Why are defense structures designed to be useless?

This has the hallmark of some marketing idiot researching why PS1 wasn't as successful as WoW and concluding that it was to complicated, got bogged down, aircraft were difficult to fly, etc (I am not a PS1 player, but that how it is described) and so Sony instructed the designers to change the the game to make more simple (resources, capping, etc), more fluid and some corporate executive must be a pilot or something because clearly the word came from very high up that aircraft must rule Auraxis.

The only turrets I don't like using are the anti-vehicle ones. The reason for that is a lot of the terrain keeps me from hitting enemies who can sneak around small hills while I struggle to connect. However, I've used the AA guns pretty damn well in many base defense scenarios.

They need to bring back alpha walls and tower assets. They were superior in both structure and defence (walls especially). Towers weren't cartoonishly over bloated and didn't have those unnecessary protruding feet, and walls were covered like bunkers

I agree with this. I was sort of hoping they would add certs so you could be better with base turrets if you wanted to be or allow engineers to modify turrets and the like sort of like the combat engineer class in PS1.

Immersion isn't ridiculous to me in role playing games. You're playing a role, so that role needs to be believable. I spent a good portion of my teenage years playing MUDs and other computer games with a role playing aspect. I get it. But this isn't a role playing game. It's a shooter. The combat is the main draw here, so the combat needs to be the primary concern.

This argument really holds water. If you want immersion, play an RPG. If you want a realistic shooter, play ARMA. If you want both, you can LARP with Airsoft guns.

But yeah, the hover tank physics really need work for this game to be believable.

At leat they're indestructible, suck on that, 21th century

I disagree! I find base towers are very good tools for defending a base... if used properly. Most of the time, the towers are manned by uncoordinated players late into an attack, so as individual turrets go up, they're quickly picked off by enemy tanks and liberators or even just heavy assault troops.

But when used PROPERLY, base towers are a huge asset for defenders, and a great demonstration of this happened this Monday.

I was rolling with my outfit, the 666 Devil Dogs, on the Connery server Monday night when our commanders gave us orders to take Howling Pass Checkpoint. Howling Pass has plenty of fortifications, including the towers the OP is talking about. We took the base with minimal TR resistance (coming from the south) and were then given orders to take the Abandoned NS Offices to the west. We did take Abandoned NS Offices with some effort, but before too long flat desert plane to the north of us was COVERED with Prowlers and Liberators bearing down on us. Needless to say, our northern offensive slowed to a crawl and we started getting clobbered at Abandoned NS Offices by the advancing TR. Prowlers and Liberators are tough to fight on wide open ground, and Abandoned NS Offices isn't exactly a castle on a hill.

That's when I said we were should leave Abandoned NS Offices and fall back to Howling Pass Checkpoint: man the turrets and halt the TR counterattack. I don't know if it was my voice that sparked the move, but pretty soon our forces did exactly that: we all started respawning at Howling Pass Checkpoint and climbing up the base defense towers.

We held the fort!

It was a truly epic hour-long siege, and we had dosens of players working together... MAXs, Engineers, Heavy Assaults, and Combat Medics like me all working together efficiently, helping each other with class abilities and manning the turrets... but nonetheless we held the line against a huge army of TR tanks and air power, and I strongly believe one of the decisive factors was the presence of static defenses like towers and turrets at Howling Pass Checkpoint.

Sure, towers do have blind spots and the middle and top sections don't provide cover from all sides all the time, but if you tweaked them too much they would probably be overpowered. I think they strike a nice balance between defensibility and not being impregnable right now, and that's good for gameplay.

Ever played TF2? Ever noticed how silly and likeable to game world is? Because Valve actually cares about the artstyle and its integrity. If you would look at the world from its perspective, it's quite believeable. There's nothing detrimental to the cartoony world such as seriousness or realism. It all fits.

PS2 is a game with realistic graphics and (at least tries to have) realistic physics. It has a world with serious and realistic characters locked in eternal conflict. Then you have bases designed by an utter ******, or the other minor things that were mentioned before and don't make sense. One would think at least one of the 'humanity's best' would be able to design a defensible base.

I remember Higby talking about Esamir and how he wants it to be as close and as realistic to an arctic continent as possible, having the sun and the moons acting differently.

You also seem to think that immersion only exists in RPGs. To be honest, that might be true. Because many games these days pretend to be RPGs when they clearly aren't.

But screw this, let's engage in more ad hominem, that's fun after all, isn't it?

I totally agree. Most the time people do not man all the turrets on the towers or they man them as a last ditch effort.. In fact, I've yet to see all guns on towers going off at the same time EXCEPT when it's a location with just two towers. I've often single-handedly held off two or three aircraft for enough time for reinforcements to get there or to keep the enemy occupied enough to stall their offensive. Could I hold out forever, no, but I wouldn't expect that. Most people will not stick around a base after taking it over. 99.9% of the attacking force leaves for the next objective and leaves the base they just took defenseless. That's my only gripe but hey, you spend the money, you want action and defensive action only occurs if they other factions want the base back. What I enjoy the most about this game is that you have to work as a team in order to take territory and hold it. If you are just interested in kills and working on your own that works too but it doesn't fit into the bigger strategic picture very well. I like the game and have a blast whether running with a squad or infiltrating on my own. If I took the time to be overly critical of all the little things which aren't realistic (like side-scaling cliffs) then I wouldn't enjoy it. Play, have fun and keep it in perspective!

It sounds like you are playing the wrong game here. I think you are looking for CoD or maybe Quake Live. That's fast paced, arena shooting. This game is more about strategy and combined arms, concepts that are not really usable as it seems now. No-one wants huge impenetrable fortresses but we want a bit of a challenge. It's not fun just running over outposts with a large amount of tanks. The good fights, and the fun fights are the ones that take some time and where you actually had to play as a team to push it.

When I signed up I envisioned huge battles with tanks, infantry and air playing together. What we got was large herds of tanks that drive around, shelling an outpost and then moving on. I usually log off when the resistance is gone and the ghost capping begins.

The ideal base design is really the amp station, except the amp station is missing an air dome. Much like the tank shield, the air dome should be there to prevent the air from bombing the place until the generators are down. So it would allow infantry fighting, which happens A LOT during amp station siege. And the thing is generators can be repaired so even if the generators are down and vehicles are in, it doesn't mean the defenders can't repair them and close the facility back up again.

I've had some of the best infantry combat at the amp stations, and I'm liking it more and more since people are FINALLY understanding the importance of generators. Back shortly after launch, most didn't know anything about the generators, so people would never attack it or defend it. Thus the facility kind of dropped rather fast. These days you can get some of the longest infantry combat at the amp stations because people actually do attack & defend generators. You get occasional tanks, sundies, and air that get into the mix but at least ground vehicles can get shut out with the shields up.

The amp station is designed like DAOC's fortresses, with an outer wall where both attackers and defenders can fight on, and an inner building where it's like a last stand. I would like to give the defenders a better last stand, such as making them spawn inside the building rather than outside. I've always though the defenders should spawn where the current SCU is located inside the amp station, that would make a lot more sense than having them spawn north outside where they eventually get spawn camped.

Tech plant on the other hand is just a mess. I loved the old tech plant, but the new one just makes it very hard for defenders to defend the place. Having to run out to defend the generators, with no shield protection on the outside like with amp station, it's just crazy all around.