Confirmed: 9 Sanctuaries at launch.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Khellendros

The thing is, we didn't have footholds in PS1, so there was no comparable situation.

In PS1, you didn't really push an empire back to the WG, rather you eliminated their spawns at the last base, then they were largely gone. In order to come back, that empire then has to either go back to sanc or to their linked cont to pull vehs. The time and effort cost of doing that is much higher than for a foothold where the spawns, equipment and vehicle terminals are all right there and so unlike in PS1, there will be a constant stream of reinforcements from the foothold. For PS1 WGs, it was more like a trickle due to the aforementioned time/effort cost.

We had Footholds in PS1 - broadcast warpgates which were connected to sanctuaries. The only thing different is the loading screen. That loading screen is quite significant though, as you point out, it makes it much easier to return to the fight and bring armor / aircraft. In many cases in PS1 the only reason an army was defeated was because they were reduced to a footzerg and were getting farmed by vehicles. That led to them giving up and leaving.

It's the "giving up and leaving" part that is shitty that they are fixing. You don't want people to give up and leave. That leads to downtime, and parts of the world that are effectively cut off from approximately a third of the population. It leads to stagnation and the requirement to have a "raid" formed up to break into a continent to try to get a real foothold in order to effectively wage battle. That part is being removed in PS2 with the footholds.

The consequence is never truly being able to kick an empire out of the continent. Why is that a bad thing? The only reason I have is that it removes the sense of accomplishment of "victory" on that continent. But in reality, victory was had long before they were physically removed when their back was broken and they started losing territory. Thus there are other ways to grant the feeling of "Victory" without locking the continent and kicking people out.

This is a GOOD change to Planetside. I didn't believe it at first myself but when I took the time to really think about what was being lost I realized what footholds actually give back to Planetside.

1) More battle options - that's right, everyone has more battle options with footholds.

2) Less attacker handicapping - in PS1 Attacking a continent was severely against the attacker due to not having a resupply base. In PS2 attacking is more fairly balanced against defending and so there will be more action and movement.

3) Less downtime. That last part of a continent cleanup was terrible. There were often cases where an empire would give up because they knew they were in an unwinnable situation and just leave. Then you sit around waiting for the continent to be cleaned up.

4) Less wind-up time. The other side of the downtime is the wind-up time before you can begin a new offensive and competitively wage war in PS2 - you had to crack into a continent. Usually that required CR5s and outfits to coordinate and hit a specific location, ideally with as much secrecy as possible. Unfortunately there wasn't much to keep secret because they generally only had 2-3 viable targets. Either the defenders were there waiting for them and you had a failed assault, or you gobbled up huge amounts of land with little to know opposition. More boredom.

In all the downtime + wind-up time could easily span an hour or more of not-much-going-on.

Less wasted time, more options, more action, more progress. That's what footholds bring to the table.

They do not in any way create a 3-way stalemate - that is just nonsense. What they do is make it a lot harder to completely remove an enemy from a continent. And the bottom line with that is that its bad for the game, thus the existence of the footholds.

If you want victory conditions, that's a great discussion on how those can be added in without breaking the foothold model. Lots of ideas have been proposed about that, many of which are perfectly viable without continent locks and blocking off huge chunks of territory.