In a pleasingly symmetrical experience to that of my last post, I also spent a mind-ravaging amount of time visiting towers in Planetside as well recently. The two games work well together, I’m finding, and most nights I’ll put in an hour or two of ultra-harsh ballistic mayhem before grabbing a bite to eat, and then relaxing with a good virtual plywood-based tinkering project. I’m not sure if this makes me more of a rounded human being, per se, but certainly a more balanced kind of obsessive online escapist at any rate.

Two towers in particular occupied much of my most recent session, on the north side of frozen Ceryshen. There’s a map and notes here so you can follow today’s tactical debriefing more closely.

Of late, my ‘Picking the Losing Team’ strategy, based on player team online percentages, has seen me working almost exclusively for the New Conglomerate – the blue/yellow team with the big shotguns, with my previously detailed Infiltration character. Seems the NC are quite unpopular during early evening UK time.

My current build:

  • Infiltration Suit (2): The basic tool for the job. See previous.
  • ATV (1): For the cloaking quad-bike – many of the continents take some time to cross on foot, so some kind of transport is essential.
  • Anti Infantry MAX Armour (3): In the NC’s case, this is the Splattercannon MAX, which does exactly what it says on the tin, being a exoskeletal juggernaught with a truly horrifying semi-automatic shotgun for an arm, about three times the armour of most foot troopers, and a built in force field generator. This suit offers the Reservist, or non-grunt specialist a good way to be useful in the front-line base fighting, and I use it when either I can’t get anything done as a cloaker, or just fancy a change.
  • Hacking (3): Moderately useful, but prequisite to...
  • Advanced Hacking (2): This gives me a bit of a purpose on the battlefield, rather than just showing everyone else how much I suck at pistols. It makes hacking primary objectives a lot faster, and also allows me to steal unattended enemy vehicles, converting them to be owned by our empire, and allowing anyone from our team to use them. You still need the appropriate (or equivalent) vehicle cert to be able to actually drive the thing though. I leave that for others to worry about, and am usually skulking to the next abandoned enemy vehicle long before the original owner returns. This is frivolous, but fun, but also works on deployed AMS spawn point trucks, changing it from one of their spawn points to one of ours. Much of my time is spent hunting these hidden vehicles down and converting them, and this helps the overall advance tremendously, if you can get away with it. Adv Hack also allows the hidden ninja access to equipment from enemy terminals, and coupled with the AI MAX cert above, makes for a very nasty surprise in an enemy base they thought they were safe in. Given the tiny backpack space of the stealth suit, this helps with resupply while under deep cover anyway.
  • Unused Certs (1): The above leaves me with one point spare that I can’t really find a use for. Other certifications that cost one point are Switchblade, a kind of advanced ATV that works as a deployable turret and is amphibious, and the Harasser, a two-man dune buggy thing. However, since you can only unlearn one thing every six hours, it’s more flexible to just leave the point spare. I could then just dump AI MAX, making four usable points I can then split into a two and a two, Ground Support (AMS) and AA MAX, for example.

Implant Slot: Sensor Shield. While active, this hides me from the alarmingly diverse ways I could be shown up on the radar minimap – not good if you’re supposed to invisible. It also makes my footsteps silent, even when running, and prevents the automated deployable Spitfire turrets from sensing, subsequently shredding me. I can still be seen with Darklights, and by my faint outline if I run about too fast, but really, this is a must-have implant for the dedicated cloaker, massively cutting down on those annoying ‘being killed for no obvious reason’ moments. (”zOMG HAX!!1!”)

My usual loadout:

  • Mag Scatter Pistol: The NC specific pistol; it’s more of a sawn-off shotgun, than typical sidearm – high damage, high spread, low range, low rate of fire. Good for ambush, and the usual turning-battle pandemonium that follows.
  • REK: The hacking tool – can’t do any greater good without one.
  • Box of shotgun shells: for the pistol.
  • One of each grenade: For unforeseen circumstances. The EMP grenade is particularly useful for getting rid of mines in enemy doorways.

With that all loaded up, I hit Instant Action, and go see what mischief I can cause. With current numbers, most nights tend to end up with one fully populated three way battle on one continent, and a great deal of desultory skirmishing on another, the target of which changes about frequently. There just isn’t’ enough players to make up two really good fights anymore, which is a shame, and as a Reservist, I get sent to the back of the queue to get into that One Big Fight, until any Subscribers are let in first. Fair enough, I suppose; I am a freeloader after all. It does make queuing to warp anywhere a bit of an exercise in futility though, so I tend to just take the Instant Action Lucky Dip instead, letting the server decide where I’m needed the most.

After an extremely quick base resecure assignment on one of the infantry-centric Battle Islands, which was a bit of a wild goose chase – one lone cloaker trying his luck on an empty base, my next posting came up, on Ceryshen (see map above). It’s a desolate icy world, and a treacherous one, comprising mostly of insurmountable cliffs and deep ravine, making ground travel difficult, and as a result, it’s a pretty unpopular choice of fighting venue – most folks preferring the lush, lightly wooded hills and rivers of Cyssor instead. The NC Secondary force had started a beachhead on Igaluk base (NW corner), coming in from the Solsar warpgate. However, not shown on this map, is the ridiculously tall clifftop mesa that Igaluk and Sedna rest on, and pedestrians and tanks from Solsar have to wind all around the place to actually get up there. AS the redness of that map indicates, this is Terran Republic country, and one of their two ‘home continents’, and predicably enough, within minutes, a sizable home guard had showed up, resecured the hack attempt on Igaluk, and by the time I arrived, they were storming the tower I spawned in, a little to the north of the base.

Tower fights are some of the ugliest fighting in Planetside and this was no exception. I took a few of them with me as I struggled up the stairs in my MAX suit, but the sheer density of corrosive plasma fire, and salvos of Decimator rockets (a kind of shoulder mounted bazooka) soon ended that spree, and you can only have one MAX suit every five minutes. Close-quarters heavy-assault body-slamming is no place for a cloaker, so I was quite glad when they finally put us out of our misery and got a hacker to the tower’s control console, two floors above the spawn room.

The next nearest spawn point we still controlled was that red circle to the north of Sedna, some distance away. Due to the way the lattice works, (those red lines connecting the bases), we couldn’t hack Sedna until we’d captured Igaluk. But Ceryshen is a harsh place to fight, and leaving the tower showed that despite looking right next to the base on the map, the tower and base were separate by a 100m cliff, the tower much lower than the base. Sniper-larity ensured, most of the NC gave up and withdrew to HQ, and most of the TR went south, to defend against the purple team - the Vanu Sovereignty - who must have been feeling left out and were launching offensives against Taraq and Keelut simultaneously.

That left a bunch of TR snipers on the top of the cliff plinking away at the NC left in the tower, while our AV folks, who get the remote control camera-guided missile were having a similar sort of camp-gasm too. For the most part, the action in Planetside moves far too fast for any snipers or AV folks to be able to settle down on a ridge with a deckchair, glass of Pimms and picnic basket, and enjoy a good hour’s uninterrupted sport, so I didn’t begrudge them all their moment, but this wasn’t helping the greater glory of the NC much. Off I trotted, making for the Igaluk tower again. (if you squint at the Igaluk circle closely, you can see the target tower near the top, just above the ‘u’ – it’s that close to the base proper.)

The run takes about two minutes in a cloaker suit, and I didn’t have access to a quad-bike – vehicles can only be got from bases. Some more of the TR were jogging down the road from Igaluk to mop up my comrades, but weren’t paying much attention to invisible people – I’m just glad Planetside isn’t sophisticated enough to do footprints in snow, is all. Eventually, I made it to the target, but topping the rise, I nearly stumbled into what must be the biggest field of Combat Engineering Deployables I’ve ever seen. Landmines, Sentry Turrets, Motion Detectors, the lot, festooned up the valley, lending an almost festive cheer to the stark snow-bound glen.

As I was crouched there, gawping, another NC cloaker sprinted up behind me, and before I could say, ‘Careful, there’s Spitfire Turrets all over the place in there!’ he got gunned down by a Spitfire Turret. As I say…Sensor Shield is a must-have implant. I turned mine on, and began threading my way through the minefield, up to the tower door. Knowing the safe approach distance for landmines is a bit of an acquired skill, but I do know that if there’s one right in the doorframe of the tower, you won’t get through without it killing you. Softly, softly, out with the EMP grenade, arm back, throw, KABOOM! Job done, door clear. I skulk up to it to begin hacking it open, and it opens. Out jumps the TR Engineer that laid all the pretty lights out, on goes darklight, ratta-tatta-tatta-tat!

It’s a difficult call. All veteran CEs know that if someone jammers your door grenade, they want to come in, and can hear it a mile off. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a silent way of disposing of mines, so you’ve got to do it the noisy way, and this puts folks on alert. I wake up back at Sniper Central, north of Sedna. It’s cosy, and neither side seems to show any sign of wanting to either capture the tower, or push out in any extensive way. I suit up and run back to Igluk Tower again. I get to the door again, and sure enough… new mine in the doorway. Patience and Planetside are not words that are often used together, but clearly I now had a Nemesis.

Over the next two hours, he and I engaged in the kinds of cat and mouse stalking and defence that would easily make a screenplay for a third-to-second-rate Hollywood action flick. I’d try decoy jammer grenade lobs, he’d throw plasma grenades to saturate the area. I’d shoot the tower’s wall turrets to set them auto-firing at rocks, he’d do wide sweeps with a darklight. I’d destroy mines with really long lobs from nearby hilltops, he’d replace them just as diligently. Once, I managed to lure him out of one door, and sneak into the tower itself from the opposite side, mostly by using the arrival of a less prepared NC cloaker and his sudden death as a distraction. I made it to the control console, but he shot me in the back as I was hacking.

It was stupid in a way…the assault on Ceryshen had long since stalled, but neither he, no I seemed to be able to blink first, and again and again, I threw myself at the tower, and he managed to repulse my attempts with trickery forethought and patience. I even tried hacking the base itself, more as a distraction, than an actual capture attempt, and some of the other surrounding towers, but the chap would just not abandon his post. I think I may have caught him with a lucky grenade lob once or twice, but since he was guarding his own spawn point, he’d be back at his post longer before I could do anything useful with his death.

In the end, my own self-imposed clock ran out, and I accepted defeat, logging off to eat, and go tinker in Second Life. But despite it being one of the more pointless and doomed offensives in my time, it was certainly one of the more interesting. We never exchanged tells, and I’ve forgotten your name already, but regardless, I salute you!