No Auto-Turrets - A paradox harming PvP?

[Mastachief]

There should be no more restriction on troop movements than that currently in planetside.

Lot of the current "VETS" are still after 10 years simple people that only believe in going A-B-C-D and so on so there will always be a zerg and a front on front fight. Those of us that avoid the Main fight should be able to do you without unreasonable restrictions.

[Ragefighter]

Originally Posted by ThGlump

Turrets never really slowed anybody, and it was only bad luck if someone catch hotspots from destroying them (not like there was reason for it other than draining).
Time to response is in the system, as bases behind lines will take a lot longer to conquer. And fast response action is better than guard duty. And bases on empire borders? You always should take them as something that being atacked right now. And if they arent attacking there, thats a hole in their defense too and you should attack from that side.

So in summary, bases on the border will be constantly in battle so no need for guard duty, bases behind front lines will take long time to take so no need for guard duty too.
Problem solved. The less AI the better.

Have sensors that warn you when base is being attacked, not some auto turrets.

forgot they said the bases behind the front line are harder to capture. and from what it looks like now, the map should alert people quickly enough to go and man a turret/defend the base.

I think engineers should be able to customize the base a little bit, not really sure how but that would be cool. Like make it limited a little so a bunch of engineers can't throw down like 100 manned base turrets but reasonable in that if you see like a fleet of air ships inc you can adjust to more of an AA defense. (player operated not auto). or were the turrets they posted pictures of from engineers?

/wants them to do an "engineer week"!

[ThGlump]

Originally Posted by Garem

For behind-the-lines hacks, this is less of a problem. When the major battle is going on in the east, where we SHOULD want everyone to be, any clever boy who wanted to avoid the fight and score a cheap border hex could do so.

I wouldnt call it a avoiding a battle. There are outfits that specialize on those operations (both capturing distant base, and resecuring them). Its valid and its not avoiding battle. They will have their own battle even if its on smaller scale.

Hack a base before anyone even could get there should be impossible. 50:50 bases should take enough time so you can fly over whole continent atleast 2 times (if not they get feedback about it in beta as this is part of main gameplay).
Surrounded bases where timer will be significantly shorter, you need to defend (as its easy target and surely will be attacked immediately), or use it as base for conquering adjacent bases to increase defense timer.

There is really not much room to avoiding battle and gaining benefits from it, everything seem to be ingame already and all i could need is number tweaking if its broken. No need to create another hurdles in capturing bases other than player defenders.

[Erendil]

Originally Posted by ThGlump

I wouldnt call it a avoiding a battle. There are outfits that specialize on those operations (both capturing distant base, and resecuring them). Its valid and its not avoiding battle. They will have their own battle even if its on smaller scale.

Hack a base before anyone even could get there should be impossible. 50:50 bases should take enough time so you can fly over whole continent atleast 2 times (if not they get feedback about it in beta as this is part of main gameplay).
Surrounded bases where timer will be significantly shorter, you need to defend (as its easy target and surely will be attacked immediately), or use it as base for conquering adjacent bases to increase defense timer.

There is really not much room to avoiding battle and gaining benefits from it, everything seem to be ingame already and all i could need is number tweaking if its broken. No need to create another hurdles in capturing bases other than player defenders.

Oftentimes the decision to perform ops away from the zerg was made as much to influence the main fight as it was to start something on your own. Hitting the enemy\'s flanks, backhacks to draw enemy troops away from the main fight, denying the enemy access to resources (gen holds, mod dunking, viruses, etc), and opening up new fronts for your empire to gravitate towards once the current fight wraps up have always been fundamental gameplay strategies in PS1 that took place away from the main fight but were still done to influence it in some way, and I\'m sure similar ops will continue to be of importance in PS2.


I\'m curious as to how the uncapturable footholds will affect this tho. In addition, the Mission system might drastically change how back-base ops and responses work. In the past they\'ve mentioned being able to setup a mission waypoint for some distant location and letting someone who accepts that mission spawn at that location. If they implement something like this, then the whole backhack/response dynamic could completely change from the way it was in PS1.

This in turn will drastically affect how important PVE-style automated defenses would be. If you can get troops to a remote location via the mission system, than having all but minimalist defenses may not even be necessary if sufficient early warning systems are available and in place.

EDIT: Typos.

[Traak]

Originally Posted by ThGlump

Have sensors that warn you when base is being attacked, not some auto turrets.

Translation: you never play Combat Engineer, so make it so they can't have Spitfires.

[ringring]

What in hell are auto turrets, I've only played the game 8 years.

[Mastachief]

fly a reaver near an enemy base

[Shogun]

i loved my spitfires!
so sad i´m not going to secure bases with them anymore.

i guess beta will show if it´s a problem but i can imagine that lonely backhackers might now be encouraged to do their thing all over the map because there is no danger as long as their is no enemy.

it was a useful tactic to put up defences on strategic points prior to leaving the base. just to prevent the leftover cloaker from causing too much havoc on his own

[kubacheski]

Originally Posted by ringring

What in hell are auto turrets, I've only played the game 8 years.

Way back when base turrets would shoot at you, not extremely accurate, and IIRC you had to have certain bases captured for it to work. I.E. a lone base wouldn't just go on auto-defend, a certain percentage of the continent or certain bases had to be "owned" for the turrets to shoot your enemies. I may be completely wrong tho.

So the though is that auto-fire turrets can "assist" in defense, or grant some risk to back-hacks in PS2?

Not all bad ideas, but with the transition from lattice system to map control, it's not exactly clear how a back-hack will affect the front lines. I mean if back hack in PS1 and you took down a strategic link in the lattic, the "front-line" hack becomes a no-go. Now with the description of map control, it affects how fast a hack can be done, but does a back-hack really affect a "front-line" hack? I mean if you do a back-hack, you've got one hex on the map. Yea you get the resources from it and a good location to spawn from. How's that relate to the frontlines? Takes troops from the main fight? probably. But the very fact that it's a back-hack means that it's going to take longer. Why have the AI base turrets do anything. The game already has an implementation to make it riskier - it makes you wait longer for the hack to go through. You wanna sit in a hot zone for 2 minutes or 4 minutes?

So following the logic train, a front hack is started. Defenders decide to back-hack a base to draw off attackers. They get in and start back-hack. As it's going to go faster (i.e. not surrounded by enemy controlled hexes) the front hack is going to finish first (assuming its successful) and the troops can then quickly (or leisurely - we don't know the timing penalty yet) get to the back-hack site to defend/retake.

So do auto-fire base turrets make any sense?

And the intent is that there's going to be enough interest (being such a kick ass game and F2P on top of that) that there will be plenty of population to man turrets.

And for the record, yes I absolutely love back-hacking. Jump in Mossie, taking towers, set up a boomer or 2 and wait. Every little thing to upset the opposition is cool by me. I'm just saying autofire base turrets aren't going to change things much.

Now Remote Control Base Turrets are a different story, imagine an extremely specialized Advanced Hacker/Engineer that can jack into a console at a base and control the outlying tower's turret. biofeedback from turret into the controls so the engi gets damaged/fragged when turret blows up.

[ringring]

So are we talking Base Turrets or Spitfires or both? Why invent new nomenclature?

Base Turrets: ..... hardly worth it unless upgraded. AA is a beast.
Apart from that the only use is if you're in your base and you hear the wall turrents shooting you know there's a reaver of ams and you have a chance of a kill! They are tripwires, but the game wouldn't be harmed particularly if they were removed or only activiate once manned.

Spitfires: Something similar needs to be in the game. Often you will CE up a base that you think may be a target and then leave. The object being to watch the map for hotspots.
Again, from the other direction we'll often decide to attack a base, scout it out but leave if there are too many spits - we don't want to create hotspots.

So .... base turrents. It will be fine if they are only active if manned or deployed by an engineer type.

...... CE spitfires, an essential part of the armoury.

[DviddLeff]

As the article says they have taken out the big base shields and auto turrets to encourage players to do the defending.

Now looking at the bases they are bloody huge; you want a man defending each wall and you will need a platoon to even see when the enemy crosses the walls let alone mount a quick defence.

I do believe that some degree of shields and/or auto turrets will be needed to slow the enemy advance enough for an effective defence to take place, but we'll have to see how it is in beta with map sizes and population caps.

[Traak]

I wonder if the bases will be placed in tactically idiotic locations like many were in PS1?

Base of a hill? Right in a huge depression?

Far more interesting than just having them all on top of slippery, steep hills surrounded by gorse.

[sylphaen]

An auto-turrets mechanic could allow some "radar-jamming" module for vehicles or undetectable vehicles.

Plus they give an incentive for vehicles to stay away from the infantry fight/push happening in the base.

I'm not against auto-turrets as we saw in PS1. They were annoying but they served a purpose. And most of the time, they were destroyed unless manned.

[UnknownDT]

You won't be able to stop us from taking a base anyways..... :P


lol

[sylphaen]

Originally Posted by UnknownDT

You won't be able to stop us from taking a base anyways..... :P

Agreed. Auto-turrets never stopped a base assault.