I feel that continents lock way too quickly now. Many times I'm in the middle of a good fight that gets ended by a continent lock... and many times I wasn't aware it was close to locking. IMO continent locks should be more rare than they are... and they should scale with the pop of the continent. For example, if its 3am and 70% of the playerbase is on continent A, continent B should be very for those small number of people to lock. Also, the overpop makes it even harder: some sort of penalty for basically ghost capping. Bases are a nice idea, a nice change. However, I feel that they are entirely too strong. The AI turret will kill infantry very quickly... maybe they need more delay to aquire targets, less dps, and slower projectiles. Also the air shields should maybe mitigate damage but not stop it.
I agree with the first part. i don't like getting locked out of a good fight. I don't agree with the second part. Do not nerf xiphos ai turrets. Its their job to kill infantry. dont make a hammer soft because it hits things to hard. I have the opposite experience with them. they dont kill me very fast unless i expose my self to them. and when i do its to close the distance and i very rarely die to them.
Well yes, they do seem to lock faster and I lost out on two decent fights in the last two days as a result (and ended up spawning in Hossin - so double bad). I think the more heavily contested continents i.e. the ones people seem to prefer to play on lock faster (again, Hossin seems to be the exception). I don't know if the faster continent locks have come about because you can generate VP by building a HIVE now, or if it is coincidence. But I think the points required to cap a continent have been reduced (CBA to look back through the notices) and I'd support increasing the number you need. Xiphos is fine in my view. The only time I got decent results with it was in a medium range fight where the enemy exposed their backs to my turret while shooting in the other direction at my allies from behind cover (to their front) and totally ignored me buzzing away like an angry hornet.
You need 15 VP to lock any cont now, Indar used to be lower than the rest but its the same now. Used to be Indar 8 the rest 10. Reason they lock so fast now is the new ways of getting them: HIVE generators - grants 1 VP every 10,000 cortium. Having the most HIVE generators active - Grants 2 VP (temp) Having all 7 cores active - Grants 3 VP to the empire who does it (temp) Not hard to build 7 HIVEs then go and kill all the enemy ones, you get 5 VP instantly doing this, add that to the 5 you just got for winning an alert and suddenly you're down to needing only 5, with territory ownership youll probably have 2 or 3, meaning you only need to link an enemy warpgate or generate a few VPs and you lock the cont. Granted there is a fair bit needed, but if you already have an alert win under your belt and own lots of the map, its easy as hell to snipe a few HIVEs and complete the VPs required. My outfit did indeed notice we had 12 VPs and 5 active HIVEs the other day, so we just deployed 2 HIVEs and went and stole the 1 VS and 1 TR active core, cont locked a few mins later after the game had realised the VS had 1/0 cores active , and that was just 4 of us iirc. I agree conts lock too fast these days. Alert wins should be 3 VP max IMO, atm 2 alert wins and you're pretty much guaranteed to have locked the cont, id want at least 3 or 4. Get rid of the 'having the most HIVEs active' 2 temp ones, too easy to do.
I think the early locks are good. They give incentive to fight. Don't want an early close? Find out what threatens to make for one, and kill it.
Might be an unpopular opinion but as much as I like the construction system, I preferred it back when alerts were the only way to lock the continent.
