Combat Engineering - Fortification Engineering

[2coolforu]

Given the trend towards customizable skills and diversity I thought that combat engineering could be one of the cert trees that could be made particularly dynamic and versatile. In Planetside there were a lot of changes to CE and the amount you could deploy, I thought fortification engineering and many of the most recent iterations of CE were really good ideas just not executed to maximum potential.

Area Denial

The volume of mines that an engineer(s) could deploy and the area of territory they could deny to the enemy and the time period they could do it for was not an equal pay off to the effort put in. The hedgehogs were a brilliant idea but you simply did not get enough of them to have a serious effect on an enemy, an engineer should be able to deploy a larger amount of weaker hedgehogs to deny routes to the enemy and create chokepoints. This is especially important as open terrain becomes valuable, capturable areas, an engineer that can create beneficial terrain for friendly units would be a huge asset to a team, it would be vital to have a dedicated engineer/engineer outfit.

Support
with higher lethality of every weapon and higher fragility of vehicles and troops combined with open areas being as valuable as facilities there will be a huge demand for cover and fortifications. We know that engineers can deploy an operable turret similar to the ones from Planetside however what if they could deploy simple sandbag walls or makeshift barricades. These would only be deployable outside of a base but would provide infantry cover in the more open territories. Perhaps the most certed engineer would be able to trade off deploying MG nests for deploying a pillbox that multiple infantry can occupy and fire out of with their rifles.

There is a lot of possibilities for what an engineer could do, a few ideas seem to give them to much role overlap (Deploy a first aid tent? Perhaps this should be a medic ability) but I think a major thing they should be able to create is a mortar pit/light indirect fire weaponry. This would mean we could have a combat effective dedicated engineer, from reading a lot of threads lots of people who dedicated themselves to support roles did so because they didn't have the PC to enter direct fray or felt they did not have the connection/ability to take part in one on one combat - true, light indirect fire weapons are something I thought Planetside needed (flail didn't really fill this role) and the engineer would have to sacrifice the rifle slot to carry the weapon. With lower TTK's comes a defender advantage, lower TTK's tend to make camping a more effective tactic and puts the attacker at more of a disadvantage. Given the increased defensive bonuses that would be given through the new engineer abilities a mortar would help balance the field as it would be able to saturate fortified positions.

Since air combat seems to be coming more and more powerful, one man can pilot a bomber and drop bombs and we have flying spawn points then infantry may require more AA defence. An engineer could trade off between an MG/Mortar/AA Defence. The AA defence would be a simple SAM site that would require someone manning it [or it could be automated depending on balance] Obviously this is a lot of junk to add in so far into the dev schedule however they are possibilities for the '3 year plan'.
Vehicle Warfare

Since SOE seem to be giving tanks realistic armor, perhaps engineers would be able to deploy tank bunkers, basically a dirt pile that shields the front and sides of the tank and means that the only visible part is the turret.

Tank traps may be required to negate the larger amounts of 1 man tanks, dragons teeth or hedgehogs fill in this role. Another object could be an AT gun, like a Pak 38 or ZiS-3 from WW2, these would be terrible against anything but a tank.