Revert Tech Plants to How They Were

Lets give a brief overview as to how difficult base-capping is in the game, by base type, and what is needed to accomplish it.

Outposts: Overwhelm the defenders by using heavy armor and numbers
Amp Stations: Overwhelm defense by taking down gens using force of numbers
Biolabs: Overwhelm Defense by force of numbers
Towers: Overwhelm Defense by using force of numbers

Seeing a pattern here? All you need a a large zerg to take all of these outposts. No coordination at all. Just everyone run at the gens/points and eventually we will win. Now, we add the latest iteration to the easily capped zerg bases-the Tech Plant!

Before it was THE hardest base to take. You couldn't simply overwhelm the defense using force of numbers alone. You would get stuck at the back doors. You needed TEAMWORK and COORDINATION to take this base, and there were TONS of entry points and ways to take it, all stemming off of the fact that the back doors were so defensible and the only way to get in.

And now, due to crying, SOE has made (in my opinion) the worst mistake in the game so far. They have ofically taken the defensibility out of Tech Plants. 2 Gens outside of the main facility. Lets dissect this.

Now, you have 2 dedicated gen taking sunderers. You now split the defenders in two. The attackers can spawn right on their points while the defenders need to run to them.

Noone can honestly tell me Tech Plants are better now. I guarantee I can shoot down each and every defense of the new Tech Plants.

Happy Zerging! and remember, whatever you do, DON'T DEFEND ANYTHING. You will lose 100 percent of the time.

Tech plants were horrible.

2 Sundies, win the base in 2 minutes, otherwise, farm your certs.


And yet, they made it worse. I'm impressed.

I wish they would have kept tech plants the same i loved defending a base for 5-6 hours

Yeah, I get it. Its a lot harder for an uncontrolled mob to defend it now. Heh.

I agree with your point, but Tech Plants were GOOD before, but they just needed to add maybe one more infantry enter point and it would be better. Now they broke them.

Look at my sig. Do you honestly think I care about the uncontrolled mob defense? No. Uncontrolled mobs were a viable way to defend the plant, no doubt, but only because now they actually held some leverage against an uncontrolled mob attacking. I say "Some" because it was ULTRA easy to attack a tech plant that was defended by an uncontrolled mob. Load ONE diffuser sundy and ram it through the back shield loaded with MAXes and bang, enemy spawnpoint gone and gen lit up.

It was too easy to defend funneling the attackers through just a few small doorways.

Instead you now have to actually think and coordinate a defense. Its a big problem, the generators, nobody defends them...

You're missing the point. Unless they explicitly say otherwise somewhere, every last shred of evidence I can find suggests one thing: Zerging is the way SOE intends for people to play the game. Constant offense, cap and leave, avoid the enemy zerg.

Simple, right? You can join a mob of people and farm certs with zero effort, or you can get in the way of someone else doing the same and get a warm, fuzzy feeling as a reward. I really can't understand why people always choose option 1 [/sarcasm].

I actually liked the way tech plants were before. They were the only place that seemed to actually grant some form of tactical advantage for being on the defense.

It wasn't exactly fun to "defend" a Tech plant.

Basically, you were steamrolled all the way to the Tech plant building itself, and stuck here for days.
In proportion, the time spent attacking a Tech plant would be:
Outer walls - 5%
Satellites - 5%
Courtyard - 5%
Double doors - 85%

(yes this is completly arbitray, but how I feel about it)

What's funny is I actually loved being on the attacking side of a long drawn out Tech Plant battle. There are so many ways to get in and so many ways to kill people, it's too fun. The best part of it all was... most of the battles were done on foot! Yay a base where we could fight on foot and not have to drive vehicles to gain advantages.

Now that generators are outside, it's gonna come down to once again, who's got the biggest air & tank power. It would be like an amp station...but without the outer shield. Attackers get to just go in and overtake the generators, and hold the generators with tanks & air power. I would really hate to be the defender of the new Tech Plant now. An amp station without the outer shield...that's just bad. Amp station can still have good fights because often the outer shield stays up, so infanty duke it out inside for the generators.

Disagree, really glad for the tech plant change! Thank you SOE!

Tech plant battles were not fun, despite the fact that they made me cert rich. To those who say the change killed the only good battle in the game...horse****. I stopped counting the number of times factions lost half a continent because a big % of their population was camping a tech plant that was barely under attack. BECAUSE of the tech plant camping the rest of the map turned into a no-resistance bore/cap fest. Get off your damned ***** and stop letting me cap your territory.

All that said, the shield gens need to be very close to the spawn room. Defenders should still have an advantage of some sort.

Again, why do people keep saying funneling through 2 small doorways when there are many other ways to get in? Is it really for reals that people to this day still don't know the other methods of getting into the old tech plant?

WHy soe. the tech plant was fine. no one had a issue with it. now like said above it's like all the others. bring more then they got win gen win base. ba change very bad change. not only did oyu make it easyer to take you blocked the pathways that poeple used to place sundy ams in the base. so now it's even more limited.

lets also note that the sundy shield buster was best used at the tech plant. it shined thier. not.. welp why do i need. i just drive my tank up and block off a shield gen like a amp station.

I agree with you on your point about tech plants being too farm-able. Solution: add one more cap point inside and 2 outside. Make the ones on the outside worth more than the inside, but only by a little bit. That way, defenders are forced to push out and recap the other points. Don't make it impossible to defend

I think the tech plants were fine the way they were before with one exception. While it was difficult for the attackers to make it very far past the double doors, there were still other entry points (Above the shields in garage, lift down from roof, etc.).

I believe that if they just moved the elevator/lift to the other end of the tech plant closer to the generator on second floor and away from the double doors, fights would be a lot more even with minimal changes to the base. But this new structure, having two generators outside, is just awful and takes away what made the tech plant unique in my opinion.

Well you can get in on the top if you have a galaxy, but thats pretty much it as far as I can tell! All the other doorways are shield protected.

Tech plants were fine the way there were if not for people driving AMS's to the second floor. The new Tech plant has barricades which solves that problem. All you need to end the original Tech plant is a couple (or three) sundys full of troops to kill the deployed AMS (if it's not on the second floor). That gives the zerg time to swarm inside to the teleport tube. The new Tech plant is as useless to defend as Amp Stations. At least the Bio Lab is somewhat defendable as long as the numbers are about even. Once SOE nerfs the Bio Lab there's no reason to defend anything in the game, and it's only barely worthwhile to defend the Bio Lab as it is now.

Honestly, all I used to do when running solo was defend a Tech Plant or find a cont where we have pop so I could soak up base captures. Now I'll just log in and if we don't have pop anywhere, or have pop on a cont where we already own all the bases, I'll just log off and find something else to do. Seeing how SOE is screwing up the bases in PS2 makes one long for the old days of having fun bases to defend and capture like we had in PS1.

Like what? Dropping down the elevator? You just get farmed by the same guys defending the doors. You are literally like 10 feet away from the double doors. Coming through the shields in a sundy? Pray they don't mine it or someone is getting quite a few kills. It can work but it does take a bit of luck. Everyone defending the Tech plant will be spawning at the sunderer there. If you get unlucky you can end up with a spawn of 30 ppl and end your joy ride quick. What else am I missing that makes taking tech plants easy?

I would argue that Bio Labs were actually harder to take from an organized defense than tech plants. Bio Labs have precisely three points of entry, all of which can be saturated and camped quite easily. Coordinated assaults at different entrances didn't really do much to support each other as the objectives inside were still widely spread apart.

Tech Plants had (effectively) four, all of which gave you a very short window to react to hostile action before it was in your face. More importantly, because the cap point and generator for the tech plant were centralized, coordinated assaults at difference entrances supported each other.

That being said: the change to the Tech Plant has effectively removed the ability to defend the base for anything more than a brief time unless the defenders' numbers are so overwhelming that the tech plant would be in no danger even with the cap point sitting outside in the open.

But it also represented the only real opportunity for a true slugfest between factions other than The Crown. With this change, SOE's design philosophy seems to be "May the faction with the highest current population win!"