The Battle for Peris Eastern Grove (Test feedback)

[OctavianAXFive]

Some Test Server Feedback

The Battle for Peris Eastern Grove

Now I’ve held off on giving feedback on the test server because it’s very hard to get a feel for a system after the limited amount of time playing the game during the Saturday tests. I’ve decided that I am going to talk a little bit about my observations during the things that I’ve done on the test server; most notably the battle for Peris Eastern Grove that took place on April 27th.

For those of you unfamiliar with the rush-lanes: Peris Eastern Gove is currently the eastern attachment to the Peris Amp station. On the test server, it is a fully functioning outpost that is a part of the southernmost “lane” leading from the Eastern Canyon Warpgate to the Western Heights Warpgate. The two connections to Peris Eastern Grove are the Peris Amp Station to the west and Regent Rock Garrison to the North East.

The Situation: When I arrived, the TR had control of the Peris Eastern Grove and were attempting to cross the bridge that gaps the canyon between it and the Peris Amp Station. The attempt was quickly met by heavy NC resistance and the TR fell back to the outpost. Steadily, the NC pushed up the road and the battle for the outpost proper ensued.

The outpost has a single control point in the middle of a courtyard. On the east and west sides of the courtyard are buildings. The courtyard is elevated, so to the south is a hill crest with stairs leading up the hill into the courtyard. To the north is a small wall that obscures the courtyard from the road. There is a staircase that leads along the north wall up to the eastern building. The spawn room is behind the eastern courtyard building.

Being that this was the test server, things were rather uncoordinated. The NC went ahead with a direct assault, taking the western building. They then began to flank around the hill to the south and the wall to the north. The battle lines literally cut the facility in half. The defenders had the east half while the attackers owned the west.

This made for an interesting, but unrealistic battle. The NC were rather obsessed with their new Max shields while the TR were busy with their new Max weapon and ability. Beyond that however, each faction was trying desperately to get to the control point in what was essentially a no man’s land. The TR and NC in either building (and on top) gunned down anyone foolish enough to dive for the point. Naturally this benefitted the TR defenders more because they started with the point. The room the TR used for cover also had more windows and was a very short walk from the spawn room. The NC party bus required the NC to walk a little farther to get to their positions if they died.

On the surface the battle being had was ideal. It was a true test of individual player skill in a “trench warfare” style shootout. I know both Higby and Malorn know exactly at what point in the battle this is because I was feeding Malorn (MAX) ammo while occasionally getting into a shootout with Higby (LA) who was on top of the opposite building. The battle remained a standoff for a while until the NC wizened up.

Higby, I don’t know if you’ve ever read anything I’ve ever posted. But if you have, I’m going to point something out about something you did that really made my day.

You attacked the spawn room.

Screw the control point. The spawn room is the goal. It’s not kill-whoring if it’s also the best way to PTFO.

They used the courtyard wall against the TR, using it as cover to move around the buildings and come up to the rocks around the spawn room. I saw what they were doing and fell back to weed them out. Higby and a few other NC were back there killing us as we came out of the spawn instead of trying to fight us straight-up for the control point.

The TR could not fight for the control point and for the spawn room. It didn’t take many NC to distract away enough TR to turn the tide of the battle. Other forces were aligning against us. The VS back capped Regent Rock for some reason and pushed down behind the TR. But it was over before that.

Really what I took away from the battle for Peris Eastern Grove were two things.

1.) The outpost is not terribly defensible if you opt to play it smart instead of just rushing in for a direct assault from the Amp Station.
2.) The NS Research Lab is too close.

If you go on the test server and look at the map, you will see that the NS Research Lab is just north of Peris Eastern Grove. It is NOT a part of its lane, meaning it cannot be attacked by the TR unless they go all the way around through a different lane of attack. However, it’s still a part of the south lane battle dynamic. The NS Research Lab is extremely close geographically to the Peris Eastern Grove Spawn room. If you come out of NS Research Lab and go south, you’ll find yourself in some very handy rocks that overlook the road and the Peris Eastern Spawn Room. At one point during the battle the NC pro snipers (scoff) figured that out. I managed to find my way up there and shot them all in the back with an unsilenced weapon but it was a futile effort. They could just keep coming back and eventually they did, this time they were heavy assaults.

As fun and cool as fighting over the control point was, it was only fun because the NC were using bad tactics. When they brought in tanks and began to flank and fight us at the spawn room, the base became way less defensible. We simply didn’t have the numbers to cover all of that ground and all of the attack vectors.

The spawn room is the natural focal point of a base. It’s not designed to be, it just is because of its inherent importance. I really think that each base should be tiered in such a way that focuses the final fight on the spawn room. I understand the desire to avoid trench warfare but I think we can have our cake and eat it too.

This is a rough paint sketch I did of an ideal Peris Eastern Grove layout using a different system.

How it Works: The entire base has been rotated to face North-South. It is elevated, with rock strewn slopes leading up to building 1. The rest of the facility is surrounded by a wall. Building 4 on the eastern wall that has a staircase in it. The red dot is a generator housed in the middle of the base that powers the shields for building 3. Building 3 has shielded doors but NOT shielded windows. Instead it has those small blast windows. Building 3 has three doors total. One door leads into the courtyard with the generator. The second door leads into building 2 and the third door leads back towards the spawn room. Building 2 has no external ground floor entrances. It has roof access with an AA gun on top, a balcony, and two doors on the ground floor, leading into buildings 1 and 3 respectively. It has many windows overlooking the generator courtyard, meaning that whoever controls the windows has major sway over the fight for the generator.

The generator in the middle has a 40 second overload time with a 7 second arm and 10 second defusal time. Once destroyed it can be repaired like any other generator, though obviously repairing it under fire is extremely difficult and takes a long time if it’s just one engineer. Once the generator goes down, a countdown timer starts for the SCU and the shields around it go down. This plays out sort of like the control points do now with a virtual tug-o-war. This starts a 10 minute timer until the SCU shuts down. If the SCU is manually overridden at any time, it doubles the rate at which the timer counts down until it reaches 0. If the SCU is stabilized then the timer will go back to the normal rate of countdown. If the generator is repaired, the SCU is automatically stabilized and the timer begins to count up until it reaches 10 minutes or it is overloaded. A generator overload pauses the counting up process.

Once the timer reaches 0, spawning at the base stops and the shields around the spawn room itself go down. The defenders can hold off in here for as long as they can, protecting a central terminal. The weapon change terminals inside the spawn room are neutral and cannot be hacked (to prevent resupply). The central terminal has a 5 second hack time. Once hacked, a two minute countdown timer starts at the end of which the territory flips and the generators auto-repair.

A base that is completely undefended should take about 7:47 seconds from the time the player begins the first generator overload to the point flip. (Or about 5:47 until spawning at the base is no longer an option).

A base that has enough resistance to hold the SCU room but not the generator should hold out for about 15-20 minutes though it could be indefinite if the defenders manage to hold the spawn room without dying or running out of ammo.

With this design you are giving the defenders a chance to hunker down and stall if they are outnumbered. Attackers may also see some benefit come out of this. A smaller or equally sized attack force has a chance to turn the battle in their favor with good team play. If they can get that first generator overloaded, they have a better chance of actually holding it than a control point, which just requires raw bodies be thrown at it to contest or reverse the empire in control. From there the attackers can whittle down the defenders until they kill them all. This works both ways of course. I think this would be a coup for small outfits.

Camping the spawn room in this layout is much harder and requires the attackers to go through all of the other layers of the base’s defense unless it’s a literal army of light assaults coming over the walls. This is opposed to the current layout which allows attackers direct access to the spawn room no matter the point in the battle. By facing it North-South, it also limits the effectiveness of NS Research Lab as a free flanking route. Additionally, the base is very vulnerable from Regent Rock. I believe this might have been intentional as it’s supposed to be a siege point for Peris Amp Station. Regardless, this layout also negates the advantage gained by coming from Regent Rock (which promotes instant spawn camping since the spawn room is the closest thing to the road from which the attackers are coming).

TL;DR
• The battle revealed a lot in terms of base design and tactics.
• Change the capture mechanics to reflect the spawn room as the main objective.
• Allow for a siege mechanic to prevent indefinite defense.
• Would return us to more dynamic capture times but with map changes it should still be evident as to how long it will take a base to flip.