I've spent a lot of my 500 hours in this game building. I would fill a truck up with building materials, park it somewhere near a fighting front, and proceed to do one of two things:
- Build defenses literally right behind the fighting as friendlies move up, providing them with a reliable fallback point
- Pre-build towns before the front moves to it, tailoring the defenses to repel the kind of force I expect to arrive
In both cases I've had some of my most rewarding moments playing any video game. This game updates frequently and changes in often drastic ways. As primarily a builder, I've mostly been ignored throughout the game's development. Here and there, a change would come to bleed another fifty hours out of me. I can't remember any one change that made me most happy. Some changes disappointed me, at least to a small degree. I never participated in Clan play, so that's a large part of the game I was excluded from by choice.
I think an example will better serve to show what this game is. Better than a review, anyway.
Crumbling Post, 10 PM. I was a Warden, and about to log off for the night. Crumbling Post was our town, and it was absolutely FULL of supplies. It was supplying the front in Linn of Mercy to the west in a war we were losing. It started with me about to log off, but I saw that there were scouts trying to soften the defenses. Or really, just one guy with a mortar and a LUV. There already wasn't much in terms of defense for Crumbling Post, just enough to deter. The war had not yet touched the region at all, so no one bothered much outside of a single Russian clan who were hoarding resources nearby. After some effort, I had beaten this guy into submission, so he finally gave up. But the effort made me rethink the whole front. I noticed what seemed to be a night time clan rushing through our front at Linn of Mercy, and I realized that the front would very quickly shift from the bridges in the west, to the flatlands just outside of Crumbling Post. Except that wouldn't happen at all. They would simply go around the meager defenses outside the town and take it in hours, if any defense was even mounted at all. So I took my truck - which I had been using to do supply runs during the day - and got to work, using the huge amount of building materials stored at the town hall. Nearly done shoring up the main frontal defenses, including patching up weaknesses left behind by incompetent builders before me, another scout popped up and began to shoot rockets at my defenses. It took about thirty minutes to deal with him, but after that, I was completely free. I spent 4 hours that night singlehandedly building up that front, all the while watching the prior front crumbling on the map, minute by minute. When I finally put in the final touches, the defense at Crumbling Post was expanded by two FOBs (FOBs increase how far you can place automated defenses) in length, from one impassible mountain to another.
Blue line is the line of defense I made; it included walls, automated defenses, tank traps, barbed wires, and sandbag emplacements. (This occurred before the trench update.)
By the time I was done, my suspicions turned out to be true. At around 1 AM, Linn of Mercy was entirely theirs, and Crumbling Post was completely open. I was very nervous for the next hour of a clan bumrushing through, but by 2 AM, I had put in the last of the defenses without any harassment. I was too tired to defend it, so I spammed chat to make sure the Australians would try to keep it alive until morning, and I logged off. When I logged on the next day, I saw to my
immense satisfaction that the fight was still raging on at Crumbling Post, so much so that there was a login queue. We held it. I can't remember exactly, but I think we eventually had a clan rush that lead to us winning that war.
I think you could get that in Eve Online. Solo? Not a chance. This is the only game you can get that experience solo. Well, maybe, if your mother drank tap water while pregnant with you, you might get that experience out of Rust, or some other similar buildy game for your fellow pseudo-intellects.
This game is bullshit. I haven't ragequit a game more than I have this, but I come back to it every update. The devs seem like they chug soy, and their occasional livestream dev logs are embarrassing because none of them are able to speak well enough to form sentences into paragraphs without stumbling over every word. The choices they have made, and the reasons given for them, drove me to have literally no confidence in the devs. If you want to enjoy a game like this, you have to enjoy this game now, how it is - because you can bet your ass the devs will fuck it up eventually. Clan players constantly complain about the direction of the game, but I don't play in a clan so I don't have a hugbox to take my opinion from. They may have a point, though. It seems like the devs get all their suggestions for changes from their circlejerk Discord server. Take that as you will.