Somehow SOE managed to **** up the most basic concept of the idea. Limit the connections between bases. That was it. That's all we wanted, so that there might be some semblance of battle lines. Not this crap with actually limiting the terrain so that platoons are forced into a series of bottlenecks. I thought maybe they would remove a few bases so that there was more space between cap points. More space between cap points means more chance to engage with an enemy force outside of a base. That's interesting. Big vehicle battles on an open field are awesome. Instead SOE made MORE bases, making even less chance to fight an open and fluid battle. What we ended up with is boring and annoying. I didn't like fighting on indar before because it was the most common continent. I can't stand fighting on indar now because of the lattice system. When an alert happens on Indar, I log off. The only silver lining I see is that many people must feel the same way, and are now fighting on Esamir. I see the population there running strong now. Long story short, get rid of the lattice system until you can pull your heads out of your ***** and do it right.
They definitely didn't add more bases, they removed bases. There are a couple of bases that got completely revamped, maybe moved, but there are less bases now than there were before. There's plenty of fights inbetween bases, it doesn't happen ALL THE TIME but it's common. It depends on which part of the map, the SE side of the map is pretty bottlenecky I agree, that's just how that side of the map was designed. The North and SW part of Indar is fairly open so, I'm assuming you're NC? The rest of the post is just fluff and frustration. As far as cont pops go though, Indar is still the most populated continent most of the time except during off-map alerts. At least on Mattherson.
Wait... what? As far as I can tell all they did was change some of the roads and base layouts. Still plenty of opportunity to use the surrounding terrain and flank your opponents. This game did not become a rail shooter. You do not have to stay directly on top of the lattice line. Now go forth and outmaneuver thy foes on the fields of honor and glory, and earn your place in Valhalla!
Get rid of the lattice system and give the noobs a server where they can go and **** each other and give people that have learned to read the battle flow and make intelligent decisions based at the current situation. The lattice system took everything away that was good about the game. The large scale, The variation in battle plan and tactics, The choice to strike an undefended area as to disrupt the enemy and possibly cause the battle to detour. All those aspects are removed with the lattice. Even the partial lattice system that has been cheated into Esamir and Amerish are a mess. It created confusion and has basically given the battle a give up and go somewhere else. I can say this without exception that with the lattice system and if SOE intends to push this system onto the rest of the game that I am done with this game. I HATE the lattice system and just don't care to play it any more. I don't play on Indar any longer, This is coming from a guy that played the beta and has spent a bunch of money on weapons and vanity items. I'm also a platinum member with battle rank 79. I have put plenty of time into this game. I'm disappointed and upset over the changes. Even the new harasser has made a mess of the game. Instead of it given another dimension to the game it has given noobs a means of playing within the game. They don't have to go after territory at all.......they can run around and just have fun running over people, no matter what faction. There is no weapons lock on road killing so they buy a turbo and just run all over and kill everything. The lattice system takes the guess work out of that for them too. What a mess you have made SOE. I'm paid up until October and then I'm all done for sure. No more money spent on this game for me. Who knows......I might even by an Xbox.
They removed bases that people never had the chance to fight over in the first place. At the same time, all the minor facilities around major installations because their own bases. What I hoped for was that we would have a system that let us get away from Zurvan, Tarwich, Allatum, and Mao. What I have observed is that fight focus on these bases more than before the Lattice. Not only are the fights more often in these locations, but they stay there longer. Because the outbases aren't just short caps but full bases in and of themselves, they require a sustained effort to secure. My faction of choice is in south-eastern indar. There are a number of areas where there used to be roads and now there are not. In some of these areas passage is entirely blocked off by rock walls. In others it's just rough terrain, which is still enough to dissuade the casual driver from going though. Essentially, I am upset by the impediment towards mass movement. I was hoping for a system that encouraged fewer objectives, while maintaining alll options to reach those objectives. What I ended up with was more objectives in less interesting areas with fewer ways to get to them.
Sounds good to me, have your "hex only server" just dont come back when you and the rest of your SMG infil ghostcappers get bored fighting NOONE over random baseflips. Quoted for the damn good argument.
I still don't get it..... what was all this super strategy that was going on in the hex system? As a platoon leader I was sending my guys all over the place to secure bases as squads, partial squads etc. There was nothing to it, just look at the map see how many enemies were in a base and send a greater force. The vast majority of fights were one sided - either I zerged a bunch of skirmishers or I got zerged in return. Taking a base was pure math. There was no need to defend a base, in fact holding a base was the last thing you should have done because it was so easy for the enemy to avoid any concentration of troops, unless you split up and fought a series of small scale skirmishes you would hold nothing. Unless your enpire significantly outnumbered the others the lack of defence and the ease at which any defence could be bypassed just lead to permanent stalemate. Indar on Miller for example only ever changed hands when one side or another did an alarm clock raid. No one ever got outplayed strategically on the hex map, it was too simple a system... if you lost a lot of territory due to being cut off it was no problem just respawn at the WG and send everyone out to cap the undefenced hexes. It was a numbers game and the only skill required was to be able to move around the map fast. Sometimes there would be an interesting skirmish, but more often than not these would be over in a few mins as the battle would be decided by who could call in reinforcement fastest. Large battles, if they were worth fighting were also over quickly - either one side would reinforce fast or have to pull out of the battle because losing rear area made the base not worth fighting for. If anything leading a squad or platoon was counterproductive, those 48 guys would have been more effective running around on their own. One guy could cap a base as easily as a squad in most cases.
Indar had a Spec Ops training camp, among others, on the South edge. Now it's a mountain ridge there, wide enough for maybe 3 vehicles to fit together- the 4th would either fall off the cliff to Arroyo Torre or slide down the mountain into the ocean. The road from the Stronghold to Zurvan no longer exists. Now there's a path, maybe 1 Vanguard wide, between rocks which leads to an empty canyon. There used to be a base here. The road from Tawrich to Xenotech? Mountains, so rocky only a Light Assault can get through them. These are the ones I found, I'm pretty sure there's going to be a lot more upon taking a closer look. If the Lettuce simply limited the ability to hop over a mountain and grab a base on the other side, everything would have been fine. People would follow about 3-4 corridors to the next big base, one of them might even branch off to another place, and we'd have a constant population density- lots of people in a huge base would get split into still many in 3 or 4 smaller ones, later combining again in the next big base. Since the number of paths was limited to 1 or 2 between major facilities, the 200 people who battled over a Tech Plant with a dozen buildings and a battlefield of over 500 x 500 meters will now have to all fit into 1 or 2 small bases, such as a storage with 3 buildings. No way is this going to leave room for maneuver. This is not limited by the game engine either- there's still lots of square miles where all these people would have been able to go that are now a waste of RAM, HDD space and the time SOE spent to model them.
Explained much better than my original post. The hex system was bad because battles were often tiny fights that switched from one base to another every few minutes as people respond to ghost caps. The lattice system as implemented is worse because it limited many paths around the map and has forced us into gridlock battles where vehicles are stuck bumper to bumper and infantry are piled neck deep behind tiny scraps of cover playing peekaboo with each other.
Yes but you're expecting a logical and thought out approach to this game where SOE have consistently shown a distinct and shockingly lack of presence. Basically they **** everything they touch up.
Can't wait for the new bases with walls around them and shields above them. They showcased the Elli Amp Satellite as a base with a trench in the middle and 2 bridges across. We'll have bridge fights there, because bridge fights are cool. Well, in the same video they said that Galaxy drops through the shields are possible, and that AA can't shoot at planes above the shield. As such the bridge is not the best choice, it's not the only choice. A Galaxy picking up people who respawned outside the wall, and dropping them off on the enemy side of the base while hovering safely above the shield will completely bypass the whole bridge fight... With no enemy vehicles around and the airplanes being totally immune to AA, such drops will work much better than the creators of Operation Market Garden could have ever dreamed of. I think there should be at least one military history/tactics/strategy enthusiast/expert among the PS 2 development team.
This sounds like what PS2 should have been like in the beginning, as in taking the lessons learned in PS? Did I just spend 8 months as a rat in a maze?
I was thinking of it in a negative way, where now even the same Galaxy could drop people over and over again, landing just outside the assaulted base and doing so with total immunity- because for some reason the people at SOE believe people will prefer to get stuck in a battle over a chokepoint (which is the worst choice unless someone's not organized enough to call the Galaxy), at the same time giving the new ability of Galaxy drops in absolute safety. Liberators will also most likely be flying just low enough to shoot through the shields, and then climbing the 5 feet or so required for total safety to have their nanites repair them. The more creative Lib crews will probably figure out how to land and repair on top of the shield emitter, possibly quoting the FNO video that "Infantry shouldn't have to worry about air" and laughing about it when they fix their gunship and go bombing again 5 seconds later. I think this whole idea of segregation (and the method of forcing it) will backfire just as much as cutting tank rear damage nearly in half and reducing top attack damage backfired, and now allowing MAXs to be the fastest infantry class or giving them the firepower of 2 Skyguards is beginning to backfire.
