Improvement: Orbiting Sanctuary's (Replacing Footholds)

[Daffan]

This reminds me of the DUST thing previewed everywhere with the orbital stations.

However, i'm liking the fact that its a "sanctuary" like area because having a constant foothold on a continent i believe does retract from "owning" a whole continent. Sounds like a solid idea and something different from PS1.

[Exmortius]

ya definitely gonna kinda miss not having a sanctuary. a mothership would be kinda a cool concept though if they do some type of urban space station areas though. can have a mini sanctuary hangout to warp into a new spacestation urban combat kinda zone. more cqc based stuff....all infantry only zones i guess.

[JimmyOmaha]

Updated the OP. Did some sentence editing to make it read better and added new rule regarding the launch-bay.

This could drop you on any friendly hex or your foothold; even if an enemy empire holds it. Although It would be at a resource cost, including a small tax on infantry. Squad leaders would be able to drop with the whole team. And platoon commanders would have a similar ability for their whole team. People in the bay, but not in the squad/platoon will not be affected. Anyone participating in the drop would get a cooldown timer so the tactic, if failed, could not be repeated over and over.

Also been thinking about them footholds a lot. Seems like they are here to stay, at least until launch. Empires can get to any continent. And it balances out the populations so servers can run at peak with everyone involved in a battles. Unless the Sanctuary's acted as the ques, but they'd need to be bigger than PS1 versions.

[capiqu]

I like

[Lanka]

Originally Posted by JimmyOmaha

-- Unless the Sanctuary's acted as the ques, but they'd need to be bigger than PS1 versions.

Well, not necessarily. No one says you have to have 1500 players crammed in same area - just make it big&cozy enough to fit 250 players, multiply by 6 instances and there you go.. If the queu jumps to 3000 players, all* the system needs to do is make 6 more instanced sanctuaries to fit the overflow.

Add function to request move to another instance (or even system automaticly moving players to same instance their friends/outfit is in) for easy grouping&dropping to continent.


I'm still leery about the current plan of having only footholds.. Where is your character when you log in, for example. On the last continent's foothold? They can't spawn where you disconnected after some time offline because that'd cause some silly or exploitable situations. At least I wouldn't want to steamroll over base only to find some sneaky sniper log-in half hour later and start back-stabbing campaign.

I'd rather have connecting character spawn in Sanctuary somewhere, be that orbiting on continent or in neutral area, where they can decide where to move to over being stuck in continent foothold you couldn't care less but can't move out of when other continents are full (as unlikely as it would be, it's still possible imho.)


(*Obviously I'm no engineer. It probably won't be quite that easy.. >>;)

[JimmyOmaha]

Beta-day Bump. :]

[ThePirateMan]

Anything that replaces the permanent footholds is good with me. Really can't stand the idea that we'd all be locked in our own corners without the ability to lose.

Have the devs said anything on the topic of sanctuaries and permanent footholds?

[brighthand]

I will be NC, and I SERIOUSLY want the repurposed asteroid mining facility as a base We will be like some hateful hermit crab, comming to get you from within our rocky shells.

[Kipper]

I've always preferred the idea of orbital strongholds over footholds, so that the battle lines on the continents aren't artificial.

My fear with footholds is that each team will almost always be holding an area around their own - sometimes it will be bigger when they are doing well, smaller when they aren't - but it will always be in the same place.

With an orbital base, the way the battlefield evolves is a complete unknown, so you get the chance to fight a lot of different battles in different places and from different angles.

Also, with an orbital base, since no combat is taking place - you can instance a bunch of them to make sure they don't get too full and lag out if everyone decides to congregate for a mass push onto a locked continent.

Taking a shuttle or teleporting at will (no silly timers) down to a friendly base should be available and free wherever there is a friendly base. If - and only if - you're "locked out" of a continent entirely, then you should have the option to drop pod a full squad (or at least, the same number of people as would be a full squad) down into any hex to launch a surprise attack.

I'd say you should be limited to going on foot or maybe in a MAX on such a drop, with the aim being to secure a base or a tower with vehicle/air pads. Just imagine, the enemy know they've kicked you off a continent - they know you're going to want to get back into it, they know you can appear in numbers anywhere - so they have to guard everything. If you were the guard on the tower where it suddenly started raining down with enemy pods, and you had to organise a defence - that would be pretty epic

I don't agree that these orbital stations should be 'over' any particular continent at a time, as far as gameplay goes - but it would of course be lovely to be able to look out the window and see the planet below with the correctly shaped continents to give a sense of scale over whats being fought for.

[Gugabalog]

Yea, a rotating world would be an epic sight.

[Chok]

Here's a dumb idea, but it might work if the devs can somehow do it:

Make Orbital Strikes manual things, so that when a person calls in a strike a player in the "Strike Seat" will be able to see a beacon and launch the strike, shell by shell.

This can be further improved by VOIP communication with the units on the ground (squad leaders? Dunno) so multiple mini-strikes are possible using the resources of 1 big strike.