Routing Spire

Also someone mentioned having 3 routers on a point... I think you meant a router on 3 points. You can't deploy two of them near each other. Not sure what the radius is but it's pretty large. >50m I believe for sure.

another thing is: Routers get destroyed by Orbital strikes, even when they are inside buildings, so the current mass of OS everywhere means that routers don't actually live that long.
not to mention that you can always just toss AV nades onto a point and watch the router pad explode.

Aye, I haven't experimented with what it takes to destroy them. AV nades then for sure?

i haven't tested it out yet, but AV nades deal damage to everything so they should be a save bet, normal frags might work too.

This has already been discussed thoroughly. They simply reskined the medic's deploy pad into a constructable item,

I still think it's stupid but far less stupid if you can only pull a limited amount of them from the routing spire.
Previously it was every medic could put one down, couldn't put more than 1 within 100 meters of each other, but that didn't matter much as long as EVERY ******* MEDIC HAD ONE.

If I remember correctly, the reasons for not putting it in the game was:
1. Zergs would become even more zergy, unable to deal with respawn points even though we already had beacons and that was enough.
Since small squads could still stop zergs as long as they used vehicles to kill every single spawn they had and then had good infantry mains kill the rest of them, it worked out well, but the pad made it so that the infantry clearing was far far harder than it needed to be even with beacon swapping and removal.
2. Diminished vehicle value, being able to bypass traditional spawns made it so that tanks are far less valuable and even more so if they could not deal with infantry effectively making hesh an even more prominent choice in some cases.
3. Made medics too valuable.
4. Made it confusing and unfun for new players getting farmed by people who did not want to destroy the pad. After all we have problems like this with the sundi already.
5. Nanite cost no matter made the thing unbalanced. If it was too expensive, it didn't matter in zergs or no one used it. If it was too cheap, everyone picks one up and fights go on forever.

But making it a construction item definitely alleviates a lot of these problems and gives the light assault more value outside of the cheese brick spawn removal.

After all is said and done my only problems with it are:
1. There should be a limit to how many one routing spire can produce.
2. A timer so that you cannot chain use them. Say the limit was 3, but they already killed the one on crowns B point, well now they have another one on crowns C point and everyone working hard at B have to go up and remove the next one at C while the zerg was not stunted by the loss at all. This is pretty unfair imo.
3. Coordinated squads being able to farm this forever. I don't like it when people pick on newbies, at all.
4. Trolls abusing it so that it simply traps you in a farm base.
5. Range at which the routing spire is allowed to let you deploy them. I haven't tried PTS in a long time due to technical difficulties, but the routing spire should be relatively close to the pad at the very least, making a construction base a interesting sunderer method. I'd be fine with 800 meters, making it within glaive distance and can be responded to.

Theres a couple of other concerns but those are the top 5. I'm taking a break from typing.

Dont worry. Current Routing Spire isn't overpower. i tested it many times. It not helps much. Enemies quickly find it and destroy it in any places, even on top of those blinking towers at most bases. Light assaults quickly destroing it. It has super low HP and bigger cooldown compared to sundy.

I wrote about this when it was on the Test Server. Link

You can see the spawn icon on the mini map so it is fairly easy to find its rough location. But I was able to place mine up on a structure and the flow of spawn was able to protect it just fine. I imagine that using this at an AMP station is where it really would shine. The spawn timer is a bit on the long side, and that does slow down spawn.

But now you see the Warpgate area littered with these spire towers, silo, air pad, and spawn tube. This is what player bases have become. It isn't about strategic placement or construction of bases. Like my previous post, this is just another bait and switch. There isn't much else a base is good for. Maybe the odd blocking of a road in a canyon. But that is, as long as the fight comes to you. Otherwise base building is a joke, and more of an eye sore than anything else.

I circled all the bases with this kind of setup on the mini map just in my immediate area. If it is about router spire, why place your base close to enemy lines. The problem is, that you cannot make it that the router spire and pad have to be within 600 meters either. Because it would take too long to build a base to be of use in warfare.

The construction in this game is a hacked together concept with no clear vision of what role it will actually play.

I made a base just like that one. Spawn tube to get there, routing spire to get a router from, and an airpad to fly off from.

Having it right next to the warpgate proved a mistake. I ended up with a lot of 4km flights to get the router to where the action was happening.

I don't think the weakness of the router comes from spire location and placement though. It's the increased spawn time, fragility of the router, difficulty of getting one into a battle that keeps it from being OP

Was confirmed by drew that you can be as far away as 300 meters to spawn in a router. I have spawned from 250m on the test server.

so what does that mean? better bring in the pmb closer to the action?

Planetside 1 had these and they were awesome.

Planetside 2, however is not planetside 1.

Here is the issue: in PS1, it was much harder to get into a base. Bases had doors and better designs to funnel players in.

Planetside 2, however, has bases literally designed for attackers to get in easily. Who the hell designs a base to be easily breached by the enemy?

The idea is to deploy an AMS(sunderer) and try to sneak a router into the base, creating easy access. But with planetside 2 bases having dozens of ways in, this becomes rediculous.

Maybe one day the developers will actually take notes from planetside 1.

Yeah, I can confirm it is a 70-meter limit between each Router. So you definitely want to place yours in a good spot if you don't want your buddies' spot to get blocked. I don't know whether or not enemy Routers can block your own Routers, though. Maybe? If someone can confirm yes or no on that, it would be great.

Anyways, like in a previous post of mine, my misgivings about this new tactical item have been pretty much wiped away. They're easy to find and destroy, (5 commissioner shots destroys it just fine, don't waste C4) as they're marked and color-coded on the minimap, or continent map if you zoom in a lot and are close enough to one. As has been mentioned by others as well, the difficulty and tedium of getting your Router unit and hauling it to the fight in one piece can be challenging. In cases of a zerg on your own side, it is useless. In cases where you're losing badly, the challenge of placing one is even higher. If you do manage to place one, it will get destroyed very quickly, and or camped for free XP. Chances are someone just destroys it, but still.

All-in-all, its use is in a niche all its own. The spawn timer is long just like an Elysium Spawn Tube, which makes solo defense of it basically impossible if it's been found and you've been killed. So yeah, I guess it's fairly balanced as is.

Daybreak is definitely right when it comes to these things. Testing these new things on Live in practical combat brings all sorts of things to light that you may not normally think about/notice. I'm cool with it so far, as a welcome change of pace. Of course, I'm going to see how it fares going forward. People are clever, after all.

Yeah, I should have torn down the spire I made just outside the warpgate no-deploy, and put a new base together closer to the front line of the faction we were attacking.

The Spawn Tube + Router Spire + Air Vehicle Terminal is the way to go though. Just gotta have it closer to the front lines. Keep those flights down to 1-2km.

Not much use if the enemy can see it on the map. A sunderer parked in a garage has a better chance.