PS2 Base Design

[bpostal]

Originally Posted by Figment

Just a sample.

Layout could be different too, with spawns in the place where I put the CC now, for instance and CC in SCU area (would require different entrances).

Do us all a favor, get a job at SOE. I know these bases are hand crafted and I really appreciate that fact, but God DAMN these base layouts... Is it too much to ask we take a layered approach to bases similar to Planetside 1? Outside is vehicle territory, CY is a hot and heavy mix of both (With covered staircases like miniature 'towers' that can be held with some MAXs, AdvMeds and Rexo's) and the entire inside of the base is Infantry's happy hunting ground.
This just seems especially important to me, not just as someone who enjoys a predominantly Infantry play style but with the fact that everyone can pull anything, resulting in a much larger glut of vehicles than ever seen before.

[RSphil]

i find most bases ok and fun to fight over. the new tech plant config however i find bad and tbh stupid design. noone would ever put base defense devices outside the base they are made to defend, so the gens for the shield now being out side to me seems really stupid.

also i agree that tanks should not be able to camp a spawn room. troops will always do it, no getting away from that but a few nades and mad rush out can clear a good path. but tanks is silly. the blast shields infront of some spawn room doors is ok but they should anti tank spikes/ barriers around all spawn buildings. more defense needs to be looked at and how a base would be built, atm this is a little lacking. they need to look at it from a defenders point of view. how could we make this base so our vehicles can move around to places where they are needed but the enemy cant get to vital areas with vehicle support.

[Figment]

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/i...uilding.65475/

Arclegger responded.

He says the only problem would be art required, which would postpone other continents.


Think it's better to first redesign buildings and then design the continents around those, then first design the continents and then having to rework all bases due to flawed outpost design principles.

[Mechzz]

Originally Posted by bpostal

Do us all a favor, get a job at SOE. I know these bases are hand crafted and I really appreciate that fact, but God DAMN these base layouts... Is it too much to ask we take a layered approach to bases similar to Planetside 1? Outside is vehicle territory, CY is a hot and heavy mix of both (With covered staircases like miniature 'towers' that can be held with some MAXs, AdvMeds and Rexo's) and the entire inside of the base is Infantry's happy hunting ground.
This just seems especially important to me, not just as someone who enjoys a predominantly Infantry play style but with the fact that everyone can pull anything, resulting in a much larger glut of vehicles than ever seen before.

Sad thing is, the original PS2 base designs DID allow for progression. Do you remember that awesome picture of a Mossie hovering over the new Zurvan, with its walls and force fields? And I remember Higby describing a progression-based fight with the ability to capture the CY and move forwards.

Now, the PS2 Tech plant was still a LESSER base design than most PS1 bases, even though they were more defensible. The PS1 bases gave you feeling of real urgency when you were rushing up from the spawn to the CY. Sometimes you'd be fighting just outside the walls (for the tower), then pushed back onto the walls then into the CY then into the building and eventually back to the spawns. Even when losing it could be totally awesome.

I understand why they wouldn't want every base to play like that, but to take away one of the two that did occasionally produce a longer fight is just plain silly on SOE's part.

[Sturmhardt]

Yup, the basedesign guys are not really doing a great job, many valid points here.

[Stanis]

The problem is the style of combat. The gaps in walls infantry can just walk through. The fact everyone can get LA jump over the walls and target any of the four shield gens using a sunderer placed just outside the walls - while friendlies are spawning a vast distance away.

The concept of shield generators for both outer wall and inner structure is good.
The location of them is terrible.

The teleports and jump pads assist the attackers. They shouldnt. Ever.
The walls, due to spawn distances, are actually an advantage for attackers as it gives them a covered walk way and elevated position all around the base.


Lets have boring plain PS1 style outer walls. No cover for attackers from inside.
In short they should be an artifiicial elevated position for reverse slope defense.
A CY that is mostly empty and is a barbican or killing ground if breached.
Again - no cover from the main base structure but cover against the CY itself meaning infantry can scoot and shoot enemy vehicles that have breached.
An inner base designed with an exterior or perimeter that is easily reached - meaning the defendenders can always respawn and be back in position regardless of where the attackers are spawning.

Lets give sunderers a deploy radius based on SOI.
enemy/friendly hex = 100m (or current value)
enemy facility = 2x value = 200m
friendly facility = 1/2 value = 50m

We should be able to have two or three sunderers deployed inside the base
The enemy should only be able to get one or two deployed at a time

[Figment]

Design principles applied:

A. Staged fighting for defending an outpost:

1. Defense outside of outer perimeter (outside of walls around outpost).

2 Defense from walled walkways (even walkways for every simple, low wall). Attackers should try to breach outer defense, bust open CY (shield generators, get AMSes into CY). Rather than just ignore it and jump over the walls with LA. LA should be able to jump over, but defenders should have ways to stop them from approaching the walls in the first place. Walls should benefit defenders in terms of cover, not attackers.

3. Defense from and for courtyard. Buildings cover inside of the courtyard, attackers should be funneled, defenders must have access to high ground, so they can clear enemy LA, snipers, CY vehicles and have relative safe positions to place AA (predominantly infantry should clear AA out). More or less CoD style map is fine for this stage.

4. Defense to keep in an atttempt to hold the fort. The keep design dominates the CY and therefore would be usable to regain control over the CY by attempting to get hold of surrounding buildings again.

5. Once the courtyard has fallen and the keep building under siege, one resorts to holding the internal areas: CC and spawns.

NOTE: In case of a larger facility than an outpost and thus more important to hold and siege requiring to last longer, the defenders should have inner lines of defense to fall back to in a linear manner. In the outpost above, this would be the case to a small degree with the 2nd lobby being a bufferzone with the spawn area. In case of a tech plant, this could be a triple story design with choke points between each level of the building. For instance, spawns and SCU on the top level, the CC on the first or second level below that, the shield gen on the first floor. Probably the shielded ground floor area must be larger to have some defensive cover and a few more entry points.

An outpost must play like a smaller, quicker base by having less deep levels. The smallest of outposts would have the most basic PS1 tower like designs.

Just an example, note that choke points shouldn't be too limited, but also not be too forgiving, that's a precarious balance, especially with jetpacks creating their own options - that shouldn't be possible on each level for instance.

6a. CC lost: try to take back CC, must be possible without exposing one self to external camping (AoE) fire. Dominance over CC must be earned by attacker, not obtained by default due to defenders crossing CY through a massive camp and crossfire.

6b. SCU lost: hold CC and try to get SCU back up. Getting SCU back up makes holding CC much trickier and is therefore a very viable resecure strategy.

B. A base can only be taken by firm infantry control. Vehicles gain ground, infantry consolidate terrain.

C. Defenders can exit to at least three different areas, even if one side is camped that leaves multiple options. This could for instance mean an underground basement spawnroom with tunnels to various buildings of the outpost, a tower like structure with exits to several rooms and levels.

D. Outer keep must have 6 or more exits. Preferably facing 3-5 different sides of a building so camping cannot be done from one direction (roof included).

E. Attackers should be able to make decisive strikes and short duration holds that break defender control over a base. A Gal Drop or Sundy Drop for instance must be hard to deal with, especially when defenders are well outside the base. Objective game play is important then.

F. Doors should not have direct visibility on areas deeper into the base, this to limit AoE spam to the outer most perimeter. Doors should therefore preferably be perpendicular to one another, have obstructions between them when in line or off-set to make a straight shot through both doors impossible.

G. Outside of doors there should be cover and obstructions to direct fire AoE spam. For instance, shielding walls in front of doors, some semi-seethrough roofing, obstructions to keep vehicles away and to hide behind for about 5-25 meters at least. This should provide some sort of buffer zone. Alternatively could be access to high ground or bunker systems.

H. Only infantry may camp the largest amount of spawn room exits. If they do, it must be possible to clear them out with sufficient defensive pressure.

I. The attacker has multiple ways to decisively win the fight. The defender has multiple ways to keep the pressure on the attacker.

J. The attacker must pressurize points and reach for objectives and hold those for some time. The defender must coordinate their efforts by prioritizing areas to defend and shifting defensive bias around.

K. The defender must have access to high ground and different parts of a facility so it can at least attempt to walk the stages in reverser order, ie. from 6 to 1. This doesn't need to be directly reachable from the spawnroom, if it is possible to hold or reconquer a buffer zone to said high ground with infantry vs infantry only.

L. Defenders without proper certification in certain fields must be able to apply their basic weapons once in an advantageous position (high ground) or use alternate methods (turrets) without being completely exposed to all elements. This means they can position such that they don't face each threat continuously or can focus on particular threats. For instance by having roof cover and parapet walls.

M. Objective based gameplay should allow for sneak attacks and sabotage (skilled infiltrator gameplay).

N. Any turrets should have some protection for engineers to try and get them back up and not be placed too far out of the building (they are primary targets anyway and instrumental to CY control).

O. SCU location: must be within spitting distance to spawns. One must have control of rooms directly around spawns to kill them, shows your dominance over the spawn area. ie. Only if infantry is in a position to spawncamp, should they be able to try and tackle the spawns. Infiltrators could have a significant role here.

P. There must be incentive to destroy the SCU over camping: aside from low exp for fresh spawns (more to gain from capture!), the spawns should be a direct threat in your goal to take the CC. As long as the spawns are alive, holding the CC should be a real feat.

Q. Would probably be a good idea to drop spawnroom shields when the SCU goes down so the outpost can be cleared and shields themselves can't be used for farming.

R. When vertical paths (elevators) are used, it should always be possible to go in and out of areas. One way traffic leads to strange gameplay where suiciding is the only way to change class or get to resupplies. Furthermore, under Q, it would provide alterior paths of clearing and resecuring.

[WarbirdTD]

I couldn't agree more with this post. The Tech Plants right now are AWFUL. Tech Plants were my absolute favorite and really gave you that feeling of accomplishment after a long base assault or defense (kinda like PS1). This change is taking away those epic fights, as well as making the shield-breaker sunderer setup pretty pointless. Whoever is whining to you about how long a base attack lasts needs to go away. This is Planetside, not CoD/BF. This is persistent and epic, not instant gratification crap.

On a somewhat related note, PLEASE make the next bases more fun for infantry fighting. Planetside 1 attained this by having the base stuff underground and the fights were SO memorable. Hell, you could probably copy/paste the design of the Interlink, and have a more defensible fortress than the Amp Station. The base design in Amps and now Techs, in which the spawn rooms are 2 minutes away from the control point, is pretty bad, and too susceptible to vehicle farming, as they are outside.

All in all, the dev team could have avoided a bad decision like this by asking our opinion on the change in the first place. Hopefully, this gaffe gets corrected and they use this as a learning opportunity to draw on player input like they were doing so well in beta.

[Figment]

Think this speaks for itself?

[Figment]

So I see a lot comments on that improvements are needed. How about you lot also help with some specific ideas on layout flow? How much space you need, how you could replace small current shacks in specific outposts with alternate buildings, or which other buildings would actually be suitable, etc.

Even screenshots with some arrows would help on where you would like to defend and how.


Btw, easiest cont to fix will probably be Esamir. Due to having more space. Amerish with its multilevel buildings will be a lot trickier - unless they can start digging into the mountains. Which could be very interesting.


Another thing is the current design of towers. How would you solve the "drop in front of firing squad" issue for instance? And is all space in a tower used to maximum effect? Any place to put the SCU? etc.

[Mordelicius]

By the looks of it, they designed the bases on one premise:

No Turtling. Every player has to keep moving.

Take for example a medium base.
- At the first floor of the main building, you have 2 side entrances, 2 vehicle entrances, 2 stairs on one side and 2 elevators on the other.
- The capture point A is on the second floor while the defensive spawn is on the third with the turrets and/or Infantry console.
- Even if you manage to turtle at A, you lose B and C and you will lose eventually.

On an Amp Station:
- If you turtle on the main building, you will lose the shields on the inner outer gates and and inner gates.
- If you turtle on the outer battlements, you'll lose everything.

On the Tech Plants:
- They removed the ability to turtle and guard mainly the the two doors.

General Layout:
-If you look at any room layout, there are no point where you can hide and not get flanked. There are always at least two exits. There are several windows and stairs. If there ever a confined space, it's easily trumped by grenade, rocket launcher or vehicular bombing.

The main flaw with the design philosphy is they give too much power to the planes and tanks. On a small outpost, it's hopeless when you have tanks, especially Magriders, going out of their way blast camp the spawn exits. This is one of the main reasons why Vanu owns Esamir almost exclusively.

Which leave players the only good defensive point being the Biolabs. They are mostly free from Air and Vehicle spam.

To give the smaller bases a chance, they have to give them built-in AA. In addition, they outposts must have AV turrets than can go 360 degrees. Lastly, the spawn room must have at least 3 large shielded exits AND an open roof with shield, so, campers can be shot at, especially those planes, just hovering above.

[Whiteagle]

After seeing a time-lapse video of a base siege, I have to agree that the original base designs were superior to anything we have now.

Originally Posted by Figment

So I see a lot comments on that improvements are needed. How about you lot also help with some specific ideas on layout flow? How much space you need, how you could replace small current shacks in specific outposts with alternate buildings, or which other buildings would actually be suitable, etc.

Eh, hard to say really...
A large number of outpost would probably need to be redone entirely in order to make them defensible, and redoing them all is probably out of the question...

Focusing on Towers will probably be the most effective, since they appear to be bases of importance considering their capabilities.

Originally Posted by Figment

Btw, easiest cont to fix will probably be Esamir. Due to having more space. Amerish with its multilevel buildings will be a lot trickier - unless they can start digging into the mountains. Which could be very interesting.

Well Amerish probably has the best anti-vehicle camping base layouts out of all three, so it can probably wait for an overhaul for now.

Originally Posted by Figment

Another thing is the current design of towers. How would you solve the "drop in front of firing squad" issue for instance? And is all space in a tower used to maximum effect? Any place to put the SCU? etc.

Probably the easiest fix would be to alternate the drop down points so they are on ether side of the tower, instead of one campable wall.
Hell, it might be worth looking into making the entire thing symmetrical...

Then if you put an SCU in them, it could be centrally located between the two spawn drops.

[Figment]

The problem I have with drops is that you drop first, see what is out there later.

And if you put a shield over it with complete cover of a floor, that isn't good either from an attack perspective. Hence why I did use a shield after the drop (with elevators), which then ended on a secure room with two entrances and some safe walls. You could clear that small area, then use the next area to try and clear the room in a fight. A mini buffer zone so to speak.

I'm only not happy with its vulnerability to instagib grenade spam. The 2nd lobby should have sufficient cover to get out those two doors into other positions so if spammed it works more as flushing out than farming.

I'm not pleased with the ohk grenades, rather had seen more, but less damaging grenades. Limited quantity over quality, rather than limited quality.

[Crator]

Do the grenades do less damage to indirect targets? Meaning, if a lot of players are around a grenade explosion do the targets behind the players who take the brunt of the burst receive less damage?

That would be nice in this case.

[Beerbeer]

Where's Malorn in all of this? How come he hasn't beat some sense into some of the people over there? Or has he become one of their sheeps?