Team A in a Skirmish is defending a Point accessible by Northern, Eastern, and Southern routes. They need to free up some forces to move on to the next point, but 3 access ways is alot of ground for 1 or 2 men to cover. So they deploy some defences. The Northern Path is wide enough for a Heavy Attack Vehicle to get in and cover the point (or seriously impact the ability to hold the point) so they lay out 3 strategically placed Hedgehogs. This will slow down Heavy Attack Vehicles who must destroy the Hedgehogs in order to penetrate the defender's position. Each hedgehog has HP equivalent to a Supply Depot, so they are not easy to kill.

The Eastern route is a covered walkway. The soldiers deploy 2 'Cover Shields' to allow 2 people to stand and fire with some easily accessible cover nearby. The third route is he landing platform. Accessible only by air. So they deploy 2 Automated AA Guns to deter aerial assault.

Now you have a point, highly defensible, with the ability to counter the 'most likely' threats from each position. The Northern Route can still be traversed by Infantry and the Eastern Route is heavily Defensible from Infantry. Taking apart these defences would require more than just rocking up in a Heavy Attack Vehicle or Dropship. The two infantry defenders do not need to carry any particular equipment to counter threats (making personal choice once again matter), but would be advised to carry at least 1 repair tool to keep the defences from being destroyed or overrun too easily.

Bump, this needs to happen...Dust 1.9 should, in my opinion, absolutely be focused on THIS. ONLY.

We need better deployable equipment to shape the terrain, give the players the ability to shape the maps and leave out CCP force feeding us what they 'think' we need.

1.9 would be nice but as Awry already said, it is a lot of work. Honestly it requires a rework of all maps and sockets plus equipment to accompany it. While not a programer myself, I would still find that difficult.

Perhaps part of the problem stems from the fact that CCP eventually wants their maps random/customizable. So on public matches you never fight in quite the same place twice and in PC you can customize what you have for structures.
If you consider other games, their maps are very much set in stone. Each one is carefully thought out and balance with portions that allow for a mixture of play styles and benefits, but that is hard to achieve when you also want the ability to free form map design.

Ex: Instead of painting a picture for everyone to enjoy CCP has instead decided to create a jigsaw puzzle that allows the creation of several different pictures. So they must balance each piece so that, by itself, it does not create an imbalance and still fits in with several other pictures while not causing imbalances there either.

I have little envy for CCP decision in map design, however if accomplish will create some of the best game play possible by simple virtue of diversity.

I think that the idea is very good, but needs a couple tweaks/additions.

1.) A way to stop spamming of installations.

a.) I foresee many maps being transformed into a giant mess of Bolases dropping walls everywhere. This would make the map inaccessible to tanks.

b.) A squad limit wouldn't work, because you can have up to 15 squads, so what if one person/squad put all the teams installations in very bad places?

c.) Perhaps make the hedgehogs have less than the health of a supply depot. Maybe 10k health? Also, make them available to be shield, armor, or balanced with their health design.

2.) AA guns shouldn't be deployable since drop ships are very easy to kill anyways. (and assault drop ships have to dodge enough)

Overall I think if you took the idea and shrunk it down in order to be more manageable and not abused, it would work wonders to improve gameplay and not make every match the same.

Funny, CCP/Shanghai wanted tanks to be simpler and have to play to a very specific play style. They accomplished that with 1.7, not that I agree with anything in their goals, solutions or methods but it has been accomplished: Tanks are easier to use. Simpler to operate and cheap enough to play early on.

This makes it better for a F2P game as New Berries can decide if they want to skill into vehicles without wasting the huge amount of SP required to do so.

The numbers balancing idea is just the clueless grasping at straws. It will make no difference in the short term nor the long term.

We have no information except the seat of our pants QQ-ing from so many Kittens. CCP keeps all the information secret as they don't want any other company to find out the monetary value of Dust514. At least one might suggest that regardless of the fact is we don't believe there are enough Mercs to matter all that much. The only value that matters is how much RWC (Real World Cash) is being spent at the PS store.

All the QQ in the world will make no difference if their income is enough or goes up.

So basically you are just asking for more divers maps that hold player interaction and to be able to call down buildings/fortification. Hmm you know we have something like that in the game called Starthawk but I see where you are going with this because I have seen something similar to it done before and it worked well to fight off vehicles and infantry it really made people have to work as a team or they would all die no matter how good they were.

I have seen Starhawk also, but it was not actually the original inspiration for this idea... but could be held as an example of how such a system could be done, and has been done.

Thanks for making a comment to me about that also I have a idea that you might like here is a link to it https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=143952&find=unread

The idea of introducing NPC allies into a warzone is a nice one. One that could potentially be epic.

However... first off it's not in CCPs general overall designs. They try to make things as player centric as possible. EVE is mostly player run with NPCs almost exclusively being hostiles or mission givers.

Secondly, each one of those Ai entities would have a brain... brains require calculation, calculation requires memory. With everything that currently draws on memory already causing technical issues, I don't think it would be advisable as yet.

Now good point here, is that it expands conflict, allows players to delegate an NPC 'Squad' to do something, freeing them up to do other things. But where do you stop? If you're equipping these NPCs why can't you outfit your entire 'squad' in Tanks? Can you imagine the infantry rage if suddenly full teams could be augmented by full squads of tanks on top of the team, rather than using one of the team to drive said tanks? Or Assault Dropships?