Originally Posted by brighthand
As for what makes a great battle? two words: CLUTCH MOMENTS.
I played BC2 rush with my squad for over 300 hours and one of the things that always made us come back for more was those last moment, 'hail mary' disarms; when the attackers are down to ONE ticket, and you guys are on the last mcom (bomb), which has been set off by the enemy. We would go in the building -or where ever it is, and shoot everyone, sweating bullets as one of us disarms to the tune of a chaotic bomb siren getting increasingly irritable. When that save was made, and the 'Your team won' comes up on the screen, there was no greater feeling in that moment; we were all just feeling a great sense of 'YESSS. I am not saying that BC2's mechanics should be copied, but that in whatever way PS2 can achieve ITs OWN brand of clutch moments, it needs to do so.
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What you describe here is a PS1 last ditch effort resecure with less than (one and a) half a minute on the clock, really.
With a set 15 minute timer, you needed to get a resecure hacker in there with enough time to pull it off. If successful, the defender resets the entire 15 minute timer and has a clear win even if you then still have to secure the base by getting it back up to operational status, if you can even beat the enemy out. Either way, you stalled them 15 minutes. You pulled it off.
Deadline pressure with an instant flip back isn't there in PS2. It's more likely you just give up because the task presented is not just monumental as it was in PS1 (single final push or single one chance pushes while fastly outnumbered were possible if played well), it's sheer impossible to pull of if you don't outnumber the enemy now.
Because it's not just flipping the points, which already is tricky even when guarded poorly due to the low ttk, the HUD warning on everyone's screen, influence you have no direct control over if you're at the consoles (have to hope randoms hold the adjecent terrain for you: unlikely) and the many zerglings present, it's also next to impossible to then keep on fighting for that last ditch chance due to the amount of pressure over time, the camping and the tug-o-war taking defenders out of the fight by putting them right next to cap points. The tug-o-war system is a bit more leniant than the ticket system in that respect, but I'd rather see tug-o-war apply only to attacking sides as the chances of being spawncamped are so damn high and logistics vs time after a retreat do not match extremely well.
Especially for a team that's smaller than the enemy, it's typically pointless and even hopeless
to even try. :/
In PS2, we've had whack a mole, we've had tug-o-war, but we don't have LLU ("capture the flag with a convoy escort from base to base") or a plain hack (timer) and we don't have CCs where you get the feeling "we could dig in around here to hold out for minutes".
Tbh if the base timer was ten minutes hack and hold, with one CC in a defensible position, like in PS1, rather than 15... I wouldn't have a problem with it. Would be a bit tight to spot and mount a response in time, but eh... It'd be doable if we had an active command chat. Not saying "do this or else", I am saying, look at more alternatives.
In the case of Esamir, putting an LLU in the central Tech Plant, probably wouldn't be a bad idea (and less work than moving the entire base around).
What I don't like about outposts around bases in general is that they have no adjecency rules and typically get captured behind your back and again and again even if you try to retake them. Especially true for Bio Labs. You can say "well defend them!" Well sure... we try. But if you do, you die and respawn and walk back to it, it's already taken and you now have people spawning in the spawn behind you while you're in the wide open and trying to get back to a CC that's also being defended: you're in a crossfire with no backup. Those CCs of such outposts should be in buildings you have very little travel time to from their spawns and ideally should be part of a lattice to force a flow through them to get to the next area. There's so many of them, I'm not sure if that's really viable though. Either way, it's too chaotic and disconnected to organise a fight to and from a Bio Lab in particular. The other buildings are on the ground, so ther's a bit of direct flow and terrain to inch forward on. But with the Bio Lab, you can't both advance on the outpost and hold the teleport at the same time!
The teleports should be a time saving advantage you can conquer once you fought your way to the other outpost or infiltrated the facility to get reinforcements there - but it should be possible to regain control of a teleporter too. You shouldn't be handed control over both ends of it on a golden platter, that just benefits the attacker while it traps the defenders between two evils: either you can't counter-attack or you can't defend.