Sunderer AMS made defense more pointless

[Buggsy]

Why am I the only one that even thinks of using an AMS for defense?

There are a few bases out there where you could deploy an AMS 200-300 meters away behind a rocky hill or something, out of sight of the approaching zerg, out of sight of the base battle. They are actually very useful. It would be more useful for defense if the AMS had a cloak.

A cloaked AMS is more a benefit to defenders than attackers. Even in PS1 everyone knwe where the closest attacker AMS is coming from, but somehow the cloaked AMS on defense confuses people and are less likely to be found.

[Rothnang]

People do that all the time, but it goes right back to the "If you have to defend a base from the outside in there is no difference to just capturing it back later" thing.

[Figment]

We have to place AMSes well outside the base to defend it, which is really quaint. The base perimeter is not good for defense if it doesn't have lots of high ground and even then it is designed such that any solid point is useless soon after the enemies arrive. I you can't escape the spawnroom to flank and fight, the fight is over. Hence yeah you need other spawnpoints and Malorn said that is why they made the Sundy available everywhere. And considering it is in many locations easy to create tank zergs to hit outposts with while the local defender ran out of vehicles, it is not a strange thing to compensate with.

I would expect buggies to be added to outposts (once they are in) for similar reasons. Outposts as is aren't particularly suited for footzergs like in PS1. The main reason is the amount of hardware you will face. If it is 30 vs 30, one side can pull tanks while the other cannot. In PS2 this means 30 tanks and a few Sunderers vs infantry and Sunderers. There is no question who wins prior to that battle starting...

Now if that was 25% tanks as not all players could afford it or would have to crew up, you would have around 6-8 tanks to deal with, which is far more manageable. If most of those are in multicrew vehicles, that may even be all. Then you don't need as many HA either and if you got minefields it would get even more interesting to see who would win. Though I must say that I would loosen gun constraints per class if there were double cert system as proposed earlier. All in all, doing everything makes balancing a mess, IMO.

[Piper]

Originally Posted by Buggsy

Why am I the only one that even thinks of using an AMS for defense?

You're not. Any old AMS hauler from Ps1 has been doing this in 2 as well. A "back up" AMS was part and parcel of any base defense in 1.

Of course it helped they could cloak.

[Piper]

Originally Posted by Crator

^ This. The issue is how can you do that in PS2.

Won't happen now, if it was going to happen it would have to have occurred in beta. There is zero way they will ever fiddle with restricting access to classes/vehicles after launch, too much toys from prams will occur from most of the games populace. They'll be basically too damn afraid to limit folks....even if it might well make for a better game.

But here is one way they could have done it. Italic C@P from beta forums below. All moot, mores the pity. The game will forever be predicated on everyone pulling the right tool for the right job at the right time, and we'll have to put up with the gameplay it produces. That there are spams of X whenever you expect to see X is still down to being identical within a 20% margin by design.


It's just a rehash of my Meta-Certs idea. Which essentially is just a port in of Ps1's cert system layered on top of the current one.

--Very first thing to say is that the current cert system would continue unchanged, all the endless progression and minor tweeks and sidegrading stuff would carry on and would be a separate thing from the following.
-- The below is just another layer of character progression and restriction that would fit over the top of it, hence meta.
--Divorce the current Battle Ranks from the certs we currently use. The later would continue to carry on as normal, Xp points earning them and folks spending them how they want in the current layout.
--Battle Ranks would go from 1-20 and would also increase by earning Xp in game, but at an independent rate from the current cert system.
--BR would be on a progression curve and start off quickly and the slow down at higher ranks.
--Each BR would award one Meta-Cert. Characters would start out with 10 Meta-Certs, for a total of 30 which would be a hard cap for the entire life-span of the game.
--Meta Cert points would be spent on giving access to the classes and the vehicle types, no points spent on them, no access to them.
--The total required to get all the classes and vehicles would be higher than the 30 points any given character could have, requiring people to make choices about what they would like to meta-cert.
--A respec would be available for meta-certs. It would start out, at low BR, being available very very often and as people advance in BR it would slow down, as in theory people become aware of what they would like to do more than less.
--The trick is assigning costings to the classes and the vehicles, the below are some for-instances.

Each class=7 or 8.
Flash=1.
Sunderer=2 or 3. Or 2 for the basic model and +1 for each variant you want to add in.
ESF=2 or 3.
Lib'= 3 or 4.
Gal=2 or 3.
MBT= 3 or 4.
Lightning= 2 or 3.
Empire specific Buggy=2 or 3. (when we get them).

The trouble is, that there really aren't that many things to turn into Meta-Certs, in the way Ps1 had a lot of things that went into their basic cert system. As such getting the numbers right, and the above do have problems, is a right PITA. However I believe the principal is sound.

[snaffe]

I'd love a lightning with dual 50 cal. Woooop. Hit and run.

[ringring]

While I don't agree with the op I think the way to get around this whole issue of sundy/tank spam is perfectly obvious and we all know what it is.

It's the elephant in the room.

Borrow from ps1 *recoils in shock* .... "you can't say that"!

Make it so that you can either cert tanks or sundy's with the proviso that you can swap certs around at a special terminal in the warpgate with no penalty except for a cool down.

"Are you mad!"
"You can't do that!"
"It will never work!"
"Are you sure you haven't been kidnapped by aliens and a perfect copy substituted in your place!"

[Memeotis]

Would limiting the spawn location of sunderers to warp-gates (and perhaps one of the bigger bases) be a solution?

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Memeotis

Would limiting the spawn location of sunderers to warp-gates (and perhaps one of the bigger bases) be a solution?

No, we had sundy spam before when that was the case.

[Crator]

Originally Posted by Piper

Won't happen now, if it was going to happen it would have to have occurred in beta. There is zero way they will ever fiddle with restricting access to classes/vehicles after launch, too much toys from prams will occur from most of the games populace. They'll be basically too damn afraid to limit folks....even if it might well make for a better game.

You don't know SOE do you?