[Malorn]

Conquering a continent was a great achievement in Planetside and unlocking access to other continents kept the game flow current.

My concerns with uncappable bases on each continent are as follows:


1) Static gameplay.
VS/TR/NC will always be attacking from the same uncappable bases. They will almost always be assaulting that continent from the same direction. They will always have one empire attacking from one direction and another empire on the other direction. Mixing it up is important and I don't want to always be fighting the VS from the same direction at the same base every other night. After a few months that's going to get very boring.

At the very least the location of which empire has what static base needs to rotate around periodically to keep the game fresh.

2) Shifting the front around the continents
As long as a static base exists there will always be link into a continent that the other empires can use to attack. I think this will result in the battles being thinned out since there could be an attack on any continent regardless of who owns it. The lock mechanic was good because it gave a sense of accomplishment and finality to a long struggle. And then it shifted the front to a new continent.

Unless PS2 has a really, really large population on each server there will be only a few large engagements going on at any one time. Having ghost-hacks all over the place due to these static bases does not seem particularly fun.

3) No sense of victory.
Capturing a continent was a good victory and while capturing the world was extremely rare and only happened a few times, those continent captures were a great sense of accomplishment for a night of hard work. As long as the static bases exist it'll never really be captured and it'll be have more like a domination map of a battlefield game where you have all territories captured for a few minutes and then some random guy goes and takes one of them and you go chase him down.

4) Diminished strategy.
One part of choosing good targets in PS1 was picking continents that could not only have favorable invasion routes (ones where the chances of getting back-hacked by the other empire were minimal). This changed daily as different empires held different continents, which opened/closed different warpgate links. If there's always a static base at every continent then all of these strategic options for attack are lost and the game gets a bit dumbed down.


On the other hand, having a static base with which to always have a foothold when invading a continent is a good thing. I like the idea, but I would propose something a little different:

Instead of having static bases, make the warpgates themselves the "static base" with basic facilities with which to continually assault the continent as long as you had a valid warpgate link.

The challenge here would be to ensure only one empire could control that link at any one time. I have to think more on this, but I really like the idea of having dynamic static bases and connecting it with warpgate links.

But at that point we may as well be back to having Sanctuary w/ broadcast gates.

You could give each empire 1-2 static bases on a few continents or warpgates that they always control that rotate every few days or once a week to keep things fresh and mix up the gameplay, but keeping static uncappable bases that never moves on every continent is very bad.