Construction items can be spawned and placed with DBC ($)

There are things that should not be Consumable for DBC

Things like:
Bounty System
Construction System

It's not a feature of base design, but it's a feature of the metagame. Without vehicle superiority it becomes very hard to get Sunderers up or keep Sunderers up, which is why the attackers will have vehicle superiority almost always, otherwise they would be the defenders. So regardless of base design, that's one advantage you can chalk up for the attackers.

Actually a massive part of base design. The developers have been creating specific Sunderer deploment places at each and every base, down to actually making Sunderer bays to protect them from incoming fire. These Sunderer bays are build that they are tough to attack by the defenders rather than the attackers.
The fact that the defenders need to guess at where the attackers are coming from, even if it takes just 30 seconds, it still an advantage. And most of the bases in PS2, at least 90% I would guess, does not favor the defenders with any safe Sunderer placements.

Unless the attackers pushed them onto the point there's no way the defenders stick to the point en-mass like the attackers do. The defensive benefits go to the attackers, not the defenders because of this. Not to mention that holding the point does not win the base for the defenders, they need to actively get out and destroy the Sunderer to do that.
There are a few exceptions of course, however those A points are the only one that's easy to defend, the 2 others are usually not as easy as they are outliers, in fact most of the time the attackers can park their Sunders almost on top of both outlier points! Even if you can defend A easily, the attackers have all the advantages at the other two points!

The only advantage the defenders really get is an indestructible spawn, and in a select few bases some additional ways to get around. But personally I wouldn't file the indestructible spawn room under "advantage" but under "necessary to give the defenders an opportunity".
Keep in mind that the defenders and attackers have different roles. The attackers need to hold the point, period. Everything else is secondary and only helps achieve it. The defenders cannot just hold the point, the attack stops when the Sunderer is destroyed, and even then they need to hope they can kill off the remaining attackers before they hold the point long enough.

Nah, the construction system only works outside of bases. You can only build a fortress in the middle of nowhere, or hope to find a space between two bases where you can set up a small fortress. It can be used both offensively, which is less likely I know, or defensively by building a fortress in advance of an attack. But as it is, it seems that a fortress can easily be circumvented due to the distance it needs to be from another base.
I think that there will be places where ANT's will build a few quick walls for a Sunderer in the middle between two bases, but there will be precious few that do that due to the massive construction-denial range all bases have.

If you could build anywhere, inside or outside bases, it would still be a powerful tool for both the defenders and attackers. Defenders can prep a base, build some extra walls and turrets to keep hostiles out. The attackers in the meantime can build additional defenses for their Sunderers and advances, building walls and fortifications on captured ground to ensure they keep it when their frontline is pushed back, creating shields and cover in places otherwise without cover etc.

Did you buy enough cash-shells for that?

Or become pointless once deployed due to continent lock.

I guess we can agree to disagree on current attacker versus defender balance. Thanks for info about construction system, I admit I've only skim read a few things about it.

Reading my points back I have to make an amendment:

The defenders can win a fight by solely holding the point. It's rare but it can by sending someone to take the enemy base point. The moment they do this their own point is impossible to capture and the fight changes. The problem is of course that they probably won't have a Sunderer at the enemy base (see "no vehicle superiority") and will have a tough time keeping their attack going, but it's far from impossible to get enough breathing space for a counter attack without having to worry about the point(s)

Pretty sure most people complaining about P2W constructibles are subscribers like myself. If you seriously can't see the problem with 'whoever pays the most wins' then you should probably go play Asian MMOs or something.

Pay to win is when you can buy something that normal players can't and it gives you an advantage in combat like cash-only weapons that are better than normal ones or damage boosts. There's no such thing here.
You can build stuff for free and you still need cortium to run a base which you can't buy (so i've heard). It's not pay to win.
"B-b-but you can get stuff faster by paying!11!!!"
Literally every f2p game out there offers some kind of boost for money. Even many buy to play and subscription games.
Planetside has the least p2w payment model out of any multiplayer f2p i've ever played.

actually pulling a sunderer and backcapping provided you call out what you are doing and have a sundie deployed can be quite effective even when you are solo and not in fact in a squad. solo players that are strategy minded a bit will respond and that small number can cause a trickle of allies to keep spawning and reinforcing your backcap.

I kind of think its a strange decision to do that, but they have to make money somehow.
If ppl want to spend for that, let them go ahead.

At the moment I'm more worried about how the Prowler ability will impact fights with the construction system.
Well, that and when it will finally hit live.

See, this is the kind of misconception I was talking about. "Oh it's just getting stuff faster, no biggie".

The problem is that when it comes to an RTS, "getting stuff faster" is the very definition of winning. Base building is very much an RTS-style element, especially with its potential to form the backbone of an economic metagame. Imagine a game of Starcraft where you can pay cash to finish buildings and units instantly. Or even keep the build time, but bypass the mineral/gas cost, it still shaves off a huge amount of time spent collecting resources (especially if you're Protoss). Would you argue with a straight face that such an ability in Starcraft would be "just getting stuff faster" and "no big deal"?

If we're able to buy bases with cash, the only way to keep that tame will be to neuter bases to the point that building them is meaningless. And then PS2 will end up with another half-finished, irrelevant, tacked-on, dead-end project attached. The only way the base system can actually contribute meaningful gameplay is if we can't pay to bypass its core mechanics.

Wait so you are getting Trolled and that Ultimatetly if you buy the Base and a TK Troll C4s it?

But how important are these bases going to be?

In a full RTS like Starcraft, yes being able to buy units and buildings for money to speed up your base would be OP as hell because the entire game revolves around it.

In PS2 however? Not so much. Yes you can build a fortress, but it won't win you the game. There's fairly few places where you can build an effective fortress that defends a base for instance, you know bases? Those things you need to win the game? Unless your fortress without VP generator is helping defend a base it's going to be useless for winning the game, and it will only offer a challenge for players to defend/destroy it which has nothing to do anymore with how you build it, only that it's there.
At best you can speed-build a fortress with a VP generator, but this isn't really paying to win. You could have achieved the same by gathering resources without really falling behind on other players who speed-build, because the moment your fortress is going to be attacked is likely after your VP generator is up. Having your base build faster only means players know it's there faster and can start attacking faster. And the moment that attack starts? everything depends on your organizational and stragetics skill to use what you build. So it doesn't matter if you collected the resources first or that you insta-build it with money, the end result will barely vary in the game.

Hence, the times that the money-bought buildings actually matter over resource-bought one's is miniscule at best, and absent most of the time. It's a convenience feature, not a P2W feature. Paying does not offer you more power in this case, it only offers convenience.

I had pointed out that they could get away with it if they made bases irrelevant and useless. However, I also pointed out that taking that approach would be tragic, because we'd be stuck with yet another irrelevant and useless "feature" that doesn't really add to the game the way we hoped it would.

(this got longer than intended, TL;DR = this game is already pretty much p2w and would be rad if it stopped)

You know, one could easily argue even the current system with weapons being sold for cash and certs is pay 2 win. To get it with certs you need to farm for quite a while. To get it with cash, all you need is a credit card. Every second of farming for that weapon can be considered time where the game is p2w. And since I came back to the game, that includes weapon attachments and implants.

I can easily give you a better model: Team Fortress 2. The weapons are cheaper, you can get them through achievements, people could even straight up give them to you if they so desire, even the cosmetics can be grabbed through drops or crafting and all you need is to give Valve 5 bucks (compared to this game where most weapons, camouflage*, and straight-up performance boosts can cost above 10 bucks)

Regardless, given the option to purchase instantly the ability to build yourself a nigh impenetrable cert farm with real world money, instead of pointing out how this takes skill out of the equation you screamed about how we should instead embrace this and pump money into the system. I'd much rather pump money into a game that lets the one who is actually better and not just richer to win the match. As it stands, I'd rather quit the game and buy a cheap burger than have to shell out for a destroyable building

*yes I know it's mostly cosmetic, but some can be cheesed to delay friend/foe recognition (giraffe, indar dry brush, whatever the hell that pink one is, anything black)

Well yes, but just because a feature can be accelerated with money does not automatically mean it's OP.

P2W does not mean "just because it gets me power faster it will make me win the game". P2W means "You get an advantage that's big enough to change the nature of the game". If paying for things gives a massive advantage over non-paying players or the action of paying is a huge part of the gameplay, yes it's probably P2W. However for the construction system it's not P2W because the times you actually have a huge benefit by paying will be small, very small. Even if fortresses will be important in the metagame, the convenience of having to do less resource runs will rarely make a huge difference with the current setup of the game. Now if players could build a pop-up fortress that made a base insurmountable or much more durable through money, yes you would have a point. But you can't, and since the important fortresses with VP's will only become actual targets the moment the VP generator is up it doesn't matter if it took 6 hours to build them or 1 minute. Because the time is irrelevant in most cases, it's also irrelevant if you used money to accelerate it or used the slower way of getting resources.

It's a bit of an odd thing to buy with DBC as it stands on PTS and during the PTS test.

If it is you and only you building a base you could maybe justify buying one of the constructs with DBC as you are on a limited cortium budget, but as soon as you add 2 or 3 people into the construction efforts there is never any real need to buy with DBC because the silo (which holds 50k cortium, runs all the modules and powers the whole base) always has enough harvested cortium to build your limit in constructions.

It's actually a terrible waste of DBC to buy Constructions instead of just harvesting it yourself and joining up with a group of people.

Pro-tip! Don't forget to upgrade your ANT in the cert menu to carry 10,000 Cortium instead of the default 5,000.

I bet people saying it's p2w haven't even checked PTS and don't know how construction works.

For a worthwhile base to be built in a timely manner, you need at least four people participating in the building effort. I'm not sure of the prices but if I recall PTS correctly, the DBC prices for constructibles were around 89 DBC a piece. For a base having at least four walls, one bunker, a silo, six to twelve turrets and a dozen modules, you're looking at a price reaching up to 20$ for a small, relatively undefended and unmanned base.

Alternatively, those four people who are obviously playing as an organized group could spend 5-10 minutes in ANTs gathering up to 20 000 cortium in a single run and building all of that without spending a single cent.

So, yes, you can build constructibles with DBC. It's not really a good use of your money though.

my biggest concern is keeping randoms from using up my cortium..

can we get squad lock on that silo please