Instead of ANTs?

[Attackmack]

Ive read what i can find but havent been around for very long so forgive me if this has been discussed already.

But the ANTs and Silos are gone. I admit i was seldom involved in antruns when i played ps1 but the fee times i was, i liked it and it felt like what we did was crucial for the entire team.
Ive also defended facilities until the ntus depletes and we lost it due to not organizing the ant resupply. I hated it...but in a good way! We only had ourselves to blame.


With them gone i wonder if there is anything else, another system of sort to replace this? I know the devs are trying to remove all downtime ( for good and bad) but in the process it seems like they will remove some very strategical and important elements of what made ps1 feel like so much more then just a shooter.

So is there any info ive missed about this?

Thanks in advance for replies.

[Pozidriv]

Raid is what happened to all the ants. I think they might have added some new elements to generator busting, i have some memories of the dev team talking that you can disable / hamper gens as an Infil via other methods than copius amounts of explosives.

To a degree i will miss ANT runs, but this new mechanic with the huge bases might be real interesting.

[Skepsiis]

I am gonna miss the old ntu system but can see why they would want to remove it and improve the game pace.

I guess the modern mechanic will be the resources. Through attrition you can probably wear down defenders of a facility by capturing all their surrounding territory and reducing their resource income so that they eventually have difficulty pulling all the specalist equipment and are fighting with a tactical disadvantage.

I expect the new design and layout of facilities which create a better battle flow anyway with what, 6? Capture points on bases, and it working like a domination map in other games so you dont need to capture all of them to take the base. There will be many more entrances and less super choke points.

[Death2All]

I'm curious to see how PS2 will play without an ANT or "power" mechanic.


When you came across a stalemate in PS you fought over the base until the base eventually ran out of NTU and the base went neutral. That was a nice built in mechanic for ending stalemates. With that gone I wonder how the game will deal with other stalemate situations where the defenders just cannot be breached.


I'll also miss having those amazing farms any you're left with only 10% NTU and by some miracle someone gets an ANT in and you get to enjoy the farm for another few minutes. Made for some awesome moments when the entire empire pushes out together to clear the NTU silo for an ANT.


Sigh....I wish ANTs were still in the game

[Skepsiis]

Originally Posted by Death2All

I'm curious to see how PS2 will play without an ANT or "power" mechanic.


When you came across a stalemate in PS you fought over the base until the base eventually ran out of NTU and the base went neutral. That was a nice built in mechanic for ending stalemates. With that gone I wonder how the game will deal with other stalemate situations where the defenders just cannot be breached.


I'll also miss having those amazing farms any you're left with only 10% NTU and by some miracle someone gets an ANT in and you get to enjoy the farm for another few minutes. Made for some awesome moments when the entire empire pushes out together to clear the NTU silo for an ANT.


Sigh....I wish ANTs were still in the game

That was kind of my point. I dont think we will see as many stalemates. With everybody being able to instantly change class on a respawn and the much more complex layouts of bases there will be more ebb and flow to battles as attackers breech their way in with a bunch of maxes from one door then get pushed out as defenders spawn back as AV troops meanwhile the defence weakens at one of the upper doors and the jump troops manage to fight their way inside and capture a spawn room within the base and start to fight down. I hope we will no longer see a case where you get an entire empire camped inside the main hallway and backdoor with the entrances being instant death for anybody that tries to do anything.

Now factor in resources on top of that, and the territory control system allowing you to bypass a base if the enemy decides to turtle and quickly gobble up some other pieces of land and of course the fact that there is a way bigger focus on a larger front line in general and many more contested areas than just the facilities that people would congregate at in ps1 and i think we have a very different animal on our hands.

[ringring]

Originally Posted by Skepsiis

I am gonna miss the old ntu system but can see why they would want to remove it and improve the game pace.

.

For 99% of player play-time removing ant will not improve game pace.

However, for those special times when you're defending a base hard, you're low on NTU and you need a ant right now, then arranging and being involved in an ant run was quite exciting. Similarly for the defenders preventing a resupply.

Soooo, ants are gone and replaced by 'resources'. Probably that will work out but in ps1 in a base that NTU would deplete put a time limit of a base defence, will the same occur with 'resources'? We'll see.

[Kipper]

Originally Posted by Skepsiis

i think we have a very different animal on our hands.

I agree with this sentiment - I don't think PS2 will play out anything like PS1 in terms of everyone throwing themselves at a single point on the map. In fact, strategically, I expect it to play nothing like PS1, and end up being a whole bunch better as a result (purists may not like that, but hell, I support positive change!).

Capturing a base won't be about forcing a single entrance and hacking a single terminal at the end, it will be about capturing and holding several points in the base over time - with more ways to approach it so that tactics will counter brute force.

Add to that the battles immediately around the outside hexes of a base because surrounding territory influences how easy or hard it is to capture the facility - it won't be a case of everyone getting to a base, capturing the walls, then trying to get inside - people will be needed outside always to keep the territories the correct colour to speed up or slow down a capture attempt.

And further to that, add the fact that rather than having a choice of two facilities to attack, you'll have a whole front line which on one continent, could be what something like 5-15 hexes long, people will be pushing forward from all sides into enemy territory and enemies will be pushing forward in others. You want more people attacking one place, you'll need to take people away from other attacks or defenses and run the risk of capturing one hex, but losing another.

This is going to be an epic war made up of any number of large battles all going on simultaneously, not just a couple of big hot-spots. Each of the large battles could have several squads employing different tactics to try and shift the balance their way.

[CutterJohn]

You do not need a stalemate ender anymore, because there is no lattice. If they are simply not letting go of a base, wash your hands of the affair and move on to a different one.


And really, thats a good thing. The NTU mechanic in PS1, while necessary, was also the game giving a giant middle finger to the defenders by forcing them to lose.

[MgFalcon]

Ohhhhh how I will miss ANT's I loved that vehicle... well exploding it as a bomb mostly... I did the occasional ANT run when bases really needed it

[Graywolves]

The ANT and NTU served the purpose of ending a stalemate/drawn out battle. Once the base was out of energy no one could spawn there anymore or pull equipment so it was only time until they were all dead and the attackers could hack back. (and sometimes a force from the defenders or third empire drop in and take the CC and hack it back themselves)



Whether or not this will be useful in PS2 is yet to be seen but probably won't be as if you play a battle of attrition you will take the nearby Hexes that the enemy is not contesting.


This doesn't mean that there won't be a place that can become an alamo.

[Synical]

Originally Posted by Skepsiis

I guess the modern mechanic will be the resources. Through attrition you can probably wear down defenders of a facility by capturing all their surrounding territory and reducing their resource income so that they eventually have difficulty pulling all the specalist equipment and are fighting with a tactical disadvantage.

Exactly, and I personally like the idea of this system much better than the NTU Ant/Silo system. This was the way they talked about it during the developers round table right after the game was announced and it was one of the more exciting things announced in my opinion.

If you are in a battle with the Vanu for example and you know they need some rare resource in order to get their more advanced weapons, we'll use the Magrider for this example, if you starve them of this resource you will have a much easier time in the battle to come.

Now instead of the NTU being a "we lose" button for the defenders, now the they have a chance to think more strategically and starve their opponent of resources to turn the battle in their favor as opposed to being forced to repeatedly do ANT runs, which usually amounted to nothing anyway.

It is a much better system, and I can't wait to see the resource meta-game unfold.