"Looks like we can't hold this guys. Let's fall back.."

Amp stations are great to be in with a zerg outside. The four windows around the spawn area often show multiple targets.
You can use the basement to harass them, but if you're all alone, you can just stay there with unlimited ammunition and now a timer to know when to redeploy and deny them even that kill.

Some real strategic geniuses in this thread.

What's worse is someone that moves from camp to camp, instead of maneuvering for tactical advantage.

Oh, also what's worse is people that think the battle is all about one cap point, instead of winning in the end.

"Let's fall back" makes sense if you fall back to the nearest base and set up defense, or counter attack immediately. But I too am sick of squads and platoons leaving battles to ghost cap.

is this a serious question? a galaxy will let you bypass a lot of defense and get you to where you need to be fast. for example, the top of a tech plant so you can quickly get in and blow an SCU shield gen.

This thread shows a big lack of understanding in game mechanics.

Not sure if I should write a wall of text to explain.

Please, by all means, do! :>

Well, I give the "lets move on" command aswell from time to time. There is also a difference between pulling out while you still can hold the base, or pulling out because the enemy has all capture points and starts to spam your spawn.
Aside from that, I tend to pull my Squad´s out when I see we´re fighting in an outpost that is completely cut off, and our empire is being pushed back losing bases left and right. If a base has lost its strategic value I don´t see any reason to just sit there.
A great example for a fight like this:
Your faction has the S WG on Amerish, you at one point pushed all the way up the North. Now your entire Zerg sits in Ikanam while your enemies have already taken half the Map and are threatening to even cut your WG off.

Anyone who cares about the bigger picture will at the very least have pulled his own Squads away from Ikanam long before this happened. I´m no fan of sitting in empty bases and I avoid it at all costs but there are fights that make sense, and fights that don´t. Our goal is to pick those that benefit our empire, and if that means fighting superior numbers so be it.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the underlying reason why most squads do not stay and fight is because of their precious K/D ratio. Imagine for a second the mentality of a virtual soldier with no stats. No k/d, no spm, no kill streaks, no assists. The only stat that mattered or was computated was facilities captured and facilities defended. I can presume with a level of confidence that tactics and play styles would be dramatically different in PS2.

I'll keep it simple then;
The only significant thing you can achieve in this game when it comes to defense is avoid the fight to blow up Sundies


It comes from three factors:
-Faster spawn timers for attackers
-The ability to deploy closer to the point than your spawn room
-Resources/Vehicles do not matter

When spawning from a facility, you are faced with an endless stream of attackers which are 4 seconds quicker to get back on the frontline than you are.
If you feel you are holding a base, you're doing only this, holding. On the same skill level, you will not push back using conventional means...
...Unless you send some LA or stealthy engineer to blow up the enemy AMS by avoiding the fight entirely


Your chances at "pushing back" the enemy are very slim to say the least only because of those 4 seconds.
If your squad is holding a base, it would be better off attacking from behind using quads or Gal dropping onto the enemy spawn location. Ultimately, it all boils down to this; blowing up Sunderers.


IDEALLY, no fight should be a neverending stalemate like Biolabs when it's too defensible, or some kind of tireless steamroller like most outposts assaults.

Since there is no long-term mechanic that weakens either side over time;
Attackers do not get weaker by attacking (they even get resources for racking up points) for entirely too long.
Defenders do not get weaker by getting completly surrounded and cut off from their territory.


So, if your platoon leaders says "We're falling back", he KNOWS that holding the base will only delay the inevitable. If no one bothers to recapture satellites, blow up Sundies, or remove enemy influence (it doesn't matter anymore...), who's gonna do it ?

No, usually its the other way around.

They want to try to cap a base that they are losing all other territories up to their warpgate over. Gotta know when to back off and rebuild connections, and many 'leaders' don't.

So I just leave the platoon, go back to the warpgate, and help others (usually more sensible lone wolves) start retaking bases back there again.

obvious exaggeration on your part. Almost NO ONE abandons defense that easily unless there's only a squad or two to defend it and the map clearly showed "enemy platoons" in the connecting territory just finished their own zergy ghost capping and are already on their way. All of you people are sad little masochists if you'd honestly rather be spawn farmed for 5 minutes, than hang out in a galaxy talking to real people or taking a quick break from your nonstop cert farms to handle RL stuff. Seriously, if you're not interested in the more social aspects of MMO's then why are you even posting on the forum about this?

The thing about those overwhelming zergs is that they're usually so tunnel-visioned and lazy that they'd rather AFK at an amp station or plant with NO OPPOSITION for the 10+ mins it takes to cap, then risk splitting up to defend the 5 territories AROUND it that agile little outfits with actual leadership are capping or defending in Three mins. That's what wins Alerts, not this 200 puggers following a Sundy caravan to a single location business.


I do however agree that making everyone redeploy back to WG is completely unnecessary and needs to stop being used as the RESET button for cat-herding. I haven't ever commended that when platoon leading. We have a "Squad Deploy" button for that and I find that calling members by their actual names (instead of just a number) gets better results there. Most of them are grown adults who can get their own transportation and meet us at the new Waypoints if we give them a few minutes to wrap up their current engagements. If they still don't come, THEN I kick them quietly (b/c they obviously weren't listening to begin with)

Lol there aren't strategies in the game so you gotta just out number the enemy to win. This leads to quick and easy decisions to fall back n go somewhere else where you know you can win (cause you can simply tell if you can win by how many people you are up against).

nope, not in my outfit. mostly were the cause of a meatgrinder, were that single VS base with all those bubbles, were DORA.

Yep- Thats why I left one of the largest ghost capping outfits on Helios. When we found resistance it was "lets go or Amerish and ghost cap". I do believe in a numbers game at some point in a large fight but I wont go from dieing to complete boredom. I will try to backup some other guys elsewhere to help turn the tide of war there before I give up completely. When that happens I switch alts or log. Anymore Im happy manning a AA gun/max and killing ESFs/Libs. When they quit flying in my area I logoff or do a biolab grind for a bit. I feel this game wasnt meant for 12v12, or 32v32 like CoD or BF series games. If people want "fair" fights they should go back to playing those games or try to have their own orchestrated fight with another outfit on a less populated area.

I love big fights, but Im not going to sit around and get farmed. Generally if you cant leave your spawn without getting shot down then its time to fall back.

Two reasons:

Frames/Chassis don't always equip if you spawn somewhere that isn't the warpgate.

Public platoons (and even outfit platoons sometimes :O ) are so useless that asking people to redeploy to an attackable location will tend to involve the farming of the three members who are following orders, and the continued killwhoring of the remainder of the platoon. Far easier to regroup in a safezone, basically. The need for Galaxies is the sad consequence of everyone's favourite whiners: Infantry. Used to be you redeployed to warpgate to pull a combined arms force; a dozen tanks, couple of skyguards, a squad of ESFs+Liberators and two squads in three or four Sunderers. Now, the most effective way to use your platoon is as pure infantry so as to avoid the effort of logistics with no reward. The fastest way for infantry to get somewhere? Galaxy. The fastest way to get a mobile spawn somewhere? Galaxy+Infiltrator+Vehicle Terminal.

Don't let the Americans hear you say that... Vietnam's still a big sore point...

Sometimes it makes sense, specifically when the other faction is capping the bases around you and about to WG your faction. But it's still annoying as hell and people play to have fun not roll across empty bases. The standardization of cap times makes this even worse right now because before, I could at least say, "Well, yeah we're standing here in an empty outpost, but it'll flip in 30 seconds because we have a 6/6 then we can move on."

And on that note, I'm going to play solo till the lattice system hits.

Trust your platoon leader. They're saying they think you'll lose, and they're your commanding officer. You may think you'll win, but you're just a grunt, your opinion is of no relevance.

It's also very evident there's a lot of cert-grinding grunts here who've never played chess or Total War or Risk in their lives. Yes, we can stay at Allatum Bio Lab for the rest of our miserable lives, neither side making any progress, or we can pull out, take NS whatever it is, Quartz Ridge, West-whatever it is, Indar Comm Array, Sea Bed Listening post, and be half way across to the Palisade in the time it will take them to cap it even with 0 resistance. This means we can sever their entire front line in a single move. There's no need to defend those territories; the point is to out-manoeuvre and out-think so that the time they spend catching up on territories they only lost because they were too stupid to pull out of a 'good fight' becomes time you spend warpgating them.

PTFO, seriously.

This has probably been discussed a hundred times on the forums (Which I have somehow missed many of), but to avoid this stalemate of infinite troops steadily pouring from a Sunderer onto a base, would the solution be to cap the maximum amount of possible spawns from a single Sundy? Call it nanite resource consumption, only up to 100 bodies can spawn before you need to hit a Re-armoury platform job, to "recharge" the Sunderer.

I suppose you just could end up with Sundy zerg's though.

The idea would be though, if you failed to capture the base within your spawn allowance and everyone dies off, you'd HAVE to withdraw to recharge the Sundy. If you win and capture the base though, then you can recharge your sundy for the next offensive.