I've never heard anyone defend 'Redeployside' so why do you continue to let this kill the game?

I don't have anything "for" redeployside.

However, when I think about alternatives, I immediatly think to something that will:
1- Cost a lot of time to devs to rebalance since it will completly change the face of the battles
2- Will make me pass more time carried from place to place in a bus than fightning
3- Make the map look like every base is attacked because it will turn it into "ghostcapingside"

I don't hate the current system at all, even if I understand what some people don't find it perfect.
But I surely don't want the alternatives that are proposed instead until now.

To be honnest even if "redeployside" is fixed for spawnrooms, a platoon has still many ways to do it:

- take a galaxy, hell even a valk, and make all the squad spawn in , drop them, change the pilot squad, make squad 2 spawn, drop etc rinse and repeat.
- take a sundy, 4 guys. Make them squad leaders. Pouf , the whole ******* platoon can spawn at this sundy.

And even if they can't get close enough , one more redeploy and there are at the base.

It'ld take about 1-2 minutes more , but the fight 'ld still be ****** up.

No one says redeploy should be totally blocked. But it shouldn't either be that quick and easy.
A fire team in a Valkyrie can take off and get across the map in 60 seconds. If you have the SLS equipped you can pick up your mates along the way.
Then the fire team should then drop a beacon (a LA landing on a rooftop would be very good at this) so that the rest of your mates can reach you.

Organized outfits would still be pretty fast and the other players would have a chance to react.
Right now when you get an enemy platoon popping out from the spawn room what do you do? You get farmed and forced to retreat without even understanding what happened.

I barely see what it would change, OldMaster.
When an organized outfit make a sunderer/galaxy raid, you don't see it coming either, you get farmed and forced to backup the same way.

I do not wish to see the devs loose weeks of effort to rebalance everything, and be forced to spend my time into galaxies/sunderers only to be farmed a few seconds later than with redeploy. This is not worth it.

You're rigt but at least it wouldn't happen that quickly. The aircraft can be countered by some Skyguards, sunderers can be blown away with c4... people popping from spawn rooms cannot.

Losing battles is pary of the game no discussion. It just becomes tedious when you die by hand of squads that are not organized, they just count on number and teleport like Star Trek officers.

Redeploy works and works well for loners. The system that is already implemented in the game that prevents reinforcements does achieve some good results in terms of:

• Giving good fights when you get a more even 50/50 population. Attackers that brought their vehicles will have the advantage of force multipliers intact, despite the even population.
• Loners and casuals, the majority of players, will be able to find and participate in good fights.

The system breaks down when squads and platoons get involved. Squad leaders can bypass the deploy restriction and bring their full squad or platoon into an even fight, completely lopsiding said fight.
Which brings us to an interesting dilemma.

• Do we remove deploy options from squads/platoons, recognising that they can basically game the system by assigning a leader that is already in the base, so the rest of the squad can deploy?
• Do we "punish" people that form squads by implementing the suggestion above?

I don't like having to jump through hoops in order to get to a battle to go enjoy the game.

The problem isn't the fact that people can redeploy. The problem is that the game, in its current state, is entirely dependent on who has the greater numbers. Very rarely will an outnumbered force be able to do anything but lose. There are a number of ways to fix this by changing from the lattice to a different system.

You're forgetting one point: to repel and counter their movement, they have to get near that hex or at least the adjacent ones. Once they do that, it doesn't matter if you destroy their Galaxy - they will be able to spawn into the contested base's spawn room and will do so in a large group. Someone may have gotten an exceptional amount of experience for the Galaxy destruction, but redeployside hasn't been stopped: it was merely averted for a short amount of time and is now in effect. Yes, the chance exists they could be countered at some point besides the contested base to which they were heading but I would suggest that possibility is no better than hoping a defending platoon who notices doesn't have hard spawn access across the map in the first place.

You can say "they had to use transport to get here, so it's fine" but that's ignoring the fact that the result of redeployside has always been the sticking point. If the method legitimizes the tactic, then we have to question why we were concerned about a 12 vs 12 fair fight in the first place when we're so quick to let it go. Are we concerned with the practice or the outcome?

I do understand my remark comes in full knowledge of how the game is meant to work but, if visibility is required to allow a whole platoon to ruin a smaller engagement, only the people flying and the Skyguards are going to realize this massive blob of players who will now to flooding from the spawn room arrived to defend this base through proper methods.

I like this idea for a few additional reasons:

1) Redeploying costs mean that redeployed troops will not have immediate access to MAXes, vehicles, grenades, C4, etc. In this way redeployed troops are weaker than troops that have been properly transported, so there is a definite advantage to dropping your forces in.

2) Redeploying costs mean that a good PL/SL needs to have the appropriate amount of nanites in reserve for a future redeploy. As such their platoon/squad will be fighting with an artificially low resource cap, because they always have to keep a certain amount in reserve. These reserve forces will be weaker than troops that are properly transported.

3) Redeploying costs mean that a sneaky PL/SL can force the enemy to deplete their resources by having them hop across the map. For example, if he can trick the enemy into thinking that they are attacking on the Western lane, then the enemy will redeploy there but will not be able to respond quickly to the actual attack. This adds strategic depth to the game.

An interesting idea, but what about a situation where the defenders hopelessly outnumbered continent wide, must decide to redeploy to defend an important base?

What about the defenders who realize the situation is hopeless at a base and need to redeploy to the next to lay mines or establish a defence in the face of an overwhelming zerg?

They will be at a further disadvantage once they arrive making it even easier for a zerg to cap the base.

I'll agree you can't just remove the redeploy button (as much as I want to), but I'd argue the problem isn't that you need to be able to rush to defend. Any fix for "Redeployside" needs to come with changes to the default login spawn. I haven't taken the games suggestion on where I should spawn in months, because it pretty reliably tries to slot me in a 120v120 fight at Allatum or some damned thing.


I'd love to see a system that had a priority of building a completely contested border:

1. Instant action is your "I need a fight right now" button.
2. Redeploy should be for falling back to pull vehicles, not for actual transport.
3. Restrict squad spawns to something similar to Sundy ranges instead of global.
4. Seed fights on unused lattice lines - Sundies are cheap, try and train people to use them.
5. Balance out existing fights instead of concentrating the entire continent at one base.
6. Starve the zerg: move people away from one-sided zerg fights.

And possibly the saddest part is that the people who might be the most capable of moving a fight from base to base are the people least likely to do so. The number of times I've seen a Twitch stream where an experienced player has the "Redeploy" button moved near to WASD, or right onto the mouse itself... it makes me weep. Get these people into the habit of pushing a lane instead of jumping from defense to defense.

You just play in a way that assumes an entire faction is about to come through the door. And when it does and if they win, have a backup plan.

Since they're likely outnumbered at that base they'll get a nanite credit for redeploying there. It's just a matter of balancing this credit against the distance cost, with the right balance you can make it cost very little for them to redeploy there. Hell you could even give them nanites for deploying there if their outnumbered badly enough.

The key is updating the population balance in real time so people can't exploit the update lag to hop over for free. Like imagine a 48 man platoon redeploys to a 1-12 fight where they're outnumbered, if you don't update the population balance in that hex in real time they'll all be able to hop over before the next update and flood the base with a giant zerg. If you update in real time maybe only 12 will make it over for low cost, the rest will have to pay an ever increasing nanite cost to join them.

And if anyone's thinking this would make moving platoons hard yes, that's the whole point. If you want to move your platoon across the map you pull Galaxies to do it, spawning into a Galaxy is free.

Like I said spawning at an adjacent base would always be free.

And why exactly is that a problem? Shouldn't the side that brings more guns to the fight win? Besides, if the outcome of a fight is determined primarily by numbers, as you claim, then that would suggest the sides are actually very well balanced. It means that no side has gear (guns or vehicles) strong enough for a small group to overpower a larger group. How is this a bad thing?

Also, if you're going to make definitive statements like your last one, at least back it up with some sort of evidence.

What about locking base spawns on the side that is zerging? I mean if you are participating the zerg, you could still spawn to the base closest to you. But someone on the other side of the map couldn't "spawn hop" and participate to the zerg unless he decides to drive/fly/walk there. Example:


http://oi62.tinypic.com/aysv2a.jpg

Just not sure when the bases should be spawnlocked. Maybe if Enemy population at tech plant exceeds 100 players and 70-80% pop? I love big fights, but I also love them epic. That's why I'm in for more even fights.

Also, in this example, NC players should be able to spawn freely at the zerged base.

This, give or take whatever the figures need to be to make sense. It has been stated before, maybe by you even, and I've advocated it on the original authors behalf a few times.

Make using transport vehicles a viable alternative / trade off for being able to spawn yourself over the other side of a map. If you choose not to take a vehicle and instead pay the additional nanite spawn cost, then you are reducing your ability to chain deploy nanite consumables or pull vehicle for the first few minutes. This is an acceptable balance.

It really is that simple and can be implemented with minimum effort, even with the time / resource constraints that the PS2 team have.

It already works like this. Once you outpop the other side people won't be able to redeploy to that base from across the map anymore. The problem is things like spawn beacons and spawn on squad leader still work so people keep pouring in from those sources.

Bigger outfits regularly use (abuse) these mechanics to deploy 48 people across the map into 12-24 fights and that's the source of the problems right now. Why would I bother to pull Galaxies for my platoon when I can just teleport them across the map for free? Why would I bother to coordinate my squads between various bases when it's easier just to mass redeploy everyone, steamroll all the attackers in 2 minutes and then mass redeploy to the next contested base?

Solo players are already being kept from redeploying across the map, it's only squads and platoons that are causing these instant zergs to pop up out of nowhere. And while that is 'teamwork' and 'coordination' and 'strategy' and whatever else you want to call it it's bad for the game and it makes logistics meaningless.

Not if you balance it with nanite cost where spawning further costs more nanites. At the moment there is no penalty or cost with redeploying, so why WOULD you choose to get in a vehicle?

It is an FPS for sure, but its an open world FPS, not a closed map FPS. You should expect travel time, and it is the games fault to have not drummed that into people from the outset.

Again if you assign nanite cost to a redeploy, then you can still spawn far away if you want - you just can't spam grenades and C4 like mad, or chain pull vehicles to join the zerg when you get there.

Not really, you are still restricted by the lattice. And those smaller fights where bases are being taken by a small force, well they need to be defended. It will actually give smaller groups of players something to do on the periphery of the larger fights, and there is nothing stopping people rocking up in Sunderers, Valks or Galaxies and growing the fight as needed. It would actually make sense of the "needs reinforcements" spawn option which is currently more like "drop 96+ here" beacon.

Again, if you assign nanite cost to a redeploy, is a platoon going to force everyone to redeploy to one of these bases at considerable cost, or are they going to do the more sensible thing and pull a Valk / Galaxy to do the job? The mass, instant redeploy problem goes away because people simply won't be able to keep doing redeploys over and over unchecked and unlimited.

Nanite cost is not the silver bullet, but is a massive step in the direction of cleaning up the mess we currently have.

Which is probably the most insidious part of Redeployside. You will often have your 2 squads start to get restless as there's been almost no resistance for 3 minutes or so. They're even jockeying for position to be the first to blast people who come out of the spawn room, or maybe they've just gone AFK for a sandwich. And then 20 MAXs come pouring out of the spawn with 1:02 left on the cap, and just like that the entire lattice line dies. Your side breaks up, and the redeploying outfit teleports somewhere else a few minutes later.

Are you against there being more choices than attacking the next base in a straight line and winning because you had more numbers?

That was the major advantage of the Hex system. It is something that can be reintroduced into the game without a full-blown Hex system.