[Guide] Why Nay-Sayers to the Prototype Hex System are Wrong

It's not as extreme as the lattice. But its more than just a change in how information is displayed. The actual number of hex connections is being greatly reduced. Meaning you have to worry about defending less areas in order to keep your front line from being back hacked. IMO this is for the best though it risks creating more stalemate areas like the Crown. But that can probably be adjusted with changes to map design as we go forward.

In such a system, stalemates can and will be broken utterly by adept strategists who can recognize a weak point in the enemy's lines and surge through it with a superior force quickly and effectively. Do it fast enough, and you will divide their lines, eventually even surrounding them. This is especially true if some sort of supply lines are established. Sure The Crown may be as defensible as they come, but even the greatest fortress can be starved into submission if you cut-off their supplies. In ancient times one was literally cutting-off the enemy's food (Caeser once built a double wall around a Gaul settlement for his army, starving them into submission).

In modern warfare, it's more about removing their ability to make war. If the enemy cannot replenish their ammo and personnel lost in battle (in PS2, this is analogous to vehicles and infantry resources), then eventually, through sheer attrition, they will no longer be able to make war against you and you can force a surrender (in PS2, the players will eventually pick-up and leave, having been starved of resources for too long).

All-in-all, possibly the best improvement we could hope for. As an avid strategy gamer, I'm looking forward to this (and would in fact toss more money at them if they did more to inform us about the changes they want to make, and when).

Better yet, with such a system, one needn't even fear NC maxes all the time. They can keep their insta-gib uber powers at close range for all I care; if the NC hole-up in a bio lab, the option will be open to simply not engage them at all. Take a different route, cut them off, and then through attrition remove their ability to spawn the darn things. In fact, by giving us such a chance to force our opponents into fighting on our own terms, OP weapons and units in the game could be made entirely acceptable, if they are countered with superior strategy. What a thought. O.O (Kinda like how some forces today are smart enough to force the vastly better-equipped militaries of the USSR/Russia and USA to fight in areas where much of their superior weapons and training are for naught.)

I seriously want to just throw money at these improvements. I came to PS2 for the strategy I remembered from the original (eventhough I never actually played it...I only heard the stories ). What I got was a very large map with lots of players in what feels more-or-less like a typical shooter. This one feature could give PS2 back the thing that makes it really stand-out from every FPS out there.

A big part of the problem is however how little information the current map provides at a glance and how hard to use the few communication channels build into the game are. I don't see anything which could help with the problem in the screen shot; it utterly lacks known enemy and friendly troop markers, objective markers set by the players, capture status of control points and how far into the capture process a base is and so on.

Totally different problems.

It's like complaining your cough medicine doesn't cure your headache.

Cyridius is quite right.

To be fair though, the devs are well aware of these issues and do want to fix them. The player-driven mission system should be a pretty big stepping stone in the right direction. I'm confused by what you mean with "known enemy and friendly troop markers" though. If you want the continent map to be able to display the current exact location of all vehicles and infantry like the minimap does...that's asking a hell of a lot; it's probably not even technically feasible. The current system seems to have the system generalize position data into far more easy-to-convey chunks (there are this many players in this hex), so that far less data needs to be exchanged between client and server to give us our current coloured blips on the continent map.

And therein is the biggest flaw. We're getting Rush Lanes, but no supply lines or any other new system that could be used to starve out an enemy. We haven't even gotten a good promise about such a system (resource revamp is on roadmap for May, but what it actually ends up being is not known).

At the moment we do see bases encircled (mainly biolabs and the crown, other bases fall too quickly) quite a bit, and with enough defenders they can hold out for hours. If it's still possible to encircle bases with Rush Lanes, that won't change.

I've mentioned it before, but keeping the hex system for map conquest and adding another layer on top, the supply/resource lattice, would be miles better than current system or Rush Lanes alone. You'd be able to attack enemy territory more freely, but holding on to such conquests would be hard.if you had limited spawns, couldn't pull vehicles, or whatever is deemed the best limitation.

WAIT!

or the rare Aboooba Ga'noona tribe from a small island off Peru that would call it a "k'sath m'oroba"

I have practically the same experience as you. All my friends have pretty much had the glory hours of any new game and now they see it for what it is, meaningless. I logged in last night, was bored after 10 minutes so logged off - whatever excitement I had for the game was squashed after GU2 came out but that might have been a coincidence. I don't know why I don't like this game very much now, but the mindless "Go here and wait for a bar to increase or decrease whilst killing people" has just got way too thin - there's literally no point to it - another way to visualise this game is to imagine an infinite number of bases in front of you, and an infinite number behind you and you just keep fighting....

So Cyridius you have a response to my last post quoting you?

What also is needed is with in the orders the continent the person is on.

Yes there needs to be a better command structure, maybe they need to bring back the old CR system tied to the certing into the command tree. When a player certs in the then start to earn command xp, with each level they get in CR it then opens more possibilities and command abilities. This will mean people at the lowest level get access to continent chat and at the highest level of command chat they can chat globally to all other commanders at that level. Though I do reckon that each level should be certed into.

This is getting better and better.
"We can't do anything! We rush down lanes! Our super-duper-strategies won't work anymore!"
All we've seen so far is a small area of the canyon-warpgate on Indar. Yet there's already many connections between the much-feared "rush lanes". What I'm seeing is that at every small base not directly connected to the warpgate, you have a choice of two adjacent bases to attack next. How many are there right now, 3?
I'm getting the impression from a lot of you skeptics right here that you fear your "advanced strategies" won't work anymore. I've seen these advanced strategies. It's when the warpgate suddenly fills with galaxies waiting for squads to hop in. The next step is usually to drop each squad directly onto point A of some useless base that will be capped within 2 minutes, against no resistance. The big, messy fight with lots of resistance that's fun for a lot of people is circumvented completely and subsequently destroyed. Thank you for that.
Even if it says "war" of the tin, this is still a game and people are supposed to have fun. Right now there's some strategies that let a few people ruin the fun for a lot of people. My idea of fun is not to board a plane, hop out, stand around a bit and fly off to the next target. It gets old pretty quickly. Not that e.g. large-scale galaxy drops won't work anymore. But I guess you'll have to put some more work into it to actually make a difference. And that gives defenders some time to react.

I guess I'm more tolerant to meaninglessness then I think territory control and resource gain is enough of a motivation for now. Our problem is that defense doesn't work at all. We're always overrun by forces marginally larger than ours, even though we should be at an advantage, having laid out tons of tank mines and manning turrets. Of course the main force completely ignored us once their tanks got shot at from AV turrets and went around to cap some empty bases -.-

And People who think all these quotes are really relevant best reflect on what they are saying.

Until there is a proper command structure there is only Unit, Platoon and outfit level stratergy. There needs to be implemented a better command organization that works on the veterancy of the leaders and tiered as such.

True, though there hasn't been any statement saying directly that "no, supply lines will not happen", correct? Indeed, in the Community Design Meeting last month, Higby said quite plainly that adding attrition to the game is something of a no-brainer, especially once they have it at a place where defenders can actually defend a location for a reasonable length of time, such that the attackers need something to tilt the scales in their favour (starving the defenders out). I think it's fair to say that the ultimate goal is to give us a far slower pace to the movement of front lines over the rush back-and-forth across the maps we get now, and this new hex system is a stepping-stone toward it. It may or may not simultaneously include Nobel's idea of supply lines (Higby also said plainly that restricting resources at that level for players is something that they can do quite readily).

The larger task of taking a hard look at all of this and revamping it was put back to May, yes, but I think that tweeted pic, if anything, shows that they are taking the simpler ideas seriously that were geared toward easy implementation for the short term. A compression bandage before the stitches in May, as it were.

+1 to this.

We don't actually have any information sans the picture and the magical word 'lattice'.

Seems like someone threw some sh*t in the fan.

The problem I always had with a hex system was how you could assault a base that you'd have to fly over a mountain, or go through a third hex, to get to, just because of the geography of the area. The neutral hexes are a great idea i was toying with in beta, but they decided to take it further than I ever thought and it looks like it's a way better idea/setup. I'm excited.

Ahhhhh, I see what you mean now. An indication of troop makeup, but just numbers. So you'd be able to see about how much infantry, armour, and air was in an area at any given time. That would be Awesomesauce, and is quite probably feasible with minimal additional overhead on the CPU. Neat.

Yeah. If they added tags of outfits when there are squads in the area consisting mostly of their members, it would be even better. It wouldn't be just "Oh, two infantry and one armour squad, whatever", it would be "FFS, [CONZ] and [WASP] squads in the area, get reinforcements ASAP or we're done for!"

Vote changes to a thumbs up after reading this.

really good post, exactly how I see the new system. So much doom & gloom from the same people everytime the new hex-system is brought up. We need to test it first to see how it plays really, maybe it's good...maybe its bad. Can't say without trying.