I think the cleverness of the game design is that whenever a player unlocks a weapon by paying money, they need to play the game to get the certs to improve it. The more you buy, the more you need to play the game to get the most out of it.
In the end, the only advantage that dedicated players will have over casual players is flexibility. A casual player will only have a few things maxxed out. The dedicated player will have a lot of things maxxed out. In a single firefight, flexibility doesn’t really matter, so skill matters more than paying. But the dedicated player can try lots of different loadouts. It’s a good balance.
I saw an awesome aerial dogfight the other day. Two of the high-speed fighter craft were chasing each other. One of them flew underneath a biolab, between its legs. The other stayed on their tail the whole time. Neither one crashed and both came out the other side. That was skilled pilots. I was on the ground and I plinked the enemy craft with my shotgun a few times.
Not onl.y does there need to be an incentive to defend, there needs to be more bases that are defensible. Right now you can defend the Crown and Bio labs maybe? Everything else is going to fall relatively quickly, unless two zergs meet or you get some very stubborn defenders.
Quite the opposite, double XP weekends help the lower ranked people catch up. The cost effectiveness of unlocks goes down as you go up.
Take nanoweave armor for example. It’s something like
Rank 1 - 5% more health, 1 certs
Rank 2 - 10% more health, 10 certs
Rank 3 - 15% more health, 50 certs
Rank 4 - 20% more health, 150 certs
Rank 5 - 25% more health, 1000 certs
A super dedicated player could get rank 5, but someone who plays casually can easily attain ranks 3 and 4, which are almost as good. The double XP helps people working the lower ranks on limited time/boosts/resources more than people who play a lot and buy those things.
But I think everyone with half a brain who isn’t utterly steadfast in their refusal to spend any money on a game they like is going to be buying boosts on friday, so they’re going to catch up massively very quickly.
Granted, you get an xp boost for defending. If you put together a squad of engineers maxes and medics, supported by sunderers, you can get a lot of massively boosted “passive” xp. Medics in particular are going to rake it in- a fully certed medic applicator is one of the few upgrades that truly benefits from being maxed out (fast revive, target comes back with 100% health). Revivng someone at a base under attack will yield a ton of xp next week.
Other than that, most of the cash purchases are either cosmetic or sidegrades. I considered getting the HE and AP vanguard guns, but I changed my mind due to HE being less effective vs armor and buffed flak, and AP too situational (its still 2 hits from the rear to kill a tank with AP also). In the end, the (free) HEATcannon is the best all around, and if I bought the others, id have to sink certs into zoom upgrades.
The tank secondaries similarly come with an all-comers variant from the get go. The only other secondary that really stands out is the vanu saron. The rest trade damage/ROF/accuracy/intended target with each other.
The 3x deal actually went live just now, so you can start if you want.
Even if you are a cheap bastard, you should at the very least throw them $5 for the boosts you can get over the christmas break, because boosts are doubled too, and paying $1.66 a week for them will net you a whole lot of extra certs.
Edit: The fact that it went live early means you can use today’s christmas deal thing which is 15% off all vehicle weapons. So if you’re going to buy a zepher or A2A missiles or whatever, get them now.
I wouldn’t rush into buying anything major today. They had a 15% off all vehicle weapons yesterday as part of the Christmas thing - so maybe tomorrow they’ll have 15% off all infantry weapons or something. Buy the SC today, but wait to see how the sales shake out before you spend them.
Here’s an idea for us to try. If we get like 6 people with dual burster maxes, we can all load into a sunderer (they can be sunderer passengers) and drive along a random empty road somewhere. An enemy fighter sees a lone sunderer, starts to line up for a rocket attack… when all of the sudden 6 AA maxes pop out like a clown car of doom and just utterly destroy him. Hop in and repeat. That would be funny, we should do it.
Anyway, at least throw them $10 for this triple SC sale, at the very least you should get some boosts for this double XP weekend since the boosts double too and we’ll be playing a lot. I suggest buying more, of course, as I said, it doesn’t get any better than this opportunity.
I’m waiting to see what sales are happening. I currently have 17,000 station cash. I’m definitely using 500 to get a 7 day boost (it takes the +100% from double xp, adds another 100%, plus 35% for my subscription, so 235% more xp). I also found that while boosts and double xp dont increase capture xp, subscription xp DOES; I get 1350 for base captures.
A tip for other cheapskates: when shopping for lewt, check not just the station cash price but also the cert price. Some stuff is actually more cost effective to buy with certs, particularly during sales. I’m only planning on buying weapons that were originally 700 station cash/1000 certs.
I’m a little worried, because playing this morning, the skies were choked with TR liberators, farming infantry spawn buildings. Sony really needs to look at this. I’m fine with a gunship type aircraft, but their effectiveness is so lopsided its looking like AirSide here.
15% sale off infantry gear today - gear meaning cosmetics. Composite armors, helmets, camos, decals, etc. Decorate yourself. Hopefully there will be a 15% off infantry weapons sale too.
Another idea I want to try. It’s cheesy but it would make a funny video.
There’s apparently no limit on how long you can wait to take a res. So we capture an amp station or a tech plant. 6+ of us deliberately die near the capture point via friendly fire. Medic issues a res to each of us, but we don’t take it right away. In fact we alt tab and go do something else for 15 minutes. The base gets defended, rebuilt, and the other team moves on. Suddenly 15 minutes later, we all resurrect inside the undamaged base shields and capture the territory for our side. It would be the biggest WTF for any defenders still around.
I wouldn’t want to bother with this as a general tactic, but as a one time video it could be funny.
So looking carefully at the prices for the tank guns, they almost seem kind of a ripoff to buy them with Station Cash (unless they are having a sale) because while HE and AP cost ~500 certs, they still cost 700 station cash. For the 1000 cert items (such as the burster arm, which I spent SC on) its worth it, but not if the cert cost is LESS then the SC cost.
I bought the Kobalt for my Vanguard, gave it IR and hoo boy is it easy to both see and plink infantry. With everyone and their momma getting flak armor, I’m reconsidering the AP rounds and using the Kobalt as my anti-infantry weapon (which is a super-accurate bullethose and with IR its really easy to see infantry).
This evening I camped our Tech plant just mowing down any TR dumb enough to cross my field of fire. With a 7 day boost, premium membership, double xp week and defense bonus, I was getting 400xp a kill :eek: I get around 90+ for assists alone. A lot of stuff I originally planned on spending station cash to buy I might just be able to get with cert points now! I went a little overboard, and it got to the point of people running in my field of fire that I’m weapon locked. But its worth it.
Tonight we conducted the longest siege of a biolab I’ve ever seen. I think we spent 6 hours alternately assaulting, surrounding, cutting off, and assaulting Allatum held by the NC. I’ve never seen a biolab hold out that long. The place was completely loaded with overpowered shotgun NC maxes, they were just slaughtering us in there.
The siege was eventually broken when the NC teammates, the Vanu, decided to show up and give them a helping hand. We’d owned about 75% of the continent at this point, and then NC and Vanu split it right down the middle - not attacking each other, only attacking TR. We lost the whole continent in about 90 minutes.
We’ve had some awesome fights the last couple of night. That huge sprawling open field fight between Mao and Howling pass a couple nights ago, an epic defense of zurvan against a siege of both sides for hours tonight, great stuff.
Refinement of my clown car of AA maxes idea. Instead, let’s get an AA galaxy going - try to get enemy aircraft to attack us, shoot them down with our guns - but, if they seem like they’re becoming overwhelming, we land the galaxy at which point they will close in for the final attack and… 8 AA maxes pop out of it and start slaughtering them.
I forgot to mention the funniest part of last night - a ridiculous vanu zerg showed up at zervan, about 40 or 50 magriders. They were just rolling over us up until that point. But they got to zurvan and there were the vehicle shields, and they were all perplexed. Having a vehicle shield was totally crippling to them because no one would get out of their magriders.
So we were having these awesome small scale battles where like 8 guys would come in towards the vehicle shield generator and we’d kill them all. Meanwhile the entire magrider army just sat outside the base and waited around rather than do something useful and actually fight on foot.
I think more bases should have vehicle shields to slow down and break up the zerg, and give defenders a meaningful chance to fight the zerg.
2 new videos. This is one from the prowler run I made when we recapture the eastern side of the map from NC on thursday. It’s basically an advertisement for deploy/HE ammo.
This one was taken with a less upgraded prowler a couple weeks ago, when I was still using the halberd (which I still use situatonally sometimes), shows good teamwork between Mutton and I and the dumbness of NC.
So getting dual mercies, the TR max goes from almost useless to overpowered. With my first few runs with it last night I went like 60 kills 5 deaths. Granted, it was an ideal situation with a lot of friendly engineer support (and supporting a max in combat is one of the highest XP things you can do in the game), but still, that thing shreds everyone. It’s not quite as powerful as the NC maxes, but it’s massively better than the other TR max loadouts. If you want to play a max, it’s expensive but get those.
