So, after the "Hex adjacency update", what will be the point of a Hex ?

I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I wasnt in favor of the adjacency thing either. I think once we have outfit owned bases we will see alot more strategy and wouldnt need it. Outfits would keep the enemy from back capping their base. With a lattice system, why bother owning a base at the edges of the map...you will never see battles at it since no one can capture it until they fight through the 20 other bases to get to it.

Note that next to nothing was done to prevent ghost capping during the Hex system period.
It was a matter of UI and spawn availability; not only you could not spawn anywhere on the map, which would have made base defense MUCH, MUCH EASIER, but you had to check manually every blinking territory and watch the progress bar, while playing whack-a-mole with the LONE ghost-capper.

Stuff like requiring 3 players on the CP to initiate a cap, blocking capture rates at 0% influence or allowing spawns all over the allied territory would go a long, long way. And we might even find a flow without randomly requiring a Lattice

You're assuming people actually want to respond to those 3 peeps standing on a point, waiting for the cap.

Here's the flaw in the pro-hex people's ideas: Like the following text, MAJORITY PLAYERBASE WANTS BIG FIGHTS.

The back capping $#!% was just a nuisance to overall gameplay and regardless of whatever features you think would work to make the current system work, it won't: because people will be people. There are better ways to encourage off-battle gameplay that still effects the main battle, without small groups marginalizing victory or defeat by taking undefended territory.

The current hex system makes it hard to predict where the enemy will attack next, making it hard to predict where to retreat to. Restricting the number of places one can respawn to without restricting the number of places an invading army can go isn't helping the issue at all. The new layout will restrict both the number of retreat locations AND advancement options.

It's easier to read for one thing. Now you can clearly see the territories you control and where your character needs to be to get the bonuses when you flip a base.

Also the adjacent territories to a main facility are more like robust towers that interact directly with a main facility. So there are some differences.

Also, it looks cool while functioning the same. I imagine that the hexes give them a bit more flexibility too when they want to make changes. They are also much cleaner and are much easier to make transparent.

It's mostly art reasons why they are staying.

Comparing the lattice overlay with the hex, the hexes look easier on the eye to me. It might be the borders between hex zones.

Yes. At least I would respond to a threat when doing organized ops, if only I didn't have to /suicide 3 times in a row to get there, only to flip a empty control point and then wait to get full control of it.

Majority of the playerbase can't handle big fights.
Not with decent performance. And that "bigger is better" doctrine is more often than not false. "Big fights" are usually so saturated on a individual level none of your actions matter. And cert-farming is a huge factor in making big battles.

I can enjoy fighting a 12v12 on a outpost. I can't enjoy the constant 250+ player deathmatch on Ti Alloys.

And every night we've got multiple squads from multiple outfits playing together.
If I need 5 guys to clean sweep an outpost, I'll have them. Provided I can respawn there in the first place....

I think alot of this could be changed by making the points for bases come from holding them and not from the flip. If you have a ticker that gave you points in timed increments after the flip I think ghost capping would cure itself. They should also make it so that one person cannot glip a gen or any other control point. You should have to have at least 5 players to flip it.

My infiltrator should be able to infiltrate bases more easily! right?



... right?

Maybe, just maybe, you can fight over every single "lattice" hex now. It would make it vastly different from lattice system. More interesting in my opinion. How it could be made to not add capture points every 100 meters, I don't know.

They are trying to make something new, not remake of old PS.

This is purely a cosmetic issue. Higby on Reddit the other day: "we've discussed it. hexes work right now and they allow us to display volume which is sometimes important as well as contour to major attack routes. We're thinking about adding an option to display the connectivity in a more "lattice" like network graph for people who prefer that view."

Since they killed IA i've been seeing a lot more defence and a lot more thought out attacks rather than ghost capping everywhere. If they "fix" territories giving adjacency whilst being flipped and let us spawn in more locations on a redploy i can honestly see the entire lattice system not being needed. Though the current phenomenon could be a passing phase. Still interesting to see what IA has done to things...

There is no point.

Unless you think providing predictable, linear gameplay to people who don't have the imagination or problem solving skills to deal with non-linear play a point.

Many strategy games, particularly wargames, have a hex grid.

So keeping hexes around, even when they're not a grid anymore, is an attempt to imply PS2 has strategy.

I think the benefit of the hex is to keep the casual players (which makes up most of the zerg) on path and makes them more predictable, simply because these players want points from when the hexes change hands. If bases were merely connected by straight lines, the flow would be much more disorganized. The micro-hex system brings more predictability to where the bigger battles are going to occur, to a degree the lattice system cannot.

Yay, I can finally say "I told you so" to the 'lattice guys' that the lattice isn't what made players defend in PS1; it was the PS1 cloaking AMS, PS1 mines, PS1 spitfires, and PS1 motion detectors that allowed players to defend in PS1.

I mean the whole map is set up to look like that hexagonal grid instead of a square grid.

We're talking a purely aesthetic thing here for the most part (Except for the people who are, for some nebulous reason, debating the imagined merits of the current system), so it's mostly up to the user. I think a toggle (Which was mentioned back on the first page) would be a good idea.

Personally I kind of like the mini-hex look since it follows the roads and the canyons, seems it'd benefit navigating the map somewhat to have the true path highlighted like they do. However that is just the opinion of someone who occasionally gets lost navigating the goat paths the cover Auraxis (Seriously, did they forget how to pave roads, sometime in the future?).

Even under the current system the hexes don't really mean anything since most regions are multi-hex. You don't fight over every hex, you're fighting over the region, and more specifically the one facility in that region. The hexes are fairly meaningless, they're just a quick way of the game tracking adjacency.

TBH these new lanes aren't going to add a meta-game, they're just going to limit fighting to a known front line everyone can see. You should get bigger battles but at the cost of less dynamic battle locations. The meta-game we need is a hierarchy of continents, so it feels like there's something to achieve by capturing one, and this also means sanctuaries need to return. To work this needs at least one more continent, then you can have a basic pyramid (with Indar at the top presumably).

Personally, I'd like to see an idea like this given more "ingame" reasoning. For example, the lanes could represent a data network. This introduces the concept of hacking and provides a reason for why one territory needs to be captured before another (you need a network connection to successfully hack the outpost).

By imagining these sorts of things as possible RL counterparts, you can come up with all sorts of ideas. For example, the reason we need access to control consoles would be to disable lockouts preventing access from hostile bases. Once access has been gained, the central computer from the connected base can be used to break the encryption protecting the control programming and reprogram it to accept the new owners. This is why there is a countdown etc etc.

Then you can tack on fresh ideas drawing from the main theme, like datalinks that can be rerouted so you can have a player reprogrammable "lattice".

Agreed. Straight Lines > Hexagons. aka. a "Lattice"

Might as well just bring back the line visuals.