Outfit Airships or Outfit Ground Bases

[Stardouser]

I'm surprised no one bumped this after Higby mentioned outfit motherships at Pax East? Or was I hearing wrong?

[FortunadoAE]

I considered bumping an even older topic!

The idea in that one was space stations. Airships tend to segment the battle into the ground battle and the air battle. Remember caves? Airships are caves in the air.

Space stations could offer all the benefits without the drawbacks:

-A nice quiet place for outfits to meet up and plan. A mini-sanctuary, away from the other empires and away from trolls. If the station has a HART, it's a way for them to meet up and drop together.
-Beautiful view of the planet out the window
-No fighting over it-- only ownership, which could be determined in different ways (x number per empire per server, or maybe just every outfit gets one after xx members)
-Instance them and it's very low intensity resource-wise. The stations wouldn't even need an exterior model.
-Still tactical: Decide where to orbit. Make it take 12 hours to move. Link any number of benefits to it: orbitals, vehicle access, HART, etc.
-Rooms on it to serve any number of outfit-based functions.

Who wants to fight over land-based outfit base ownership, anyway? It gives outfits incentives that might not jive with their empire's incentives. And airships are an even worse idea than those.

[ringring]

I'm not sure why I would want either!

If there is delevoper time available I'd want another continent.

[atomos]

I think outfit owned motherships with the capabity of a mini orbital strike would be great, they would be good at taking out stationary defensive targets like a deployed galaxy.

[Marinealver]

I would like Starships instead. Blast the ground from orbit, dodge anti-orbital fire. Invade a planet drop-pod on the ground and capture bases. I think they are going to add some expanded resource mechanics than the origional PS. I would see like the stationary ground bases generate outfit resources while the mobile Air/Sea/Orbital bases spend resource.

[Stardouser]

If we get these one thing I really hope is that they have names, like naval ships would, and the names can be seen somehow by enemies and friendlies alike. Whoever purchases it on behalf of the outfit would pick the name, although it could be changed afterward. In keeping with our realistic traditions they would be preceded by TRS, NCS, VSS, just like US ships are USS, British are HMS, etc.

TRS Hammer of Auraxis, for example.

[Snipefrag]

I think airships are a much more interesting idea, they will help to make fights more dynamic. Allowing outfits to make a big difference to the ground fight by using the additional power an outfit ship brings to push the front line.

[Kran De Loy]

While I love airships and the Titans in 2142 the idea doesn't mesh to me when you're counting that any 3 or more titans can meet up at any one time.

Sure, Titan style airbases would also cause smaller outfits to band together in more of an Alliance type thing, but the more I try to wrap my head around Titans fighting off other titans or/and clouds of comparatively gnat sized fighter and bomber ships in a game where any continent could have up to 2000 people, the more I see these things as being gigantic resource sinks. I mean far larger then just the Airbase by itself costing. This would encourage the idea of the more people in an outfit the more spread out those costs become until you've pretty much attained Zergdom from all the randoms you likely have with you help pad out your costs to gains ratio.

And that if someone flies in their Airbase, wherever that flying fortress happens to be becomes the new biggest hotspot for the continent as the Glory Prize of being the ones to take it down would far outweigh any sane person's idea of what they would be willing to lose in the attempt.

Scaling down the idea would be too much because anything bigger then a Gal is too big to land almost anywhere (and it would have to be at least 3 or 4 times the size of a Gal to justify itself imo). Also scaling it down would only mean that people are less likely to be willing lose massive amount of resources protecting it. Scaling it down would also make them lose a lot of the general appeal of having a giant outfit owned air base.

[Baneblade]

As the progenitor of the air cruisers idea, airships of course.

[BuzzCutPsycho]

Six pages is a lot for two "features" that will never be in the game.

[LordReaver]

Everybody wants some sort of outfit base, or airship or whatever. PlanetSide doesn't have room for outfits to have their own bases. Let alone the sheer pointlessness of it. Airships being worth a damn, basically mean overpowered. Otherwise you will just see tons of them floating around. It would really just be like Galaxy Gunships with more power, but this isn't EVE people...

[Hmr85]

Originally Posted by LordReaver

Everybody wants some sort of outfit base, or airship or whatever. PlanetSide doesn't have room for outfits to have their own bases. Let alone the sheer pointlessness of it. Airships being worth a damn, basically mean overpowered. Otherwise you will just see tons of them floating around. It would really just be like Galaxy Gunships with more power, but this isn't EVE people...

People are not asking for a EVE like ships. They are asking for something they can earn for the outfit but takes a ungodly amount of time to get. Think about if it cost you over 1 million outfit points just to get a base bare model of a airship. Another 500k in outfit resources for weapons and terminals. On top of that another 500k in resources just to deploy it.

How many outfits back in PS 1 did you know even had over a million outfit points? Very few did from what I have seen. Even if they went with something similar to what I listed above. I doubt you would hardly ever see them on the battlefield except for once in a blue moon. I would expect them to be extremely tough to take down.

I would also like to see these as one of the only means of accessing a OS strike.

Ofc, this is assuming they even put any of this in the game that is.

[Kran De Loy]

Cost alone isn't any kind of deterrent for people willing to mindlessly follow a single outfit in order to get access to one of the airships. And it's not a matter of Zerg versus smaller higher skilled groups. A smaller highly skilled group will eventually reach a ceiling in how much resources they can earn in a given period of time while Zerg outfits just add more people and it hastens the pace at which they can push out Airbase after Airbase.

And don't bother bringing multiple outfits working together in an alliance. Someone has to own the ship. And it still isn't a valid attempt to refute a zerg from gathering. An alliance would just toss all the zerglings into a single outfit and the people that actually get to own the thing in another. Also it would open up a whole new can of worms that would derail this thread so shouldn't really get into it too much; trading resources.

Anyway, If SOE put max number of of airships bases that can be active on any one server at any time it would solve a number of the problems about the glory of having one without everyone getting their own special snowflake to freeze the living crap out of each continent server whenever the storm rolls through. But then how do they decide who gets them? First come first serve? Have a limited number of them and instead of blowing it up you capture it? How is that any different then having land bases?

Really the way I see it is that people want two different things in one package. Should break it up, imo. 1) Giant Airship Carrier Bases. 2) Outfit owned customizable bases.

1) Is the sweet package that everyone likes but it just wont work with the scale that PS2 is shooting for and the very fact that they want PS2 to be an FPS first and foremost and an MMO as a very closely followed second.

2) Is just as easily achieved by making current bases in the game customizable by the outfit that is currently operating it. Give the outfit a 5-10% increase in resources gathered from that base and the ability to customize anything from the turrets to the strength of it's walls and you have a vastly more intrenched interest for players to capture and hold a base instead of just resources.

As for the 'only show up every now and then' idea it doesn't hold because if they didn't want the ships to show up they'd be super weak and easy to destroy and/or have super weak weaponry. If neither of these are the case then those ships will be all over the place and excessively overpowered. Any small time outfit would be forced to give way to these behemoths merely because it is there and they can't compete not because they don't want to.

As for an orbital space station, that would utterly toss a number of their arguments out the window about why they put in Footholds to each continent, to lessen the number of loading screens and provide every faction a place to gather and push out from at any given time no matter how pushed back they become.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of airships and I would honestly love to see them in the game, but the idea of them being these massive outfit orientated bases just does not fly with me. They really should be kept to oversized glorified Lodestars with advanced radar and an infantry spawning platform. Maybe make it so what they hold isn't the vehicle or whatever, but a limited amount of resources that the pilot crew (yes crew, this isn't a 1 man ship) would select that would be used to spawn a limited selection of vehicles in the field.

[Stardouser]

Originally Posted by Kran De Loy

Cost alone isn't any kind of deterrent for people willing to mindlessly follow a single outfit in order to get access to one of the airships.

Let's look at it this way. They could make the cost of airships so great that even if the entire active population of a server banded together, they still wouldn't be able to buy too many. And since the entire population will NOT work together, that's even less. And, these things will get hunted down and killed, too.

I think the real problem here is that no one wants anything that requires teamwork to kill. If it can't be killed by one tank or one aircraft, people are against it. But that outlook on things is going to stall innovation greatly.

[Hmr85]

Look, my original Idea for Outfit bases was for them to be almost like a sanctuary for outfits only. It would allow them a place to plan/stage massive assaults. It would be a place for them to also hang out at in down time. I never was really in favor of them becoming front line battleships or anything like that on the playing field.

Originally Posted by Kran De Loy
Cost alone isn't any kind of deterrent for people willing to mindlessly follow a single outfit in order to get access to one of the airships.

With that said, I really think your overestimating the amount of them that would be available. Over 8 years of pS1 we have only had maybe a handful of outfits that have reached over 10 million outfit points. That's over 8 years now. So if you take that into consideration you would likely see one every other month or less due to the fact a lot of outfits alone never ever reached a million outfit points. Then they would have to weigh the costs of actually getting one. A lot of them probably wouldn't do it. Your zerg outfits will only pull what 11 over the course of 8 years. That's not a lot of them if you really think about it.