Planetside 2 had a pretty good method in it's design to prevent "Wack-A-Keep" Syndrome. You can only conquer assets which are at the boarder of territories. You can only raid or take territory which is contested or parallel to contested territory, however there is a fatal flaw in that design. I call it the "SpiderWeb Syndrome" In that without extreme and constant force applied, you will be stuck in a stalemate. So just like a spider web, it is a massive all encompassing mess which you must struggle through and the game grounds to a halt with boarder skirmishes making up the majority of fighting and determined pushes often resulting in being cut off at the base by a counter attack, then resulting in an island of territory which is quickly overwhelmed from all sides. Determined Strategy or a massive push from an organised clan unfortunately doesn't impact on the battlefield as much as one would hope. Most battles devolve into an attrition cluster%*&# until one side loses the ability to spawn in the region and run out of resource points to spam tanks in rapid succession.

Thing is the design of how territory and bases are taken in PS2 is in fact good, but it's only half way there to what I think would be a good design approach to territorial control. But also the core gameplay itself, in regards to spawning and gear could also come into play. The quickest solution which would radically change the gameplay would be to take the EVE Online/DUST512 route and make the game "hardcore" where death is final and perma gear loss. This would dramatically effect the over-all scope of how people approach the game and force players to be organised because the economic risks are very real. Though personally as much as I'd love to see it, i don't believe that would work in EC and I also think that it will off-put younger audiences from playing. Also as shown in DUST512, using "hardcore" gameplay in a game in the same genre as EC/PS2 resulted in endless griefing, praying on newbies and devolved the game into everyone sneaking around like it's an ARMA game. As opposed to storming the castle, everyone tried to sneak into the castle... it seems applying one form of gameplay mechanics to a different kind of gameplay layout to that of traditional applications has mixed results.

In other words, "hardcore" and "fortified castles" that require you to besiege and blast your way in, don't mix. While on the other hand "hardcore" and "fortified towers with only a single health meter" like in EVE do work.

A middle road to that, I think would be the best solution. Vehicles, buildings and fortifications suffer from permadeath. PS2 did that to a small degree, where once everything got destroyed you needed to rebuild it, also you had a resource bar on vehicles and assault suits. But they didn't go the extra step I feel that is required to make enough of an impact so as to prevent the game being 90% of the time a constant zerg fest on the contested boarders.

Guild Wars 2 WvW actually achieved this to a small degree, in the early days of GW2, when 100g was a fortune, WvW resources were expensive, siege equipment was expensive and upgrading castles was expensive.

However what they got wrong was: Players can batter down castle doors with their bare hands and spells without the need for a Ram or siege engines. Which encouraged zerging rather than organised Sieges; The lack of ladders and wall scaling siege equipment, which devolves a game into Player verse Door (Planetside 2 didn't suffer this problem thanks to jump packs and troop transports and the simple fact EC has jump packs in it already eliminates PlayerVerseDoor regardless of how the game turns out anyway). And finally when fortified locations fell... there was no permanent destruction. Locations were not left in a ruin where guilds had to spend a lot of resources to have them rebuilt encase of a counter-attack. Meaning you lost a lot for spending gold to fortify your castles, but lost nothing by taking castles. This discouraged guilds from building up defenses all but the richest of guilds with gold to burn (which back in 2012 1g = $0.20 US based on the GEM exchange rate at the time, gold was worth so much more then).

Also another problem with all those designs, none of the bases or territories had any strategic worth! Take this location for XP, take that location for XP, push into the enemy territory, take all the bases, win passive bonuses for your faction... *YAWN*.

People love uphill battles and downhill defending. One game which was great at demonstrating that, although failing in almost every other way was in fact Warhammer Online. You had to battle threw a series of player controlled castles and territories to get to the ultimate objective, problem with that... it had no real impacting reward, the only incentive was the grind for gear. Each location and each asset should have an impact directly on the ebb and flow of the battlefield, like someone stated before, you lose a fortification, all of a sudden the cooldowns on global orbital bombardments is increased, reducing the effectiveness of that weapon. Thus making the asset a key strategic target to both defend and attack. Rather than having a shallow incentive like grinding for gear or XP.

I think if the developers take the ideas from PS2, GW2 and combine them and then add perma-loss to resources including the destruction of any fortifications requires you to spend resources to rebuild them would encourage more planning and strategy involved in taking fortified locations as well as treating any vehicle like a valuable critical asset as opposed to a commodity and also in turn make them a high priority target for the enemy, meaning you must protect them from anything which counters them, like anti-vehicle weapons.

Any wall destroyed will stay destroyed once you take the location, any building destroyed will be perma-destroyed, requiring the faction/guild to spend (non-refreshing) resources to rebuild it or replace it.

You require certain buildings and control of certain cities or fortifications to gain access to construct certain vehicles and defensive turrets. All of which can be destroyed or captured by the enemy at any given time. A faction can win by focusing their attention on halting production threw direct or indirect assault or sabotage.

You require certain buildings and control of certain territories to have access to resource gathering facilities. Players don't farm resources, that would be boring, instead they are automatically harvested by these "farms". Which consist of everything from mines, mills, farms, gass refineries, power stations to pumpworks. The enemy can defeat your faction via economic attrition by focusing their attentions on the destruction of your resources denying you access to materials required to fuel your war machine. Lacking the ability to constantly supply the front lines with resources means the enemy when they destroy things, you wouldn't be able to quickly repair it. Thus to eliminate stalemates you must attack your opponent's economy.

Resources must be farmed and not auto-accumulative, you have to work hard to build up resources. Like in EVE Online. They don't slowly build up from doing nothing, they are not auto-refreshing.

A great game to look to for inspiration which is highly overlooked is an old gem called Command and Conquer Renegade Multiplayer. You needed harvesters to generate money to get stuff, if they are destroyed you can't afford things and when a building was destroyed you lost access to those classes and vehicles.

I Also believe that defensive turrets should be automated, having them player controlled has two equally bad outcomes.
1) It forces players to leave the action to sit and control a turret endlessly firing on other players, this can get boring and it also takes you out of the fun and chaos of the battle.
2) It's a very cheap no-skill required method of getting kills and experience, it encourages players to fight over defensive weapon systems rather than actually focus on defending.
This is a bigger issue in GW2 and DAoC than it is in PS2 but the issue is still there in PS2 to a smaller degree.

After reading what everyone else suggested, I worked out they pretty much think the same. I think the community as a whole has pretty much worked out what needs to be improved over past games.

Developers need to treat a battlefield PvP centric MMO like it's an RTS where you play as a grunt. And you and your army control the eb and flow of your faction, rather than some godly disembodied commander like in an RTS game. Only then will we see "the perfect Massively multiplayer online strategic battlefield warfare game"

Should of done that with Macragge.

Not always an option and even than who says you have orbital control, maybe Orks just drop some large roks on your 'ead.

this , i like everything pyctooth said. Keep your supply line up and running as well as supple building should most defiantly be a major part of the game. Also i think vehicles should need fuel to run, like in War thunder,

You select the vehicle you want and along with what load out it has, you pick how much fuel you want, maybe a full tank or the minute fuel load and that will last you like 1 hour and 30 minute or maybe only 22 minutes. And if you run out of fuel on the battle field, your vehicle just stops and become a new piece of cover.

Tho i feel you should be able to jump in and use some of the defense emplacement weapons, but let the majoryity of them be auto controlled

after playing a decent amount of WvW in gw2 and played PS2, i don't u can stop it. what is the best what to take a well defend location. logic would say have an easy way in, kinda like a spy. thats how it would work in RL. pay or get someone in to open the gates. can't have that in a game, next best thing is to en mass ppl outside. unless EC has it so u can use a scout to sneak into the base. open a gate to let a small squad in and do some dam to draw attention. which fyi would be hella fun

Part of what makes Zerging viable as some have written here is that one base easily leads to another. There is little distance between bases and to many control regions/districts. Remove the region control districts and just have an imaginary control area around each base depending on size. Eliminate all the smaller bases, including the ones used to teleport into the bigger bases. Consolidate them to a medium sized base that is pretty distant from the large ones. However, these medium size bases are ones that can vastly effect the large points

So for instance the medium base may have artillery that can "reach" two of the larger bases, but is nowhere in sight of either of the large bases. Other bases could be used in different ways in addition to the artillery base.

Telporter pad

• Pay to deploy anywhere, literally. Paid for using deployment costs. Units with Deep Strike via teleporter in the table top do not pay, like Terminators.
• Teleporter homer can be dropped anywhere and is invisible, except to auspex types, designates an area that removes scatter.
• Pad ‘reach’ covers multiple bases, large area.
• Doubles as a research facility and so equip costs are overall less on continent represent more elites.

Air Pad/Deep Strike Staging/Radar

• Builds light air units and skimmers, even jet bikes.
• Is a command center for large indestructible AA sites in key areas around the Air Pad. The turrets can be taken offline for a time at the site location or sabotage of “controls” from inside the Air Pad. Sabotaging one site takes a large area of AA out, but if the AA is up Gunships will not be able to sit around.
• Gives sight of all air in surrounding area, also able to sabotaged, radar installation.
• Units and vehicles can Deep Strike from the pad as long as they would normally be able to from flying, primarily Jet Pack wearing folk. Deep Striking this way would let AA have a shot at the person coming in, much more time than the PS2 drop pod. (Eldar could really have a great advantage here if you let their skimmers also DS. Would take control but also let you skip large area of land crossing at high altitude).
• Bombing runs.

Gun Fortress

• Holds control over certain bottle necks like bridges and large gates.
• Easy to defend with small to medium squad numbers, large number of defenders simply makes for a crowded base. Crusader gun castle.
• Higher awards for action within the area of the Fortress. This way it attracts fire fights.
• Possibly add NPC MOBA type spawning towards a selected base in the area around the fortress.

With the larger space and ease of Deep Strike at any location in an area you could really guerilla war a zerg as the go from base to base. Which is a longer journey and leaves plenty of time to get shot at by a flanking Eldar Skimmer Mecha Infantry or a fire base of shooty Terminators and their Dreadnought friends at a choke point. The Fortresses also slow down any Zerg that would run into the death trap and going around would mean long long times on inaction because the fortress has the bridge only accessible to the controlling race.

I have been talking about a perma-death and resource system for awhile on another post and still catch flak. I remember when this game first was announced PvE was supposed to be for resource control. Clearing out a nid nest would grant you resources from that PvE run.

I have to say I think lots of PS2 fighting happens at a base, if anything it feels like the area in between bases is almost nonexistent because it can be crossed so fast and offer little geographical resistance, roads to every where. That said I agree with how fights turn out, that attrition cluster f#$@ thing.

I still think removing the districts altogether is the way to go, this way just holding the base is what matters and not if the district is connected via many multiple chains. Adding in all those extra defense and the far reaching influence these bases should have is what will make an incursion worth the time. It is pretty easy to explain why they should still get the same resource regeneration, comm relay.

EDIT: The other necessity is for bonuses are awarded from base actions, like artillery strike awards the defenders who are just standing there a percentage of points, provided the player captured the point or have been in base for long enough to earn a "defender buff".

I didn't mean to gut your suggestion, but there are some things I definitely agree with you in here, and others that confuse me because they're somewhat contradicting. Mostly what confused me about the paragraph was the wording of the "Farming is boring, players don't farm, but resources must be farmed and must be worked hard to get." I'm just assuming that my thoughts are similar to yours when I say that each faction's resources are nestled within the fortress. Something that would keep players just as interested in defending their keep as attacking an enemy one is the thought that each keep generates its own RP that can be used to purchase big ticket items like tanks and specialist gear. If the keep changes hands quickly, then neither side will be able to claim the benefit of vast quantities of RP at their disposal.

Running with this idea and agree with the others so far, it would also make sense that like a real keep from medieval times, each fortress has a series of defenses. Even the smallest outpost can be designed this way. Its weakest (but obviously formidable) defense would surround its resource gathering nodes, its next strongest would defend the resource storage area, and the greatest defense would protect the center where ownership of the entire structure would change hands. Saboteurs who infiltrate deep into enemy territory would find disrupting resource gathering an achievable and satisfying task, but not such a disruption that the enemy could not easy recover from it if they took some time to repair their damages. I personally would love to do some infiltration, but I would never want to be able to take a whole keep that would normally require several hundred people.

As for stalemates. Taking a hat from the enemy of 40k, I believe in line breaker tactics if other tactics aren't working after several hours of concentrated effort. Obviously it isn't fool proof, but I'm assuming that if neither side is getting anywhere in their conquest, the rate of Requisition Acquisition would be high enough that if left undisturbed for long enough a faction would be able to call upon an elite unit like a Land Raider. This is the same for the other keeps that are likely very far away. As an experiment in Beta, I'd also wonder what would happen if keeps were able to "pump" resources to a keep on the front lines (Like fortifying positions in the board Game Risk).

I'm just gonna give my two cents to this one:

First of all, DON'T make small or medium-sized bases have any actual impact on their own. They should only be the stepstones to capturing a real, big base with multiple layers of walls and everything. So, you should make a lot of bigger bases (definitely more than PS2 has), and surround them with some outposts, that give you the advantages SST mentioned earlier, IMO only a tad bit smaller.
Give architectural control to the players. I don't want to go ahead and be like, should I get wall upgrade nr. 1, or wall upgrade nr.2? Instead, walls should be individually "dragged" out, and improved in a similar way. Initial walls can be easily breached and only feature a walkway on top, they can be overrun by people using siege ladders, not to speak of something like a jumppack. Further upgrading would make it bigger and more sturdier, you would need a big pile of explosives to blast it open, it would also allow for towers to be build, which would be used as a shooting platform for the defenders and as hardpoints for bigger guns, like wallmounted artillery or AA/AT guns. Also, it should be possible to build additional spawn points (limited to some degree) and barracks, which automatically spawn AI defenders, and something similar for bosses. Everyone of these should be upgradeable as well.
Another part of this is to give bases to SFs. They could hang up their banners and everything, and even hold their meetings there, or just have some fun. This way they would have a lot more motivation for defending it, or even for capturing the base of their arch-enemy, and could even muster some kind of "standing army". Some members of the SF would be designated as architects, who would design the bases defenses.
Also, I can't stress this enough, make bases BIG. Really Big. Bigger than yo mama according to rap and the internet. You could imagine them as a small town even, with the sheer size of these things. A siege would simply take one or two hours, even without defenders, to just get through all the walls.
About the permathingy already mentioned, that's also a vital concept. As soon as you conquer a base, you will have to defend again, or it will switch sides for a second time. If you manage to repel the former defenders, you will first have to build everything from scratch, or remove it, to not give any chance for a second attack (i.e. additional cover for attackers, or stepstones for jump-packing up the wall).

I agree that this sounds definitely intimidating, but base design is a fundamental area of game design in this genre, and if you screw this up, the whole game is no fun anymore for most people (the reason why I don't play PS2 that much anymore). An easier way for the wall thing, which I think is the hardest part of it all, is to place some hardpoints down around the base, which you can individually connect, instead of dragging it all out.

I like your ideas, they're big and intimidating, but not bad.

However I can't say I agree with them. I think that base-building should really be left to the designers. It's too easy for players to leave an accidental defensive gap in zone x, y or z. I don't want to take an enemy keep because I had some rat on the inside who let me know that there's a purposeful gap right here without a tower, nor automated defences/npc's. I want to take it because I had the skill to.

I also want base battles to be large and in charge, I want to need to siege the crap out of this thing before it drops and some people, even giving a complete 100% effort, aren't going to design a top-tier base. I want someone like Miguel, who has a degree in polemology specialized in military strategy from the Royal Military College of Canada, to have input on this. Not someone like me, a 20-something from Florida with a passable interest at best in base construction. Because we're not all architects and while base building is important it's nowhere near the focus of the game, nor should it be. That's why I'd like to leave it to professionals.

I like the idea of giving bases to various strikeforces but that allows for a lot of favoritism if it's being handed down from the War Council. Is the base a permanent addition to the Strikeforces resources or can it be taken from the willy-nilly? Is it only reclaimed when the enemy claims it? If, Nurgle forbid, it's over run by Tyranids do they retain control of it once it's reclaimed? There's a lot of questions to go along with that one.

Man, if we could get the Army Corps of Engineers to design our bases...

At any rate, what I hope to see from a logistics system is that it not only gives bases a sense of value, but it also encourages you to make use of the space between bases.

This means having ammo-carrying vehicles to keep your team supplied on the go, repair vehicles to help engineers fix up lots of stuff fast, and in the unlikely event we do have limited fuel refueling vehicles to keep a push going between bases. This could all be put onto one chassis (ie a Rhino, Trukk, etc.), but it should be in the form of a slotted module so that it can only fill one role at a time.

These utility vehicles would make it possible to set up staging areas/FARPs, where your team can rearm and repair without having to go all the way back to base.

Another useful ability would be if we could set up destructible spawn points such as drop pod beacons, webway gates, warp portals, or tunnel bunkers. These could be further reinforced with deploy-able assets such as wall segments, foxholes, and heavy weapon emplacements to defend these spawn points or provide fire support on an objective. Deploy-able weapons should have limited ammo of course and require a supply vehicle to keep them running.

Supply vehicles shouldn't be an endless barrel of ammo/fuel/repairs either, but have a need to return to base now and then to stock themselves up. They are an extension of a base's support capability, not a base on wheels.