Love where they are going but come on now.  You all whined that walls made it too difficult to get around and was an unfair advantage to the ones living on it.  Now you are all whooping it up about the ability to make impassable terrain with raising ridges and mountains out of a flat meadow?

We will abuse this until you have one tile wide and 34,000 m to get to anywhere that we live.  Better start crying decay, or erosion or "hey we need a way to flatten that ridge even though we don't have a PBS on that island but we want to go shoot them!" now before "Switch back peak" and "caught you in the pit" are common features!

Because you are giving players a way to build fortress islands that are 10X easier to defend than walls that can be shot!

Think it through now, cuz we going to dig pits to bury roamers and travelers in!

If entry / exit TPs were placed on the Beach by te devs that would mean any attackers can circumnavigate around a whole island. This would force an island owner to build mountains around the whole perimeter of TF'able land. loads of work.

If they dont do that & only mountain in a section of an island that could leave large areas to be claimed by some 1 else. an enemy living on the same island as u will brake your defenses faster then one that doesnt.

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ?

Frack you and frack your stuff!

And remember, you are protecting assets; not some lame outpost, but a installation that can and will be leveled to the ground should your defenses fail. The incentive to frack with your stuff is proportionally of many magnitudes higher than before... now that it actually will hurt.

Fascinating.

Eeeeexept that there is a way to get rid of dirt tiles too. So you can get a mirror smooth or a fortress in either cases. Solves absolutely nothing.

With "dirt hauling" it will just make it a little bit more complicated with no real tangible benefits. Also, have any one of you, even for a second, paused and considered how much land mass can you fit in a island? With that puny 1 tile terraform tool it will take 100 man crew at least months to get any tangible results on islands general topography.
The real question here is how the "template" terraforming is going to work for the large crew.

The point siddy makes is the more relevant so far.

The outpost is destructable and we'll assume expensive.

Defenders should have free reign to do anything and everything to make blowing that outpost up as difficult as possible.

Its important to remember, the same with walls, all it takes is a single path to render 10 sq KM of impassible terrain, passable.

Like walls, TF will slow attackers down, and give defenders time to rally a defense; which may be a couple islands away trying to take down someone else's stuff.

As I pointed out before, gamma should not be easy to roam. There needs to be big boy islands.

Anni's point about time is relevant too, fully formed defenses and walls will not show up magically over-night (walls maybe, but probably not impassable terrain) and we've already seen how easy walls are to remove.

too many rules COULD end up making gamma just as unsatisfying to live on as beta is, mainly the risk/loss doesn't justify the gain/epeen of having your own outpost.

I saw 2 most interesting thing on the blog comments.

1. From: Azyre: Can we have Gamma 1, Gamma 2 islands ? as Gamma 1 is safe by syndicate Gamma 2 is pvp island
I am definately ON this, there are many people to want to doing things just for fun, so can be possible. But yes that also contain some problem.

2. From: Mark Zima: The dynamic ore spawn is a wrong idea
I undersatnd Zima, but I need to ask for more details the DEVs these ores will be changed when they "mined out" or there will be a timer to change like 1 mounth there will be static just then will change?
And I also see a problem, you make an area to you to live and then ores just change many times? I wold like to oposite you know the ores on the field and then make "fortress" to help mined out.
After I got some more info can be say more.

And an interesting an would be cool idea.

From: Kaldenines: "...I think some kind of device for going over impassible terrain would be in order. ... how about a carrier type floating platform which would move very slowly over any terrain but mechs would be able to dock in it. ..."

I like this idea but I would like to see these carrier to have low masking range, for the defenders can be see that in time.

AFTER the reading this post:

I see 2-3 things, now we dont know how we can do terraforming will be "dirt" (landmass) or wont, but i prefer that, you can see there will be an island and if there will be dirt you need to accumulate at least in terminal or somewher else on the map you you cant do totatlly flat islands.

I dont know what will be the start "position" the Gammas we just get some randomly generated landmass or flat? Probably 1st.

What about you cant totally block one tile, like you need to do passable in 1 direction that can be a "rule" of terraforming, so you cant totally block.

To Takeo, as we saw if there will be totally sandbox that maximized the advantage to defenders you nearly cant do anything as attackers, at least add some counter "toy" to attackers.

you know, the issue with "conserving" the total dirt of an island is, that you can either destroy anything in your robots cargo, or you destroy the robot.

making it drop on the ground and instant-raise a hill, in case of destruction of the bot isnt a good idea either (someone moves with a scarab to a pvp battle - and theres suddenly a mountain after it exploded )

half a year ago, i have discussed this with Alexadar - It would need a two-module game mechanic, where one is the "intake" and the other one the "outtake" - and one module alone just working as "smudge" or "blurr" brush on the hight-map.

Yep... You should have a very high upkeep cost in order to "rent" to space, as well as a system where if someone wants it bad enough they can go to war with you somehow (maybe a NIC war, maybe PvP, i dunno)

Slowing tiles = free demob

Mommy, evil carebares built a damn STARFORT, i cant roam in their back yard anymore!

I love how people theorize about OP defense when no one have even presented a tangible argument of what "OP" defense constitutes of.

So far, the only "op" defense has been a defense what makes it just impossible to shoot at the structure. If the bases are killable and the owners of the base have big enough "fan base", i am sure the problem of "op" defense becomes quickly moot.
Walls and some, hypothetical, AI defense turrets can never replace players when it comes down to the business.