If your building your base defense like i have seen many turret emplacements on PTS now - then your just doomed to lose your PBS.

and if i see that correct - the PTS terraforming is accelerated atm -> when it goes life it will be ultra slow. Doing your dirt-wall tactic will take hours.

I'm not sure I understand your use of exploit here. Having a lot of ways to defeat turrets, using game mechanics, is actually a good thing; it breeds inovation in deployment and combining different defensive elements to close the vulnerabilities. As well as attacker developing new ploys to defeat them.

If they are actually exploitable, either offensivly or defensively, those are things we need to uncover on the test server. To my knowledge though, no one has actually scrimaged a defended outpost yet.

The reason I brought up the fact of no one other than the corp that owned a pbs structure could terraform within 1000m of that structure was due to the ablity to create unassailable fortifications around the teleports on the gamma islands.  This would have allowed an alliance to completely seal off an island from access from any of the inter-island teleports, with no possible counter.  This would created a rather static, and dull, gamma island environment.

However, there is another way to do this:
- within 1000m of a terminal, no other corp other than the terminal owner can terraform.
- terminals must be deployed 3000m minimum from any teleport
- no one can terraform within 1000m of a teleport

This would result in:
- no one being permanently able to seal the island off.
- the immediate area of the pbs base being terraform controlled by the controlling corp
- a minimum of 1000 meters between the 2 zones that anyone can do anything.
- since it would be measured from the terminal only, and all the pbs that have to be deployed taking up space, and turrets mostly being on the edges of a base, then offensive seigeworks, like ditches and embankments, are still viable for use. Or for that matter, terraforming a ramp that ends up higher than the defender's base an fireing down with snipers...

Anyhow, i'm sure everyone and their dog is going to find all sorts of things wrong with the above, but at least it may be a possible way to balance terraforming, pbs control, and island access.  If you have a better solution, give it, if all you have is whining and criticism, just don't bother.

As Saramara says, the issue isn't really about teleports, but the fact that noone else but the owner corp would be able to terraform in a 1000m radius of their terminal. And this isn't a small downside, it would be a big problem. They could simply erect a wall around their base and relatively quickly open&close a small "door" whenever they want to get in or out. There would be no way to counter this other than waiting for them to come out at the wall 24/7.

How about terraforming height limit in that 1000m radius based on current terminal foundation height?

How about some kind of mechanics that doesn't allow to create any area surrounded by impassable terrain forcing ppl to leave a passable way? Like O - no, nevah! but C - ye thats it? As an additional to this - can we have some kind of structure that can work as gates and destroyable?

solution would be dropships and carrier - making those ultra-slow glider transporter into something that could pass any terrain.

artifical terraforming restrictions will never work.

Ok, a second, probably easier to implement idea.

In order to activate terraforming control for yourself within 1000m of an outpost, you must build a road (would require new "stuff"), it has to be at least 1 tiles wide and extend to 1000m from your terminal, walls, buidlings and plants cannot be place/grow on here, you need to place the terminal down first, and the road can be transfered to a new terminal as long as it is connected.

3 new "things"

Road layer module

Road layer chargers (sold by npcs for 50k nic a piece)

Road repair charges (much cheaper than the road charges, repair x amount of health to a road tile)

Road can be place on tiles which are passable for every bot type, they give a +[Something]kph speed boost while on them, they cannot be shot, or blow up with bombs, but they do degrade like walls do (much faster if the terminal it was around is destroyed/removed and the limit/effect disappears, and they degrade 20x faster), they show up as a "concrete flooring" like effect that is already in game.

These tiles would act as a single entity in terms of control, the owning corp can set was relation can recieve the buff, maybe make them "powered" by your energy network via a reciever node.

You cannot build roads within 1000m of another teminal, and only 1500m from your own.

Another corp cannot build a terminal within 1500m of yours

Quick example : http://i.imgur.com/NTGcJ.jpg

Next problem, how to stop long range bots from easily destroying your base/turrets/buildings from afar.

an interesting idea here, i was thinking something similar last night.

I would say you run a check from teleports and outposts.
Each teleport must be able to reach every other teleport via passable terrain
each outpost must be able to reach every teleport via passable terrain

1: take a snapshot of terrain map
2: analyse paths between teleports and outposts
3: if it passes save the snapshot
4: if it fails do a rollback of the island's terrain to the last acceptable snapshot
     (perhaps send a broadcast message to the island's inhabitants explaining the change)
5: repeat

this process could be offloaded to not affect the server process
it could be repeated as frequently as desired / reasonable to control the amount of potential rollback.

the only concern i can think of is what happens to structures placed during period of rollback.
alternatively you could have the system flag a dev/gm to investigate and dev hax down the offending terrain.
(making it a violation to completely wall off teleports / outposts, which, honestly, should be a rule)

I've spent the last week terraforming and placing down structures.

"Defeating turrerts with terraforming" is much easier to SAY than to DO.

If a base is unguarded, defeating turrets by using terraforming is less effcient then disconnecting them from the network, and tanking down their accumulator. This is a sandbox game though, so even though most attackers will NEVER use TF do defeat turrets, I think they should be allowed to fast the time and resources to do it if they want.

The ONLY restriction should be the placement of TF beacons by non-corp members within 3000m of an outpost. But not a limitation on if they can TF manually.

If the base is guarded, which it should be, attackers won't be able to spend an unlimited amount of time terraforming.

But going back unguarded...

even unguarded, attackers can not destroy your foundation buildings. you can take them down to 50%, and that's it.

they can clear out all the upgrades, backbones, ect, but until the 3 day emergency period ends, the worst an attacker can do is cost you time and NIC.

And, as long as they can't beacon TF, they'll have to spend a lot of individual time terraform/griefing your location.

But the most important thing, is devs need to DECIDE this before going live.

A lot of people liked the freedom of placing walls, the counter arguement was that beta wasn't the proper setting for that type of building, but that gamma would be.

Let gamma be that place then.

+1 to ideas like Terraform Aurua foundations though, so outpost owners that have an established base can recover from enemy terraforming quicker; but again it doesn't work with beacons. This will cut down on griefing, why spend 4 hours TF'ing an enemy base, when they can repair it in an hour.

+1 to advanced bots with better slope capacity; or make a very heavy leg module that lowers the center of gravity and increases slope capacity (and demob resist too just to make it more attractive to use).

tl;dr - This game has FFA loot, some parts (gamma) should also be FFA sandbox. If corps don't want to or can't defend an open outpost, they can still play on Beta.

Note: Just like beta outposts are now, just because players want to use them, doesn't mean they'll be able to. Trying to make gamma safe from griefing and emergent play before it even launches... hard to believe more people aren't speaking up AGAINST putting limits in. Does this mean I'm no longer a carebear!?!?!

Oh .. smack. 

True though, players with the devs on Instant messanger probably get more consideration than long, eruditical posts, unless they happen to coincide with said IMs.