Has anyone else noticed that the flow of combat has basically fallen apart? That you spend ages at every single base unless you vastly outnumber the enemy? With the recent sweeping changes to Resources, vehicle weapons and respawn times. The game has gotten insanely spammy compared to a few months ago. Sunderers are cheap and endlessly spammed. MBT's and lightnings are neutered to the point where they can no longer effectively suppress infantry and allow for a cap. Respawn times are even less of an issue and even when you are inside the walls you will still have to spend an hour to even try to take over the base. The recent changes along with the previous base re-designs have basically rendered this game an eternal stalemate / outflanking simulator.
Yes. The resource revamp is obviously promoting spamming. In addition to that there were the server merges, which made the amount of zerging even worse. There are no medium sized fights anymore. it's either a grindfest or it's 1-12 vs 1-12. I also noticed a sharp decrease in well-leaded squads/platoons. Think about it. Tactics are a lot less important now. In those huge farmfests, it's basically "just throw everything you got at them" and hope they have less of it. Great I think a way to counter this would be to reintroduce hex system. It would spread the zerging a bit since you got the possibility to flank. As of now you have to face the zerg head on or......log off. Cheers!
I have, but to me it seems more about how the deploy system picks battles coupled with base design. I tend to lone wolf when my outfit isn't online, and I often only have 1 or 2 choices of a fight which is the current biggest fights. Since I only play for about 15-30 minutes in those situations I kinda have to take what I get and can't spend forever looking for a good fight. With base design, there are often just too many people in too small of an area. At a lot of bases, the attackers are funneled to specific few choke points, which usually ends up being a doorway with little to no cover on either side that the attackers can take advantage of. This design works fine in smaller engagements because the door-frame itself can be used as a piece of cover, but doesn't scale well when you have 30 people trying to go through that one door.
Yeah this was what I meant by the previous base redesigns. They've been made so defensible that the attackers have a major uphill battle that requires far superior numbers. On top of that armor has lost a major chunk of it's ability to suppress infantry and the infantry that are defending the base can now get into the fight much faster. It all compounds poorly. And while the game could be said to be a in a good state of balance the flow of actual combat is seriously bad right now.
What I think would be a cool solution would be if bases were spread out across the entire hex. I think each base should try to be designed like a battlefield map - spread out over a large enough area that vehicles have uses, but dense enough that infantry can get around and have cover to make use of. This also allows for more classes of infantry weapon to shine instead of just CQC weapons.
I do like that vehicles have lost a lot of their AI capability, as trying to navigate through a base with a spawn room is getting constantly shelled by HE is just plain infuriating and crappy game-play, but I also think it is a big issue that vehicles are essentially excluded from capturing bases outside of the initial push up to the base.
This is what happens when you take huge continents and split them into tiny lanes such that each faction only has ~5 bases they can attack or defend, then lock 2 continents 80% of the day and force all players into those lanes with small outposts intended for 24v24 that end up being 96v96.
