Question from Malorn: Continental Lattice Mechanics

[GeoGnome]

Quote from Malorn from the main forums, in regards to how you would capture continents in the upcoming continental lattice.

You may notice every warpgate on latticed continents has 3 adjacent outposts. This was done as a possible method of warpgate capture in the future. The central idea being you have to hold all three of the adjacent territories to neutralize the gate (instead of the tower), which allows passage. If you do the same thing on the other side the gates become footholds until another empire neutralizes either end of the gate. The current lattice layout supports this design with no changes if we go that direction, but I can't say for sure at this time how it will turn out.

One of the challenges is the awkwardness of moving through gates to attack objectives on the other side. It has an awkward flow, a lot like a bio lab fight where the enemies are coming from one direction but in order to stop them you have to go to another direction (or in this case, another continent). But then again it's similar to how PS1 did warpgates and it worked out OK.

To help foster the conversation a bit, here's a few things to consider in warpgate conquest mechanics.

1. Downtime. If an empire abandons a continent what to do with the downtime of gobbling up undefended territories? It was a boring part of PS1.
2. Warpgate camping. If the opposite happens and two empires fight hard to control a gate, what does that fight look like?
3. Non-static gate assignments. How would you like to see warpgate positions handled? Do you want to fight for them, or do you want assigned gates that rotate on a schedule?
4. Empire compression. What happens if an empire gets reduced to 1 or 2 continents? Those players have to go somewhere. Folks on Connery have been seeing the limits reached, and that's with 3 continents!

These are the sort of things we think a lot about when discussing warpgate capture and continental conquest. Loving this discussion, please weigh in on the sort of things you'd like to see.

[KarrdeBRBU]

He's right, that's kinda a tough problem to solve without adding something like control stations or having to go back to the other cont and retaking the bases. I think we can conceptualize it like this. For the purpose of warping and warpgate control the 3 bases on either side act as points A, B, C, D, E, and F in a base, contributing to the overall capture. If you get 3 on one side it will eventually neutralize the gate. This will allow bidirectional travel for both empires on the gate. The attacking empire can use their side's terms, and the defenders can use theirs. However the WG just became a weapons/damage allowed zone on both sides.

The goal would then be to push the enemy zerg out of their own gate and into their 3 sub facilities. As you capture them, the gate capture speed increases until it is "locked" to the attacking empire. If at any point the gate is captured before all 3 bases are, the remaining bases flip in the attacking empire's favor in order to give them a fair foothold. Once locked the empire specific shield goes up and the zone returns to weapons safe.

[ringring]

Q1. Downtime. If an empire abandons a continent what to do with the downtime of gobbling up undefended territories? It was a boring part of PS1.
Q2. Warpgate camping. If the opposite happens and two empires fight hard to control a gate, what does that fight look like?
Q3. Non-static gate assignments. How would you like to see warpgate positions handled? Do you want to fight for them, or do you want assigned gates that rotate on a schedule?
Q4. Empire compression. What happens if an empire gets reduced to 1 or 2 continents? Those players have to go somewhere. Folks on Connery have been seeing the limits reached, and that's with 3 continents!

A1. There's no answer except perhaps to reduce the cap timers. However, if the enemy leave I suspect there will be no shortage of people willing to go around ghost capping for the xp.

A2. Hmm. Yes, as long as there are always two options it should be fine. This means the lattice proposed will not work as it only has one home warpgate (there is a thread on forumside that proposes a solution but requires more continents and a sanctuary iirc).

A3. Either for me. rotating warpgates aren't as important with an global lattice as they are now because you with the lattice you will see the figth from different persepctives naturally.

A4. You need sanctuaries there's no doubt and at least two options of attack out of it. I'm sure sanctuaries aren't difficult to create, they can be quite plain, but I think the issue lies with Higby he seems dead set against them although we've been asking for them for *years* (seems like).

The pic below is stolen from this thread https://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...apture.169521/

[GeoGnome]

Why do people persistantly ask for sanctuaries, when we already has something that performs the function that they are trying to cram sanctuaries into? I mean what people keep pitching (This happened on the main forum thread too) was that the sanctuaries would be people storage.

... We already have people storage with the VR Room. So doubling the people storage, solves... pretty much nothing. It just means twice as many people can stand around staring at each other.

[Chewy]

"A4. You need sanctuaries there's no doubt and at least two options of attack out of it. I'm sure sanctuaries aren't difficult to create, they can be quite plain, but I think the issue lies with Higby he seems dead set against them although we've been asking for them for *years* (seems like)."

I like this for finding a place for players that are being over run and are loosing WGs.

But I think it needs another bit from PS1. The HART and being able to drop on maps that you don't have a WG on. The HART maybe is able to drop you ONLY on maps where you don't have a WG.

Just getting to a map is one thing. You still need a link to cap bases. PS1 did this from finding a power drained base that turned neutral and take it over. It would give reasons to have an ANT and to have chances at smaller teams doing some nasty back stabbing by dropping unknown at an empty base, hacking terminals, and pulling some armor to have a bit of fun.

[bites]

Originally Posted by GeoGnome

Why do people persistantly ask for sanctuaries, when we already has something that performs the function that they are trying to cram sanctuaries into? I mean what people keep pitching (This happened on the main forum thread too) was that the sanctuaries would be people storage.

... We already have people storage with the VR Room. So doubling the people storage, solves... pretty much nothing. It just means twice as many people can stand around staring at each other.

Being dropped into VR however for a noobie isn't very conducive to a good first experience .... if you had not played the game before (also assuming that you probably not payed attention to the VR training thingy like most joe bloggs "Click to Accept" people), the VR would be a terrible place to start.

[Obstruction]

VR would be a terrible place to start.

why? i don't see your point at all.

half the new spawns i see pull tanks at the warpgate and spend an hour running over friendly ESFs that landed to repair.

the other half get greased on the battlefield while staring at their keybindings.

[GeoGnome]

Originally Posted by bites

Being dropped into VR however for a noobie isn't very conducive to a good first experience .... if you had not played the game before (also assuming that you probably not payed attention to the VR training thingy like most joe bloggs "Click to Accept" people), the VR would be a terrible place to start.

Yeah that is my point. People are going to start out here, and if you make it so that excess people are dumped not only in the VR, but in the Sanctuary (Which would effectively be VR 2: Electric Boogaloo). People who are being shuffled off to someplace because they can't fit into the main fight, need to be given something to do.


This is my suggestion for all of this:

Question 1: Downtime. If an empire abandons a continent what to do with the downtime of gobbling up undefended territories? It was a boring part of PS1.
In regards to downtime, I honestly think you Have to have a few minutes downtime on both sides. This is my way of thinking: So the bases around the warpgate take a few minutes to flip, but once they flip, the defenders loose that warpgate as a spawn point. They aren't immediately pushed off the continent, but they will have no spawn (Unless you go with something I suggest down on Question 4, faction Fortresses, but more on that in Section 4). Now, the attackers will have to bring the Macguffin (LLU or what have you) Up to the warpgate to put it into their network. The defenders who were left behind can thwart this if they want. Now, the LLU is brought to the warpgate, and takes a few moments to activate when it gets there. Once it activates, on the next continent, the attackers gain not only the warpgate, but the 3 territories adjacent to it, and turns the next row of 3 bases up the line neutral. This means, that the defenders will now need to flip 3 or more bases, before gaining access to the 3 bases that line the warpgate. This means, that it will give the attackers time to make the continent transition and get lined up. In terms of times, I would say that the bases right around the warpgate should require 10 minutes to cap, and the LLU or whatever should take 5 minutes to activate. So you are dealing with at least 15 minutes on the cap, 5 of which is mostly just down time.

Another option, would be to allow attackers to transition while the LLU is setting up, so you give them an extra 5 minutes to get established. That is to say that once the 3 bases were captured and the attackers gained the warpgate, they could transition while the Macguffin was charging up to give them the 3 bases around the warpgate and neutralize the three bases beyond that. That would give those people who transitioned quick additional time to get ready. Either way you are looking at 5-15 minutes there that people can get ready and get moving.

Question 2: Warpgate camping. If the opposite happens and two empires fight hard to control a gate, what does that fight look like?
Well the defenders would have an advantage, because they could move between all three bases freely, while the attackers potentially could have a weaker front. This would mostly be a groundwar I'd imagine, because there is so much AA around the Warpgate that Air would be kind of stuck.

Question 3: Non-static gate assignments. How would you like to see warpgate positions handled? Do you want to fight for them, or do you want assigned gates that rotate on a schedule?
I want to fight for gates. I think it would be challenging to find people who Didn't want to fight for gates.

Question 4: Empire compression. What happens if an empire gets reduced to 1 or 2 continents? Those players have to go somewhere. Folks on Connery have been seeing the limits reached, and that's with 3 continents!
My kneejerk answer is, make more servers. To be frank, I really see the max pop for a server being somewhere around the point where you can fill 1-2 continent. If you are filling 3 continents with people, you have way too many people to compress. So with Connery bumping up against filling all 3 continents, open another server and offer free transfers to that server for 2 weeks. Not only do you spread that pop out somewhat, but you also make it so that you have Another server you could potentially fill.

That doesn't really solve the problem though.

If you really want to keep combat going (Which is the point of Question 1, and seems to be the goal of PS2's development as far as I can see), you could make it so that you never technically 100% boot people off a continent. What if there was a "Home bases" for each faction on each continent. Looking up to Degen's awesome suggestion, he mentions having the "Home base" on the home continents. What if there was 3 of those on each continent, one tied to each faction? "Locking" a continent has always been something that people expect to be a means of population control, which is to say that on smaller servers it would mean pushing the fight over continents, so that you didn't perpetuate indarside. Well, what if you had a base people could go to on the continents, that wasn't attached to the lattice, but could serve as a home base with limited resource spawning capabilities. You could limit the way of getting there if you had no warpgate, to requiring that you transport there from the Home base (So home bases could transport people to any of these) but if you did not have a warpgate you couldn't spawn there without going back to the home base on your mother continent. This could also serve as a staging area when people were about to transition to take a warpgate on another continent, thereby allowing people to go to the home base, warp to the other faction fortress on that continent, and get tooled up (The Wire is a great show) to go help the guys pushing through the warpgate. I don't know if I am describing this well, so I will try to put together a visual aide for it tonight.

Further, if you -really- want to give someone in that fortress something to do, as opposed to just making it people storage, you could put something in place as part of the resource system, where it is a good way to boost your faction's resources by running resource loads on that enemy continent back to your faction's fortress. This way you never really take combat off any one continent, it just becomes a different type of combat, something more about skirmishing than about slugging it out with platoons of people. So, if I am TR and Esamir is otherwise locked, and I spawn at my TR fortress on Esamir, I can go out with an ant and collect resources I then bring back to the TR fortress, which are transported back to the TR home base and diffuse out into the rest of the TR in the form of Extra resources (Faster regen or just MORE resources given). Or you could make Fortresses an incentive, so that resources are Horded there, and once your faction retakes a hold on that continent, they bolster the whole faction's resource haul for a time. So now you have people storage, you have fighting that can happen Beyond the lattice (Which gives smaller groups something to do), and you never really let up on the throttle. It'd be in the interest of the faction who is getting their home continent raided to stop it, because you could let people drain resources out of existing bases, so that if and when the home continent is reentered, it could be in a state where most of the bases are drained (Thereby making their capture easier for attackers, and introducing some kind of spec ops element), so people will be fighting over the secured continents in smaller engagements, over a wider and more open area.

Something else here, is that with putting a Home base or fortress for each faction, on each continent, you could Rotate the whole continental lattice, so that one week, Hossin is the main base of the TR, and the next week it is the contested continent. The difference between it acting as the "Faction's HQ" one week, and acting as a disconnected "Faction Fortress" the next, could be a lattice link.

And hell, make these Faction fortresses have a faction specific look. You could add a great deal of identity to these bases that way, and people are Always looking for something that is Empire specific. An Empire specific base would be truly amazing.

I will be honest, I see the whole problem of empire compression becoming less of a problem as more continents are added, when we get another 2 or 3 continents, you could institute proper locking, so that people would well and truly LOCK a continent, not allowing people to spawn at their faction's fortress on an otherwise enemy continent.

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by GeoGnome

Why do people persistantly ask for sanctuaries, when we already has something that performs the function that they are trying to cram sanctuaries into? I mean what people keep pitching (This happened on the main forum thread too) was that the sanctuaries would be people storage.

... We already have people storage with the VR Room. So doubling the people storage, solves... pretty much nothing. It just means twice as many people can stand around staring at each other.

I can't think of a faster way to get someone to stop playing than housing excess population in the VR. Even if you called the VR a sanctuary and moved on, anyone who has to sit there for any length of time to wait on a queue will flip their shit regardless of what you call it.

Sanctuaries also existed to give people a chance to regroup (As well as providing links to home conts via the broadcast wg's). I should never have to tell a platoon 'Fall back to the VR and pull armor for a counter assault!'

Call 'em what you want but if you're stuck there for more than a few minutes however, it doesn't matter what you call it. It'll boring and everyone will hate it (and continental lattice).

In the end, storage is storage as long as it's temporary and the home continent/sanctuary/VR/Valhalla gives a faction room to regroup and push out then you should see satisfied players.

What if there was 3 of those on each continent, one tied to each faction? "Locking" a continent has always been something that people expect to be a means of population control, which is to say that on smaller servers it would mean pushing the fight over continents, so that you didn't perpetuate indarside. Well, what if you had a base people could go to on the continents, that wasn't attached to the lattice, but could serve as a home base with limited resource spawning capabilities.

So...same thing as what we have now except remove the lattice link to the WG itself? I'm not sure if that's what your talking about. I should mention that, to me, cont locking is more about adding permanence and a sense of satisfaction (that PS2 is currently lacking) than population control. Population control shouldn't be a major issue until we have more continents.

[Dougnifico]

I really don't understand the logistical trouble behind adding sanctuaries. They don't have to be super pretty. They don't have to be conductive to gameplay. You could just have some rolling hills with a random texture and lego-in some of the already made buildings and a pair of warpgates (or even just terminals) and BAM! Working sanctuaries.

For even less effort, make a large part a giant, flat dirt or grass field for tanks and crap to assemble on. Sanctuaries are easy. lol

Bonus easy points for SOE: Just ask a member or two from the community to build it for you. Just give them to tools. Now its done for free!

[typhaon]

There are going to need to be tighter overall population controls on the servers.

At the very least, measures to prevent 4th factioning (faction switch timer like in PS1) will have to go in.

If SOE does not do this - the overall game will take the form of your basic "territory control" alert.... and we all know how those go when the population of one empire gets to about 40%.

[SgtMAD]

I find this all pretty funny due to the fact that when I brought up all these issues before Beta even started,
ppl on this forum told me that it would never happen, that you couldn't lock up continents in PS2,that there was no way an empire could take out the other two.

this is all pointless if SOE doesn't add a couple more continents and I don't think we are going to see Hossin any time soon.

SOE let the bean counters decide that PS2 was ready for release instead of listening to the beta playerbase,which was telling them that the game needed more time in beta,that it wasn't ready.

and if SOE is serious about warp gate defense and being able to push out successfully,they need to re-site all the towers around the gates so they can actually be used effectively,
replace the gun turrets that have been stripped in the last two patches and quit mounting AA turrets on the back side of the towers,I mean who in the hell looked at that and thought it was alright?

[Edfishy]

GeoNome is spot on with 2, 3, and 4 (#1. I think might be a tad complex and requires an LLU).

1. I'd just suggest an empty continent will have faster cap times and have the lattice automatically hack enemy bases for your empire.

2. As GeoNome suggests, enemies camping your warpgate will (with the resource revamp) be too far away from their own warpgate to collect resources fast enough to compete.

3. Warpgate rotations would be fine.

4. As GeoNome suggests, providing protected empire Fortresses on other continents that you could stage an attack from but not actually capture territory would suffice. Players would now have missions to siphon resources from back territory or try and shut down ANTs from powering the main offensive that's closing their empire off. More continents eventually solves the problem altogether since there's plenty of room for everyone.

[libbmaster]

Originally Posted by GeoGnome

Why do people persistantly ask for sanctuaries, when we already has something that performs the function that they are trying to cram sanctuaries into? I mean what people keep pitching (This happened on the main forum thread too) was that the sanctuaries would be people storage.

... We already have people storage with the VR Room. So doubling the people storage, solves... pretty much nothing. It just means twice as many people can stand around staring at each other.

No, the point is to give outfits a place to regroup and pull vehicles before shipping out to contents.

If MBTs and heavy vehicles were only available at sanctuaries and Tech plants, we would have much less spam and thus grounds to buff said vehicles.

[Calista]

Originally Posted by libbmaster

No, the point is to give outfits a place to regroup and pull vehicles before shipping out to contents.

If MBTs and heavy vehicles were only available at sanctuaries and Tech plants, we would have much less spam and thus grounds to buff said vehicles.

Someone asked Matt in the last CC about warpgates actually warping vehicles etc and he said it was not planned anytime soon. It kinda sounded like to me that even after continent linking you would have to use that terminal to spawn over to a new cont.