The Lattice is a false Messiah. Think twice.

[UberBonisseur]

Originally posted here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...d-rant.105491/


"Where they make a Zerg, they call it Flow"

-Tacitus

Originally Posted by Higby

Greetings Auraxians -

Many of you have requested that we take a serious look at the shortfalls of our territory control, influence and base connectivity in order to ensure we're routing players into great fights and encouraging a better overall battle flow.

I won't lie; the "new" old upcoming Lattice system does not sound like good news.

Taking it the other way around:

Convince me this will improve the actual strategic depth we've been asking for.

Since that and that only would set PS2 apart from the hidden deathmatch that is BF3 conquest mode.

Where is my tactical approach in this Lattice prototype ?

What we're doing here, in a nutshell, is reducing the number of adjacent territories from an average of around 6 to an average of around 3. Smaller outposts will have 2-3 connections in general, larger "hub" regions will have 3-5. "But, why?" you may ask. We see several benefits to doing this which have also been brought up by many of your fellow players who are advocating for some of these changes:

This Lane / Corridor approach means that rather than 5 different targets you can attack next or fall back to when defeated, we've got a more limited set of locations to fall back to. This will hopefully encourage fights to progress more often from outpost to outpost instead of "dispersing" after a large battle as often happens today.
Defenders will have a better idea of what targets attackers will be gunning for next, that predictability should hopefully encourage more active defense of outposts and facilities, as well as allow for proactive deployment of combat engineering.
Tactical severing of supply lines and base benefits will be more feasible as well as more understandable.

Okay. He made it clear.

Let's go over, one by one, those points:



-Limited ammount of connections:

From 2-3 to 3-5 connected territories, minus one for your own in the back, which means potentially 1-2 to 2-4 different territories to attack. That's not much. But setting facilities as big lattice nodes make up for that, right ?

Well... That means the only way to have an actual tactical approach; your only instance of choice will happen once you capture THE BIGGEST AND MOST DEFENSIBLE BASES OF ALL.

You are offered tactical choice once... you capture the hardest bases. Which means, in the order of capture hierarchy, from hardest to easiest, you have:

Continent => Facility => Tower => Outpost

Shouldn't ALL of the strategic approach revolve around taking what's the hardest to take ?

By making the facilities the CENTRAL POINT of strategic choice, you are essentially removing it. Worse, it could take the slippery slope of snowballing for who owns facilities. Anyway...



-Better predictability

Well that's pretty obvious. However, you're entirely forgetting what Amerish has accomplished: funneling attackers.

The TERRAIN does the job. While you still can Gal-drop all over the map, which is usually how my pals plan their territory conquest, the bulk of the ground force goes from base to base in a very specific fashion.

It's easily predictable for whoever can open his map and look where the road is leading.

Indar ? A barren desert for the most part. It's not nearly as bad on Esamir due to the limited number of bases.

-Cutting off supply lines

How do we do it ? Sure, it's easier, but... what's the plan ?

According to reddit, no clue:

Higby:

Well we'd like them to be benefits that greatly help defenders in territories. MBT benefit is ok, but the others suck in that regard. example ideas would be to make biolabs reduce hardspawner timers by 5 seconds which could stack. If you had 2 biolabs connected to a territory you were defending the hard spawns would have very short respawns, providing a spawn advantage for defenders and making severing the benefit actually worth thinking about. an idea for the amp station is tying it to a potential "anti-deployment" zone around the outpost / facility. if you had no connected amp stations it would be a small radius around the facility that enemy sunderers could not deploy - with an amp station that radius gets pushed out 100m or so, providing a different kind of spawn advantage.

Those are just examples of ideas we're kicking around, but hopefully you get the theme.

I can see why we have a problem with the current system:

It's BINARY while the adjacency can include a huge ammount of surrounding territories. If only one hex is in contact, the whole continent is linked. If the SCU goes down, the base is lost, etc...

You can fix that; INFLUENCE, a system that already exists, can fix that. Instead of having a flat +10 hp regen/sec with the biolab benefit, how about basing it on Influence ? The more you have, the stronger it is....

Which leads to:

Standardizing capture times - influence and # of players on the control point will no longer cause the capture time to fluxuate so defenders can have a better timebox to gather reinforcements or set up their next line of defense.
Making facilities which are under capture contention no longer provide adjacency for capturing other territories. If you are playing TR and own Xenotech Labs but it is being captured by the NC, you will not be able to use it's connection to to Crossroads to begin capturing Crossroads until you've secured Xenotech.

-Standardizing capture times (aka goodbye influence)

Remember, Influence ?
The more surrounding territories you have, the faster the base is captured ?



Turns out it is not exploited at all

Back in beta, Facilities had multiple control points, some of them located OUTSIDE the facility.

Unfortunately, those where placed in the satellites, far away from the actual base which left attackers no choice.

It was an interesting concept. By controlling a great majority of surrounding territories, you could slowly but steadily capture the sieged base. You would lock defenders in until the capture process ended, but you also had to hold those adjacent territories for this plan to work.

Now that Facilities have either a single control point or all of their control points inside (except maybe Saurva on Indar), you can't use this system anymore. It still works on most Tower outposts, but not on the biggest bases of the game.
It's a great loss for the strategic aspect

Are with just forgetting that BETA had more strategy than the current game ?

By also applying this "capture block" adjacency thing, you also kill off preemptive capture. That's a big thing I like(d) with the BETA; if one of your bases was under capture, but had 0% influence, the capture would come to a dead stop, unlike now. But then again, it was not BINARY. Influence mattered and it was a slow and strategic process of gradually slowing down the enemy capture.

And you might argue:

"But, the current flow of battle is awful, you idiot !"

Yes it is. In which forms ? Ghost capping ? Zerging at the Crown ?

Then how about we adress those problems first ?

That thing right here, is our deployment menu



Notice anything ?

There are at least 5 of our territories under attack/capture.

NONE OF THEM ARE LISTED IN THE "REINFORCEMENTS NEEDED" SECTION.

How could you possibly defend your faction from ghost capping when no quick deployment options, visibility about those areas, or even XP incentives prompts you to go and stop those caps ?

Why can a territory cap itself when no one is on the point ?
Why can a single person turn a control point ?
Why does that control point remain when no one stands next to it ?
Why can you still cap a territory with 0% Influence ?

Ghost capping CAN be adressed, without fostering everyone into a lattice.
But you have not even tried to do so.


And The Crown ? Or any other "impossible" place ?



That's it. This is all it takes to fix the Crown. No more no less.

It's about stepping out from the BINARY side of base capture/logistics and start using a mechanic that has proven working in BETA.


Back to the main point:

Convince me this will improve the actual strategic depth we've been asking for.


Yes, this is a rant.

Because you bring the Lattice back doesn't mean it will be properly implemented. Not without a complete overhaul of anything else and a change of game mechanics.

Any improvement can be seen as the "Messiah update", because such an absurd ammount of awful design choices was made so far. You shot yourself in the foot multiple times, dragging down gameplay along the way, and now, it's like you're descending from heaven with the cure.

But it does not justify another phase of Beta, nor it should make the old one null and void.

In other words:

Think twice before you support this change.


Also a good read:
A take on fixing the Flow in one big picture