Lattice vs hex : how about neither

Oh, i thought ghosting was literally like flipping the point and letting the base capture itself.. lmao, seems more appropriate use of the term.

well perhaps the point could take maybe thirty-sixty seconds before it starts flipping back to host colours, to allow people to run around a little and not be stuck in the one room or area the entire time.

Learn from history or be doomed to repeat it OP.

Except The Crown is nowhere as defensible as it used to be. The fights won't last.

It will be 100% Ghost Cap. Planetdrive 2 10/10 would cruise again.

Who said the defenders have to stay on point? The advantage of defending is that they don't have to. In the suggestion I made, they don't even have to flip the point back like they do CURRENTLY. Just kill the attackers that are on it. If they wipe out the attackers they don't even have to remain in the base.

I guess you could call it ghost defending. But as I said, its an advantage that would go to those who actually capture a base and are now defending it.

As for making it all about the Control Point, how is that not a bad thing for attackers to focus on? What else do you want them to focus? The spawn room? Oh wow.. this has the side effect of pulling attackers away from that.. isn't that what everyone here wants? I mean seriously, knowing what I just clarified, what else do you LaSouris, want the attackers to focus on? Gens? They'll do that if they're required to keep the control points accessible. I know you're not going to suggest the spawn room.

This has never been done what history? Hex? No hex.

I made a mistake in my first sentence and I only just saw it, I meant attackers, not defenders. The main goal of attackers is to take the point, and then defend it from the defenders, so in a sense, the defense is now the attacking force.

And yes, if the attackers manage it, I am going to say the spawn room, because that is technically good attacking, you're stopping the defenders from getting to the point. If people are trapped in the spawn room, it's either some damn good attackers, or the pops are imbalanced toward the attackers, at which point there is little that you can do. Base combat, around a point, is like this:

Attacker spawn > Defender defensive points > Point < Attacker defensive points < Defender spawn

Requiring attackers to be on point at all times would make it like this:

Attacker spawn > Defender defensive points > Point < Defender spawn

Yes, some people might stay behind to make sure the point flips, but that'd be in fusterclucks, and those have no semblance of tactics. In smaller, tactical battles though, it gives the defenders a HUGE advantage, because they can have multiple points of defense, whilst attackers can only defend the point. An example is tech plants, if your defense is sitting on the enclosed parts of the plant, you're defending poorly. You should instead be defending all the entrances, and having the requirement to stand on point would prevent this

To be fair, it embodies the spirit of what made people complain about the Hex System: it's virtually unmanageable from a defensive standpoint. In our case, we just swap out "any base connected by even a single side of a hex" to "any base anywhere." That makes it something more like a pure embodiment of the frustration. Moreover, Lattice and Hex both embodied the concept of "map progression" that is key to the PlanetSide experience. The absence of any system discards that.

You're going to be alone in your idea that attackers should camp a spawn room. I don't disagree or agree with that stance, so I'm going to leave that one alone. I do know its an unpopular stance however.

Anyway. regardless of the fact, do you honestly believe that.. for example if you need to stick Six attackers on a control point at a Techplant that you would not be able to put attackers elsewhere? I mean a squad is 12, platoon is 48. That allows you to put 6 and 42 players elsewhere.

We're not talking about putting dozens of players on these points. Just a meaningful amount to make taking a base based on its importance more or less a concentrated effort.

Judging by the numbers of players sitting on control points now, I don't see your fears coming to fruition.

[quote="Taemien, post: 3337611, member: 103700"
Anyway. regardless of the fact, do you honestly believe that.. for example if you need to stick Six attackers on a control point at a Techplant that you would not be able to put attackers elsewhere? I mean a squad is 12, platoon is 48. That allows you to put 6 and 42 players elsewhere.

We're not talking about putting dozens of players on these points. Just a meaningful amount to make taking a base based on its importance more or less a concentrated effort.
[/quote]


A coordinated 12 man squad covering all the entrances to a tech plant would be able to hold off a larger force, but if you had to take 6 of those to just sit on the point, suddenly that small squad is penalised extremely unfairly. I have no problem with needing a certain number of people to take a point, but requiring these people to stay on the point the entire time of the cap seems like it would only punish attackers

The whole idea of holding land for your faction that can't be captured is ridiculous. That is not how mass warfare is waged.

If you can't defend the territory then you shouldn't be able to own it. If your getting back capped then your line has extended too far.

Map progression just makes this game like every other small map game but with large expanses of open spec with nobody on it. Except with no load times unless you switch continents.

Look past map progression to a fuller experience in no holds barred warfare with combined arms. Utilize strategery and not lets go to the next flag on the line.

This also goes really well into the victory point system. Hold 3 bio labs or 3 tech plants. Well just drop on them. This will move your big fights from the typical strangle holds that don't move for hours to actually looking at the map and consciously choosing where to defend. Taking small bases becomes your supply line to attach bigger bases.

You will still have big fights and small fights. They will just move from Indar excavation and that other silly one on the right of the map.

I mean isn't anyone else tired of fighting in the same 4 locations every day?

Remove the boundaries from the sandbox game and let us go ape****.

Do you know how law executing establishments (police, military, et al.) work? They work because people are there because they have something to do there. We have police who walk cities and people who live in them. These cities and police offices are manned because there are day jobs. Certainly, they have to keep up the external appearances of security. Inside both, however, are offices and desks with people pushing paper and stamping documents, making phone calls and getting coffee.The enforcement people are there because the people are there and, sometimes, because they are epxected to be there even if there are no people. When you walk by a military base's entrance and you see the guy with the tactical assault rifle in the station out front, what's keeping him there? There's a lot of answers to that, but a main one is that is his duty (job). We didn't have that. That's why Hex lead to frustration. We don't have reasons for people to be places where there is no fighting. It was absurd to expect to demand people who were here to have fun be stationed away from combat for the vague chance that there would be combat, or expect everyone to charge off and capture a random base where there were equal chances to encountering enemies or standing around and watching the nanites solidify. There was no way to force them to do that. It's not (everyone's brand of) fun and it's not a job.

The Hex System's "frontlines" was a dike in dire search of enough urchins to jam their thumbs in all the holes and stand there all night, holding back the water; and, if we couldn't expect a larger population to do that back then, I don't see why we can expect that now. I am not just talking about the act of having some lonely squaddie standing manning the AA guns in each owned base, but also pulling out of what one is currently doing and redirectly in response to every perceived issue. There was a relatively thin band of holes in the dike during the Hex System, each just as equally predictable at any given moment as with the Lattice, but never enough people to plug it up all the time or even all the times when it mattered. Proposing that all bases can always be "backcapped" is just that same vulnerability as a floodgate rather than a crack.

I don't know how much you may feel that we've matured as a community since 2012-2013 but that, in a nutshell, is why the Hex System was hard to swallow. Your proposal is based around the same premise of people caring about every little thing that happens on the map, and caring about it "right then" rather than "we'll take care of it later" or "someone else will handle it, surely." Back then, they eventually looked on the map and saw that the inital problem had grown; and, even as they continued to do stuff that they found important, they bitterly wondered why no one found that important or apathetically put it out of mind again.

Even if the system sounds good, that doesn't mean it will actually work. We have precadents about how a system where people aren't required to butt heads directly crumbles.

Edit: And this system still screws over any side with a population disadvantage, but extremely fast compared to Lattice, and it can be leveraged even faster than Hex.

Ideally..................


Planetside 2 should have had smaller continents, with Facilities,Large outposts & Warpgates only, with WG's being siegable.

One could argue that 12 people is too small of a number to realistically take a Techplant, under normal conditions. And there has been a consensus in the community that defenders do not have enough of an advantage. In addition they do not like spawn camping. This sort of solves those issues, or at least mitigates them somewhat.

Personally I'm in the boat that 12 is too small a number. I would like to see larger coordinated groups rewarded for doing what they do. Everyone's got their small little units. And I personally believe that is a problem. If you wish to win big, you should be big. This isn't to say you need to zerg. But damn we have platoons for a reason. And there was plans to have Companies of multiple platoons. I don't think we'll see companies, but I want to see more platoon elements.

This isn't to say the little outfits won't have a chance. You see you can win a continent through small base captures and ignore the larger bases under a no-lattice/hex system. This would allow smaller outfits and squads to engage in smaller targets (and more of them due to the faster cap timers). They would be able to totally avoid the zerg which would do what they do now.. move from base to base. They wouldn't be coordinated enough to go, "oh we need to pull back over here to protect this little base" not realizing or caring that losing the base will lose them a needed VP.

The problem is real war objective is usually enemy annihilation, while Planetside 2 is about territory control. Your system has the same issue as the hex map: it forces factions to split in order to cover as much territory as possible in an efficient way. This makes huge epic battles (the most unique ps2 feature) less likely to happen.
Moreover it forces people to keep moving to keep more bases under control thus it leads to a massive use of redeploy (teleport >>>> any other transport mean).
Last but not least it makes long battles extremely counterproductive: any fight lasting more than 10 minutes would cause the armies to lose big part of the map while they they are fighting to advance. This would make Biolabs bad tactical options: by the time you manage to conquer one you would lose 3 smaller outposts.

Players hate feeling forced to leave good fights (like it happened in the past when an alert was won).

Honestly I feel the lattice is not so great but it has more pro than cons.

That's not actually true. The zerg does what the zerg does. It moves forward without any regard to strategy, until it gets stymied and then it may switch directions.

That means coordinated outfits, squads, and platoons will do their thing while the random zerglings will push forward following a singular path. When a zerg meets another.. which it will. Then your epic massive scale fight will happens.

Coordinated outfits do NOT willingly engage or seek to engage in massive fights. It bogs them down and strips alot of their strengths away as their numbers count for less and individual skill is diminished in impact.

Also Biolabs are not bad tactical options. In the current system they can be if you open a lane to a Biolab and the zerg floods in. If the map opens up and smart players assault the biolab immediately under the proposed system, they will likely face little to no bogdown IF they assault the biolab properly. Take down SCU first and defenders cannot show up.

Well coordinated defenders Gal dropping in can show up. But that's a different fight altogether.

You can't sit here and honestly tell me that the Zerg which makes up the majority of players, will suddenly smart up and use Galaxies to move into interesting and crazy areas. Nor that the Zerg would split its forces to cover larger areas. It never did that in the Hex system. It won't do it in a Hexless or Latticeless system either.

The benefit of the zerg however would be if the resource revamp completed and they were the ones that held the territories close to the warpgate that they initially pull out from and generate the resources everyone else needs.

The addition of vp point gens will make lattice a handicap. I believe.

If your pushed back to a small enough territory. People will organize. And push back. Right now when you log in, the current ownership of the map does not reflect the current situation on the battlefield. It reflects the past 2-3 hours of fighting down these funnels.

What would happen if you did remove both? And just let us go freestyle on this planet. PTS maybe? Make an event of it for a weekend and see who shows up. I'll go. +1 this post if you would go too.

This is actually demonstrable.
The prior problems we are discussing are not inherent to the system (at least not in an obnoxious way) but, rather, to the known behavioral patterns of people operating under very similar constraints or, as is this case, lack of constraints. The solution is to find a controlled loosening of the grip of Lattice (at least as far as PlanetSide Classic went) but not to get as loose and uncontrollable as Hex.

Let us do talk about an different sort of implementation issue, then. It's true that the NW Warpgate on Esamir can view Ymir as unfair to their VP objectives under either Lattice or Hex Adjacency rules; but, under your system, lacking either requirements invalidates every other base on the map but the ones required by one or more of the VP rules. That's all the bases "most directly connecting" between the Warpgates and all major facilities. Certainly there are Alert victory conditions but it would take 8-10 Alerts where most territories don't change hands to capture a continent. Targetting the Tech Plants or the Amp Stations is much more lucrative. What's the value of Geological Survey Camp or Echo Valley Substation under a VP system where people don't have to ever go there? Even more involving fights like Saerro Listening Post are as much an inconvenience as they are pointless.

You don't need small bases as advanced staging grounds. Under Hex and Lattice, you need to visit these bases to progress capture across a map; under a free style system, all you need are Vehicle Terminals to hack for Sunderers and all the logistics but heavy tanks are at your finger tips. There's an endless number of places from which they can be pulled without having to ever contest a base in proper to get them. Hard spawns are only good for defending bases, not capturing them (those 3-point Amp Stations notwithstanding). Contesting these "pulling" bases would make it obvious from just looking at the map that they're being used.

You will need to get the smaller bases to pull supplies. Sunderers tanks etc. you would see more drops on large targets but capping of smaller targets to have a supply line of some sort. And allow spawning close to your objective. Beachheads so to speak. Not everyone will take the infiltrator route. And you can surround a base. so the enemy doesn't get the benefit of the base.

Options options options. War no holds barred.

There still are vp rewards for connecting warp gates etc.

Or you can stick to picking 3 different fights on each continent.

You don't need beachheads; Sunderers handle every sort of Infantry logistical concern that we currently have and can even be outfitted for a decent measure of armor warefare. You don't need need a squad of Infiltrators, or even a measured ratio of Infiltrators compared to other classes; one Infiltrator is more than enough to hack any number of Vehicle Terminals anywhere, and you can pull whatever you need, including the aforementioned Sunderers.

What I am saying is that you don't need to own these bases to do that. The VP system doesn't even give these bases enough value to make them worth it, not at the rate of Alerts. Even if someone took such a base, why would people feel it necessary to defend from being taken, take it back, or feel it might be defended from being taken back? PlanetSide is still not so advanced that there should ever be supply and logistic concerns, except when it is the players' fault for being negligent. Supplies flow as freely as water and nothing is so far away that distance is ever really an inconvenience. You don't need to own the satellite bases of a Tech Plant to seige the Tech Plant if the only capture requirement is "just show up" and, as mentioned, there's no reason to ever contest these bases except to introduce jeopardy upon your main attack by drawing attention. I suppose you could cite distraction but there are too many locations where even that wouldn't make sense. This compounds upon all those other bases around the map that wouldn't contribute to anything but low-scoring Alert victories.

If a complaint with the current Lattice is stagnant fighting concentrated in certain areas or between certain bases, why risk introducing reasons why there'd be no good reason to go fight anywhere specific?

I will not accept an argument that floats on the promise of possibilities without structure. This playerbase has already sunk that ship.

Come on we have seen this already when the game came out. WIthout lattice the line of the battlefront is just too long: too many bases to keep under control mean splitting up is always the best option, while zerging leads to losing the war. We have seen this also during the Conquest Mode testing: while most of people was in Allatum the rest of the continent was capped by micro squads of 1-12 footsoldiers.
I can still remember the first version of The Crown and the old motto of this forum "Take the Crown, lose Indar". Because that was happened all the time: while a zerg was struggling to cap The Crown in a huge epic battle gaining every single meter with bullets and blood, the rest of the continent was capped by small teams who though they were great heroes and tactician. They were just capping empty bases. Let's be honest: fighting an epic battle and feeling forced to redeploy every 5 minutes just sucks.

A map without lattice could imho work only:
- WIth less bases, giving relevant benefits.
- Space between those bases filled by players structures working as support structures for sieges.
- Attackers forced again to sit on capture consoles to make the countdown to progress.
- If attacckers are not on capture consoles the countdown eventually is reset.
- If attackers do not reach a certain number then the countdown is bloody slow (no lone wolves capturing a structure in 2 minutes).
- Redeploy only brings back to warpgate or to vehicles with Squad Logistic System.

Do this, and yes lattice can be removed.

With current rules and with the current map lattice is the best option we have. It could be better, it could be different, but it's the best we have. We were there when we had the hex map, and we tested the Conquest Mode, and we know it was awful. Some could think removing the lattice would mean bringing more strategy but that would be an illusion. As it is now without lattice would be again pure chaos without any resemblance of a battle flow.