Remove Small bases from the lattice system.

Overcrowding of small bases in a Massive Scale game doesn't lead to good things.

In Planetside 1, though, towers were designed as just that, staging points. The maps in this game weren't designed with that in mind, Bio-Labs are the only bases that work anywhere close to like that.

I proposed this idea in beta. That main bases be connected via a lattice and all the other hexes are free to be captured by whoever, whenever. It's a nice mixture of both lattice and no lattice. An idea I picked up from a game I used to play several years ago called Planetside 1.

They didn't listen in beta just as they won't listen now.

That's the thing though, the distance between facilities hasn't changed. Not only are outposts hard spawnpoints, but also a vehicle spawn and defensive hardpoint. Though it would be possible to drive, fly, or run all the way across the map to capture the next lattice point without capturing any of the outposts you have to cross through, you still have to cross through them. If you lose vehicles, you have to spawn them at your nearest closest spawn, which could be a good distance away, while also having to deal with the enemy having spawns right next to your facility.

Since the base isn't an 'essential cap', you can also start playing around more with what constitutes a capture. You could even have bases with several sets of objectives, one to capture, one to disable the outpost. You could make a base where an infiltrator has to hack a 'network mainframe' for a minute, so it drops a 'mcguffin' which has to be brought back to the mainframe, or capture point or whatever else at a friendly base. This could even be concurrent with the regular base cap; a stalemate could be broken by an elite infiltration team breaking into your network vaults and stealing your mcguffin. Outposts could also have the old kind of generators, the type that could be overloaded or destroyed with explosives (the equivalent of 9 landmines exploding simulatenously, at least. Give it some autorepair too, so it's not too obnoxious). This would deactivate all turrets, terminals, spawn and capture points, which would all turn neutral (but hackable and usable), until the base is captured again.

100% agreed. but i dont know if it will ever happen, that's the thing...

regardless, if we do this, we'll have epic fights in the open like yes between Quartz ridge, and it was what made PS1 great in the first place, because bases were far away from eachother, making open field battles constantly occur.

a quick way to do this would simply be to remove the spawn rooms from the appropriate small bases, and make the capture points cap the base almost instantaneously.

this will remove the need to do yet ANOTHER revise of the lattice system (although we should not rule that out completely)

They need to just remove about 30% of the bases on indar, and about 20% of the bases on Amerish and unclutter Eisa tech on Esamir.

My thoughts exactly. When the Hvar outposts and Sandstone Mining were being redesigned it was a great opportunity to remove some some the clutter in that area but unfortunately all of them were kept. Indar has more areas like this such as Regent Rock and the outposts next to it and other spots as well.

The new Amerish has some really nice outpost designs but there's simply too many of them. Do we really need The Scarfield Reliquary, Shrouded Skyway, the Genudie physics that close to one another?

And the area around Eisa is just a mess.

Also remove most non-biolab satellite bases and make them quick flip again.

/agree I feel that the small outposts should be removed from the lattice and operate on a hex agency as long as they can only be captured when they are adjacent to a base that is connected to the lattice and it is available to be captured. I have made two posts regarding this idea with pictures and a rule set for how it would work.

Hybrid Lattice/Hex - With Hvar Tech plant example

Amerish Remade- This was done before the Amerish revamp

I think that if the small satellite bases are removed from the lattice and then operate with Hex adjacency rules, we would see fights spread out across multiple Hex's. The lattice is still in place as a stop gap from ghost capping and it is still structured enough that defenders can anticipate and prepare for attacks, but at the same time the capture restrictions are loosened a little bit and we will get situations where both attackers and defenders will have different avenues to use when assaulting a lattice linked base.

I think it would be interesting to even remove the spawn tubes from some of these smaller outposts and rely strickly on Sunderers & vehicles to provide the transportation and spawn abilities. Basically become points of interest that would rely more heavily on vehicles and maybe remove the actual capture point all together and have the base flip based on the population of each empire in the hex around this base. Therefore vehicles could be part of the flipping process, by just being in the hex and keeping the enemy out.

But within this system part of the benefit and reason behind taking the smaller, non-linked hexes is that they offer a forward spawn point to stage an attack on a nearby main base.

if you've ever looked at the map, ever notice how crowded the maps are with bases?

And it's not going to happen.
Look at this:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Planetside/comments/255ocp/questions_to_the_level_designer_of_planetside_2/

I like, as always, but it requires some other changes to cap times and major facilities to make sense. Here's an extended suggestion I made to introduce primary and secondary lattice.

Hrmm? I still can't take a facility unless its attached by lattice link to another facility. As far as I understand the OP, they'd just be capture points you could use for flanking.

Make the gate shields and vehicle pads locked to the owner of the facility if a contended facility isn't connected.
If you want to take the shields and vehicle pads, then put those back to the hex system where adjoining hexes need to be hex-linked to an owned facility.

Effect removing small outposts have on camping, zerging, and pop imbalances = 0

I think Tuco nailed it this time. If you remove the small outposts from the lattice and leave them in the map so that empires can capture them if they like then I think nothing will change. I mean why in earth would an empire skip enemy owned small outpost if it is along the way to the next base? Especially when the opposing force is of equal size. Ofcourse the outposts will be fought over and the gameplay will be pretty much identical as what it is at the moment.

SOE needs to remove the small outposts from the lattice AND make them permanently neutral without any spawns at all. That will make the gameplay closer to PS1 style. I would do the same thing to the towers as well.

All they would have to do is keep the buildings & spawn terminals, but Remove player spawning from them.


Either that or Merge Territories into larger territories.

Maybe, but I like the way they are now. You get more certs this way. What you want will reduce certs earning. It might be by a little but I want to make more certs.

Because the strategy around holding outposts becomes less, 'Will this outpost be easier to take than that outpost" and more, "Which outpost do I want to attack the main facility from? Which outpost helps me hold those forward spawns? Which outpost will the enemy most want to take?" Why would an empire skip outposts? Because the other empire is abandoning the zerged out base, and trying to attack multiple outposts on what would have been that lattice lane. Does the larger force pursue the smaller force into these less critical outpost fights, or can they make a good enough push on the facility that losing all of those outposts won't matter? The flow of battle would still often tend to concentrate on these bases, but that they can be bypassed (or disabled, or whatever else) opens up a new layer of strategy that would push battles onto wider fronts.

I think removing outpost captures entirely kind of misses an opportunity for varied 'gametypes', but that's a whole other discussion.

Here's an idea - what if the minor bases were directly tied to the capture status of nearby main bases. The enemy could disable individual bases by destroying power generators and such, but would not be able to actually fully capture them. Defenders would be able to use satellite bases as defense, and attackers would have to contend with not having 'home ground' from which to stage attacks from.