more meta-game (meaning secondary objectives that don't get affected by lattice) to make this a truly unique game. Oh, and weather. I want to see weather. Cloud layers, cumulus clouds, rain, snow, dust storms, etc etc etc... I'm rambling. I'll stop now.
