After this update anyone is able to call in an orbital strike without actually setting up the construction asset and wiping out your base, makes building worthless. You have no chance of taking out the enemies orbital strike asset because there isn't one, no warning, nothing... seriously screwed base building.
You need to spend a fair amount of time gathering War Asset resources, first. Then you need to wait for the Orbital Strike charge to craft. And you're not always guaranteed to get War Asset resources; you either need to claim capture credit for a base, which generates resources per minute, or you need to jump between a lot of different base offenses, and be present with a spot on the scoreboard for your outfit to get a 1x tick of that territory's resources. Using Construction assets is always going to be a more consistent method of deploying Orbital Strikes.
I think the problem will be that outfits gather these resources 'passively' and afaik there is no decay on it. In a month or however long a lot of outfits WILL have these resources and orbital strikes and at that point they will probably just nuke player built bases to farm certs even if the base has little to no strategic value to them. Building your own base is an active way to play the game that WILL be countered by a passive resource income. The question is only when people will have stored enough of it to start throwing them around, not if it will happen. Might be a good time to add another player construction, anti-OS shield or something. If people want to strike your base they should at least need to destroy a single module first(more trouble than its worth unless they actually want the base gone).
OS should never have been added to the game. They doubled down on their stupidity when they allowed farmers to OS lattice bases, And now they are tripling down on the stupidity by giving zergfits passive OS.
One one hand, OS is awesome. It's something that fits well into the battle and looks amazing. On the other hand, it is too strong. But making it very weak would make it pointless and reduce it so a meme, looks super strong but can barely scratch anything. It's a no-win scenario. Only real solutioun would be removing it entirely, and that would not be a satisfying one either.
Not really. It just needs some thinking that isn't shackled to a bunch of sacred cows like "time = power" and "all new things must be more powerful than prior ones". First, repurpose the free (and lets face facts that under the current system the war assest OS is for all intents free right now) OS from what was a CR5's area-clearing OS in PS1 to a CR4's smaller one. Ideally it should be just large enough that if dropped dead center it would just cover the entire bubble of a stealth sunderer. That alone would help - smaller OS requires more accuracy & does less collateral damage. That in turn converts it from a "Hammer of God" to more of a precision strike weapon. Of course if you really want to screw with certain outfits, put a charge up time on the war asset OS. One that can reach 30 minutes or more depending on whatever factors you want (ex. number of outfit OS'es used within last 72 hours, population of continent, time of day in game, etc) and gives that much warning in the target hex and gets more exact as the count down shrinks. Could you imagine the face of someone gloating about being ready to blow up a base or defense only see that their OS is going to give 30 minutes of warning because they've been throwing them around like candy?
It has rendered many bases pointless, and that's not a bad thing. Too many people only use construction for the Orbital Strike, making it less unique will encourage people to explore other methods of construction. Already I use the Light Air Terminal to build a rear "Air Base" to supplement the nanite cost for ESFs with cortium from the Light Air Terminal. I've seen players implement a Flail base which they protect with Harrassers to continuously assault enemy armor at places like Indar Excavation Site. Using bases to make roadblocks for stalling out an enemy armor push through chokepoints can work wonders too. There are plenty of other uses than just Orbital Strikes. I'd suggest they add more building to construction, maybe buildings that provide a strategic advantage but occupy the same slot as an Orbital Strike Uplink. Some ideas: -Heavy Munitions Factory: Constantly drains Cortium. Enables the pulling of MBTs and Liberators and Galaxies from the vehicle and air terminal respectively; independent of any tech plant requirements. -War Asset Fabrication Station: Enables the passive generation of War Asset resources at the cost of cortium; for 1 Auiraxium (Green) 1000 cortium every minute, for 1 Synthium (Blue) 2000 cortium every minute, for 1 Polystellarite (Purple) 3000 cortium every minute. The War Asset Fabrication Station will appear on the map for all players to see; Requires a player to be in an outfit. -Armageddon-class Fusion Projection Cannon: Anti-Bastion Fleet Carrier weapon platform, after a short lock on time, will destroy 1 hard point on a Bastion Fleet Carrier every minute if it is in range. Range would be about 1500 meters maximum. Meant to function as an area of denial weapon to prevent a Bastion from going anywhere they please.
Two good ideas that didn't cross my mind. Radius reduction might really go a long way, and probably removal of the super-huge shockwave. The throwback on that one can kill people who were well out of the target area. Cooldown for OS could even be easier than calculations. Either by implementing a factionwide cooldown (obviously only on a given server, not across them), maybe of 5 or 10 minutes. Alternatively a cooldwon for individual outfits, though that should be longer, at least 15 minutes. Heck, maybe even both. The "strike incoming" warning for 30 min could lead so some weird situations when the own faction is too idiotic to notice the timer and just refuses to go there (and let's face it, people in general never disappoint when it's about being dumber than neccessary).
They just need to upgrade the ants 3rd and forth seat slots to do something useful. Like repair guns that reach further then the current engineers gun. Or MAKE SKYWALLS STRONGER
pretty sure no one spends their orbitals on a pmb. Most pmbs are just solo bobthebuilders who built automated fortresses in the middle of nowhere. As dumb as the people spamming orbital strikes are, they aren't going to waste their outfit resources on killing one dude. They would rather nuke a base that's full of their teammates during a large fight. Honestly, I haven't seen a single outfit OS on any server that has targeted a pmb.
Yeah, no point to player bases anymore (I have seen an OS used on two bases so far). I would say that bases haven't had a real role for some time now. Resources for OS are not that difficult to accumulate. I solo got enough for two orbitals so far. Base Building was a mistake that the Devs have been trying to walk back for some time now. Made them decent money when they rolled it out, so they cannot just pull it from the game, since that is a lot of daybreak coin that players will have no way of spending. Player bases have been responsible for stalled zergs and that has caused a lot of complaints in the past. OS bombing used to be a big part of PS1 and it was a good way of breaking the fight apart. There really is nothing wrong with such a mechanism, it just highlights the problem that player bases used to be. Player bases were never a well thought out concept and we are seeing the results of that now. When I was a member, I used to spend my stipend on the player base items. I would love to get that back, but I just don't know what I would spend it on now, though. P.S. I don't know of any Dev that actually plays the game and builds bases. So don't expect anything to improve.
It’s over for both base building and deploy zones for sunderers in the Escalation update. If a Bastion Carrier doesn’t wipe you out a Orbital Strike from an Outfit sure will. Solution: Remove zones for construction and sunderers.
We used a PMB to protect Cobalt Geological for over 2 hours. It wasn't constantly under attack, mind you, but until it got zerged hard it held the point. And even then, when the other people defending the line fell back, that made it a difficult attack instead of a victory by default.
