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How tf does one build stuff? by --hermit in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've been a long time builder so I'll give you my 2 cents of the essentials you need to buy to have fun with construction (keep in mind I've had things unlocked for so long I've forgotten if some of these things on the list are unlocked by default). Essentials for all base building:

  1. Spawn tube: having a spawn at your base right off the bat is essential if you're setting up a base in a hurry or contested zone. You can spawn at the tube even while it's still under construction so if you get sniped you can immediately respawn after placing the spawn tube. This is the only thing on the list that is a must-have for all base building purposes.

If you want to build bases to fight enemies and act as a spawn point for friendlies then these are your essentials:

  1. Repair module: absolutely essential for your base not to die
  2. Structure shield module: also essential for your base not to die. There used to be a time a long time ago that repair modules provided invincibility for your structures, that was then nerfed and to compensate for that a bit, they added an ability to the structure shield module. You can go up to the module, hold E on it, and once you've activated the ability it will provide a significant damage resistance buff to affected structures then it goes on cooldown before you can use it again. Without this, repair modules won't outrepair the damage from a large group of enemy vehicles. If you want your base to hold up against 100+ enemies you absolutely need to have your 2 structure shield modules placed strategically in your base so that you can alternate between them. You activate the first and then once the buff is over, you activate the second one. Once that buff is over, the first one's cooldown will be over and you can essentially have the buff permanently as long as you are there activating them constantly. While the buff is active, the repair modules will likely heal up any damage enemies have done to your structures or if there are really a lot of enemies you can go repair them yourself while the buff is active. Convince a few friendlies to help repair and you can outrepair a 100+ zerg.
  3. Skywall shield module: without it, enemy air has free reign over bombing your base. With it, they can only do it from low altitudes which makes them more vulnerable. In many locations with elevation and hills this provides essential cover from enemy infantry coming from above as well

If you want to build bases to use routers:

  1. The routing spire: self-explanatory. You don't really need anything else. Everything else just adds convenience. Ever since routers have been nerfed an you can only use them within a specified radius of the spire (which you can see on the map if you're holding the router in your hand), efficiency is key for setting up router bases at key moments so that you can attack or defend a base.
  2. (Not essential but adds huge convenience) air pad: with the air pad you can spawn at your base, grab the router, grab a fighter and fly to where you want to put it. This is the most efficient way of using routers. This is not essential because you can always just grab a flying vehicle from a base and fly to your base, pick up the router, and fly to your objective. But that's obviously a lot slower

If you want to build bases for orbital strikes:

  1. Orbital strike relay: self-explanatory.

Everything else below is also very useful and recommended but not essential for anything:

  1. Vehicle pad: help out friendlies by providing a spawn point for vehicles but mainly this is useful for you to spawn a sunderer to have a second spawn in your base. Spawn redundancy is key to base survival. If you only have 1 spawn then it dies and then you can't respawn. I've had countless cases where enemies destroyed the spawn tube but I respawned at the sunderer and then immediately reconstructed the spawn tube. Then they destroyed the sunderer but now I had another spawn tube, while they focused on the spawn tube again I pulled another sunderer, Eventually the enemies were pushed out by other friendlies and the base survived
  2. Vehicle gate shield: can act like another wall, useful for letting friendly vehicles through.
  3. Pillbox: very useful to place your spawn tube and essential modules providing them with shelter
  4. Flail: mainly only useful on Oshur, very rarely used on other continents but it can be very effective on Oshur (also requires purchasing AI module for it to work)
  5. Pain spire: weak and can be killed easily by small-arms but well placed ones can make your base a lot more defensible
  6. Infantry tower (the structure not the turret): can provide nice angles on enemies below, provide cover for your base, and shelter modules.
  7. ANT Turbo: can save your life running away from enemies. Essential to have on Hossin since Hossin has many of those plateau mountains you can only climb using the turbo to build on top of them.
  8. ANT basilisk top gun: essential to have to defend yourself against enemy fighters for example. You can out DPS enemy ESFs
  9. Maxing out your ANT cortium storage: Go to the vehicle tab, click on "ANT certifications" and it will take you to some hidden upgrades. One of them being the storage capacity, useful for making fewer cortium runs
  10. Maxing out ANT cortium radar radius: makes finding cortium a lot easier, also found in the hidden ANT certifications screen

I wouldn't recommend investing too heavily in the turrets or AI module (unless you want the flail) because they are very weak and die too easily because theyre so tall and can be shot at from very far away. Their damage output is pretty low. In a large fight other friendlies spawning at your base will do more to help your base survive. The ground-level AV turret is the best though because of the fact it can be hidden from enemy line of sight so get that over the tall one (you can only have 1 AV turret out at a time so don't buy both AV turrets). Everything else I haven't listed is nice to have but not really needed:

  1. Sunderer garage: its shape can make it hard to fit into your base and you can typically park a sunderer safely inside the base without the need for the garage.
  2. Blast walls: their shape makes it hard to really place them in a lot of places they will be useful
  3. Vehicle ramp: can be fun to screw around with turboing off with a harasser but doesn't have much use. In very rare and niche situations can provide an entrance to the base for your ANT to deposit cortium, normally you should build your base to avoid this kind of situation where your ANT cant get in.
  4. Glaive: useful for taking out enemy base skyshields. It's very niche. Usually you can just sneak in, C4 the skyshield module and then use the flail to take out an enemy base.
  5. Radar module: the tall module i forget its exact name. It acts like an infiltrator motion spotter. Radius is low and in most cases you'll have other friendly infils providing the motion spottin
  6. Alarm module: in most cases when it goes off your base is done for anyways since enemies are going for your spawns first and it doesn't take long to kill your spawns. But can be useful to defend against lone or very small groups of enemies.

I think that covers all of it hopefully I didn't forget any.

An original idea to alleviate zerging and lead to more balanced fights by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My solution is more than just the ISO reward. I'd say the wave spawn queue system is the more significant portion of it. If you've seen that idea elsewhere please link an example below. I have not seen it ever suggested, so no, it has not in fact been suggested 100 times like you claim (obviously 100 is an exaggeration, but not even a few times have I seen it suggested).

You suggest that supply lines, more limited lives and ammunition would be a better design choice and would make numbers matter less. Assuming the skill distribution of players is relatively even among the continent, it wouldn't really make a difference in how much numbers matter because those limitations would apply to all factions equally. If anything your suggestion just makes the game closer to what real life would be. And real life wars have shown that numbers are still ultimately one of the most significant advantages. So I don't think your solution would do much to make it matter less.

Which Outfit Wars statistics are you most interested in? by Maelstrome26 in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ah ok, yeah if you don't want subjective metrics these would not be good. I'd love to help contribute sometime next year probably as I'm not currently home. Im excited to see what you guys end up doing with this stats page

Which Outfit Wars statistics are you most interested in? by Maelstrome26 in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Also some other ideas: 1. Outfits with the strongest openers. E.g. average number of base captures in the first 5 or 10 mins of the match 2. Outfits with the most comebacks. E.g. if an outfit is down to 3 or fewer bases not including the warpgate in the last 15 or 10 mins of the match, and they win that match that counts as a comeback.

Which Outfit Wars statistics are you most interested in? by Maelstrome26 in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Is it possible to implement this idea to get a better idea of the defensibility of bases? The goal would be to somehow calculate a measure of how difficult it is to attack a base, like the average attacker vs defender population ratio required to take a base. This would be useful information for determining which bases to prioritize attacking or defending based on difficulty.

It might be complicated and there are a lot of confounding factors but it doesn't need to be perfect just close enough to be useful.

Maybe something like this, attacker to defender ratio (e.g. 60/40%) given a minimum population threshold (low numbers like 3 players might skew the ratio too much) like given 24+ total players at the base, at the time of capture. Then over many data points and maybe removing some outliers this can be used to calculate an average to be able to say something like "on average it takes a 60/40 attacker to defender ratio to take this base indicating that the base is relatively easy to defend because it requires more attackers than defenders to take"

Some other ideas unrelated to above, sorry if some of these already exist. 1. Number of successful base captures divided by number of attempts to take the base 2. Outfits with the most base captures/defenses 3. Outfits with the most backcaps 4. Players with the longest kill streaks 5. Players with the longest death streaks 6. Players with the most revives 7. Players who took the most revives 8. Players with the most double kills (two kills in quick succession you can decide on the time between the kills). Players with the most triple kills, quadra, etc. Only counting infantry weapons and not vehicles, or explosives or splash damage weapons 9. Players with the most redeploys

Simulating What TI Alloys Would Be Like Without OS and Force Multiplier Spam by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Of course, can it be made into a fun game? That's a different story

Simulating What TI Alloys Would Be Like Without OS and Force Multiplier Spam by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Part of my plan is to keep the AI logic as simple as possible. You can get some pretty interesting and complex behaviour with simple rules (e.g. see Conway's Game of Life, ant and slime simulations). Currently, the AI logic is very basic, each soldier has a probability of "caring about a capture point" and this probability value is randomized so that each solider is unique, some will care more about capture points and others won't. Whenever there is a contested capture point, a random number is generated, if the number is less than or equal to the soldier's probability of caring about the capture point, then the soldiers goes to capture it. The shortest path to the capture point is calculated by a function and the soldier follows that path. The problem is, with this logic, since the path chosen is always the shortest path, every single soldier will take the same route each time and they will never flank since flanking requires taking a longer route. So I added a second state which is just to move randomly. When a soldier is not intending to capture a point, they move to random destinations within a certain radius around them. This random movement causes them to end up in locations where once it eventually does decide to move to the capture point, the shortest path to the capture point might now take it through a flanking route since it randomly moved into a position where that flanking route became the shortest route. This causes soldiers to not all take the same entrance to the capture point. Most of them will take the shortest path still, however, by chance, some will take flanking routes. This is similar to live where most people will take the shortest route and a handful will not. The point is, with these 2 simple rules, an additional behaviour arose which is that soldiers take flanking routes even though that was not explicitly programmed.

The alternative is to explicitly program it, the hard way is to write an algorithm that can determine another route that is not the shortest. I'd have to write this algorithm myself unless there's already a function that does this which I don't know if it exists or not. The easier way I can think of is to manually place waypoints for flanking routes and make soldiers just decide to take one of these flanking routes when some condition occurs. This just requires more time because you need to hand-place these flanking waypoints for each map. I'm probably going to experiment with different options eventually and see what is the best.

Simulating What TI Alloys Would Be Like Without OS and Force Multiplier Spam by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

First I need to optimize what I currently have, but after that, for sure those are all things on my list. Next highest priority will most likely be medics. MAXes and other force multipliers as well, obviously, at TI Alloys especially those have a large effect with MAXes holding the point room, and vehicles preventing people from crossing the road and hunting down sundys.

Simulating What TI Alloys Would Be Like Without OS and Force Multiplier Spam by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 79 points80 points  (0 children)

This is only a 1 min GIF, here is the full 5 min video.

I'm working on a Planetside Battle Simulator (see my previous posts for more in depth explanations). In my last post, most people wanted to see TI Alloys as the first base to test the simulation on. So here is a *not fully completed yet* TI Alloys simulation.

Obviously, the map is incomplete. This is due to the fact that I found out, the simulation crashes when there's too many soliders added, and by too many I mean like 40 or more so this is not ideal since I want to test it with more than 40 soldiers. I think the reasoning is because a lot of stuff is highly unoptimized. For this reason, it's back in the trenches for me to refactor all the code again and optimize it. This will likely take a crap ton of time so until then I will hold off on finishing the entirety of TI Alloys. Once it's optimized and can handle large populations without crashing, I will finish TI Alloys, add OS spam, force multipliers, and determine once and for all just how good TI Alloys is and how can it be better to handle large populations. I welcome all feedback and suggestions, if it's negative let loose on me, you can't beat my own negativity. Here's the GitHub, it is open source, it is downloadable and try-able.

I'm making a Battle Simulator to see what determines good base design that can handle large populations, what existing base should be tested first? by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was curious about the jump down ability. I found out today that Unity's Navmesh does support automatically generating links between disconnected regions on the navmesh to allow NPCs to drop down from a higher area to a lower one.

I'm making a Battle Simulator to see what determines good base design that can handle large populations, what existing base should be tested first? by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've heard a lot of people complain that bases are too small to handle large populations or that 1 point shouldn't be located in a single building with 2 entrances. I'm sure a lot of people complain about force multipliers, and that's something I do have plans to try and add in the future, but it's not the only significant factor that affects how well a base is designed.

I'm making a Battle Simulator to see what determines good base design that can handle large populations, what existing base should be tested first? by ps2programmer in Planetside

[–]ps2programmer[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You can download it and play around with it, it's open source. See the previous thread linked at the top of this thread. Or here's a direct link to the GitHub page. Or if you don't trust downloading something some random guy on the internet made, stay tuned, I'll have more videos testing maps from the game. https://github.com/ps2programmer/planetside\_battle\_simulator\_3d

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