Facilities need a way to sell their products to random players

Facilities have become a part of Foxhole's logi system that you can't avoid interacting with if you want to make use of some of the most important tools in the game.

The problem is that there is no good, developer-supported way for a random player to interact with a facility.

Imagine that I am a frontline player who needs a Chieftain. I find a facility that produces them, but now I have to figure out who operates the facility, determine whether they are online, contact them, arrange a trade, and get the required resources to them. I then have to hope that they are willing to stop what they are doing to handle the transaction. Alternatively, I can hope that someone has made their entire facility public, dedicating all of their play time to offering these tools for free.

This is particularly awkward because facilities are complicated enough that random players should not necessarily be walking around and moving resources themselves. A facility owner may have spent hours producing specialized materials and setting up production chains, and they may not want strangers taking resources or accidentally disrupting their production.

The result is a strange situation where the game increasingly requires players to interact with facilities, while providing very little support for the actual interaction between the people operating those facilities and the players who need their products.

Add a Facility Trade Depot

The solution could be a dedicated structure for facility-to-player commerce. A facility owner could place a completed product into the Trade Depot and create a listing specifying the price and quantity. For example, they might list a Chieftain for 3,500 Components.

A random player could then walk up to the Trade Depot, select the Chieftain, deposit the required 3,500 Components, and receive the tank. The facility owner would control what is being sold and the price, while the game would handle the actual exchange.

This would eliminate the need for the buyer and seller to find each other through Discord or region chat, while also preventing the buyer from having to interact directly with the facility's production infrastructure.

This could also make facilities easier to find

Existing Facility Map Posts could potentially be integrated with the trade system. A facility could advertise something like:

> Trade Depot

> Chieftain - 8 available

> 3,500 Components

A player looking for a Chieftain could then find an actual facility offering one rather than having to search Discord or ask around in region chat.

To go even further, facility map posts could be customizable. If you're selling chieftains, maybe you also mpf 250mm and transport it to the trade depot for sale. The map post creator could then check some boxes and select only chieftains and 250mm to appear on the map post.

> Trade Depot

> Cheiftain - 8 available - 3,500 components each

> 250mm Fury - 24 crates available - 25 sulfur per crate

The larger problem is the missing economic layer

Foxhole already has an economy in practice. Players gather resources, refine them, manufacture goods, transport them, and distribute them. Facilities have made this economy considerably more specialized by allowing groups of players to focus on particular types of production.

What is missing is a proper interface between those specialized producers and the rest of the faction.

A Trade Depot would fill that gap without removing the logistical gameplay that makes Foxhole interesting. Players would still have to build and maintain facilities, gather resources, run production, transport goods, defend their facilities, determine what they want to produce, set their prices, and physically transport purchased equipment to the front.

The game would simply handle the tedious part of the transaction: exchanging the buyer's resources for the seller's finished product.

The goal isn't to remove player interaction from facilities. It is to make that interaction possible without requiring the buyer and seller to personally find each other first.

I think one of the biggest gaps in capability in the game currently is the ability to clear trenches from range.

Both sides have satchels/hydras. Both sides have push 250mm. Both sides have vehicle 250mm.

Collies have the lunaire, which can easily be used to kill trenches. Wardens have the cutler, which cannot target trenches.

This leads to a capability gap where trenches are much easier for collies to kill than it is for wardens.

As every single offense in the game requires clearing enemy trenches, this gap in capability has a large impact on the game.

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Here are some possible options for wardens to gain parity with the collies.

• Anti-trench RPG ammunition: Give the Warden RPG a specialized demolition warhead that can effectively destroy trenches from a safe distance.

• Warden demolition grenade launcher: Give Wardens an osprey exclusive demolition grenade.

• Light infantry mortar: Give Wardens a portable, deployable mortar with enough range to destroy trenches from outside normal infantry engagement range.

• Demolition rocket launcher: Introduce a dedicated shoulder-fired weapon with limited ammunition and high trench damage.

• Specialized anti-trench vehicle: Introduce a lighter, cheaper vehicle equipped with a weapon specifically designed to clear trenches.

---

Plenty of pros and cons with each suggestion.

Personally, the idea of a tripod deployed mortar sounds pretty cool. Like the fissura, except longer indirect and an inability to fire close. Could just allow it to fire tremolas to keep logi simpler.

It'd still be vulnerable to collies pressing forward with lunaires to kill it, meaning wardens would need to secure the area before it could be used. This probably means something like a 50m range?

Anyways, discuss.

Sort of like advertisements, I hardly even notice myself just moving right past them without much thought. Shout outs have become so common they've lost their value. They're like review swaps, in that they really don't mean anything other than both authors wanting to advertise.

Of course there are going to be authors that are the exception to the rule. I'm more likely to click a shout out if I hardly see them from a specific author.

The naval battles over the last few hours have been amazing. Multiple 4v4 gunboat engagements back to back. Dozens of planes swarming. Two frigs moving between endless/tempest/wresta.

My single gunboat crew was part of around a dozen enemy gunboat kills, a few aa boats, and a couple of planes.

At one point collies had 9 different planes above the 2 frigs in wresta, total air superiority managing to hold us off from hitting the dd at Latro.

And here i thought we were just gonna go set a fire, only to be drawn into all of that on a Wednesday.

Damn this game is great.

There are a lot of iconic builds, but which do you think every poe player should spend at least one league playing?

Hope you came here looking for a wall of text, because you've found it.

I think discussions on building and the meta around it often ends up with people talk past each other, with people focused on individual mechanics rather than a system as a whole.

One person talks about breaches being problematic, another arty, msupp, etc. None of these people are wrong, but it does mean we often miss the forest for the trees.

Building isn't a collection of isolated mechanics, its a huge system of interacting incentives. You can't understand why people build, or don't build, without looking at how those incentives reinforce or counter each other.

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####Why are fewer people choosing to build?

People respond to incentives. If building feels rewards and resilient, more people build. If building feels temporary and easily invalidated, fewer people build. Look at the incentives present around building, and you can start to understand why people behave the way they do.

Today, builders are asked to invest an enormous amount of time gathering materials, planning bases, digging/hammer them, supplying them, doing msupp.

We know building requires a ton of effort, so the question we need to ask is: "Does the result justify the effort?" I think that's where we start to see some of the struggles builders are having right now.

####The Breach Cascade

Foxhole's building system is designed around bunkers providing support to one another. Garrisons are directional and rely upon the bunker next to them to cover their blind spots. The integrity system punishes bunker designs that attempt to circumvent this reliance by making additional garrisons result in higher and higher breach percentages.

The mutual support bunkers provide to each other works well, at least until one of them fails. Most of the time, this looks like a single garrison being breached. Attackers don't need to destroy an entire bunker, they need to breach a single garrison off and exploit that gap in coverage. Destroy the breached bunker from the gap in coverage, then move on to neighboring bunkers that relied upon it for protection.

One breach quickly becomes a dead bunker, that quickly becomes two, that quickly cascades into an entire defensive line being destroyed. A single success by the attackers leads to an entire base dying.

####Recovery Is Harder Than Destruction

What you'd expect from a breach is defenders to rally around it, replace the breached garrison, and prevent the cascade from occurring. In practice, that is incredibly difficult. The current balance nature of tier 2/tier 3 damage resistance means that any base that isn't concrete is extremely vulnerable to lower effort pve.

This means builders are faced with a choice: Replace the breached garrison with tier 2, or a wet concrete garrison. Choose between making your otherwise concrete bunker vulnerable as if the entire thing was tier 2, or risk a lucky hit breaching the wet concrete. Choose t2 and the rest of the bunker might as well not be concrete at all. Choose t3 and you commit to 18 hours of qrf to avoid that single lucky tremola/rpg getting a breach.

####"Just Build Backup Defenses"

In theory, a second line of defenses designed to prevent the cascade is great. You plan it out, and build bunkers that become effective at prevent enemies for cascading a single breach into an entire defensive line dying.

Unfortunately, the game itself discourages this.

Bunkers are physically large. Available terrain is limited. Every additional bunker adds msupp. You have to choose between howies and a second backup line.

Simply put, the current building system is not incentivizing redundancy.

####Artillery Has a Similar Dynamic

Tier 2 howies are worthless. Tier 3 howies take an impractical time to tech outside, making them practical only for back line bases.

This means the bases most exposed to artillery, front line fortifications and push bb's, almost never have access to the counter designed to help protect them. Builders end up with bases that may never see combat eating up their time, or they end up building t2 slop they know won't last, both resulting in the feeling that their time was wasted.

####The incentives Reinforce One Another

None of these issues necessarily break the game on their own. All together, though? They create a very clear incentive structure that discourages building. And that's without the numerous other issues I haven't brought up, which we all know exist.

Building takes days of effort. Maintaining it takes daily effort. Breaches cascading makes a single failure extremely punishing. Recovery is slow and extremely vulnerable. Fallback defenses are discouraged. Arty counters are ineffective or arrive too late. Builds see all of this and conclude that the return on investment simply isn't worth it, and they stop building.

That's where I think the conversation becomes bigger and more meaningful than "builders are unhappy."

####The Kind of Wars Foxhole Produces

One of the reasons Foxhole has become the memorable and addictive game it is, is because of the battles it makes possible.

Defenders preparing defensive positions, attackers being faced with engineering problems. Infantry, armor, logi, arty, builders all contributing towards breaking a fortified line. The victories felt earned because there was something substantial to overcome. This is where the real problem with fewer builders deciding to build comes to a head:

If fewer players build, those battlefields gradually disappear.

Instead of advancing through prepared positions, attacks advance through larger and larger stretches of no man's land until they finally encounter resistance or stretch their logi lines too thin. When a front breaks, there are no fall back positions. Territory ends up changing hands faster and more frequently. Large swings become more common. The game shifts from being about overcoming defenses and winning battles to hoping you simply have more players online for longer.

Population should matter, but population should determine who can best use the battlefield, not be the only factor that truly matters.

####This Doesn't Mean Building Should Be Buffed Without Limit

I also think it's important to acknowledge the other side of the equation. Foxhole has absolutely had periods where building was too powerful. Wars where fronts stagnate, with unbreakable bases that made offensive nothing more than exercises in frustration. Anyone else remember throwing everything you had at a single concrete meta piece, only for it to be repaired back up to full, with nothing to show for your efforts?

That's unhealthy, too.

It's entirely possible that the amount of building happening today is actually pretty close to what SiegeCamp wants. That doesn't mean that the incentives for building are producing a healthy outcome. The correct amount of building can happen for reasons detatched from the existing incentives.

One dynamic can encourage players to build because they enjoy it ands their work feels like it matters. Another dynamic can be that burnt out vet builders are replaced by new builders who also gradually stop building, or builders who scale back their efforts into smaller or more disposable bases.

The end result might look similar, but the underlying incentives are completely different.

Likewise, "how much" gets built isn't the whole story. What kind of bases are built? How much redundancy are builders willing to invest in? Are builders fortifying active fronts or rear areas? Are they experimenting with ambitious designs/plans, or are they minimizing their investment because they expect to lose it all anyway?

Those questions can tell us far more about that health of building in the game than simply looking at the map and counting the number of pentagons you see.

####What Should We, the Players, Actually be Contributing?

Whenever this topic comes up, someone inevitable asks: "So what's your solution?"

Personally, I don't think that's the communities responsibility. Players don't have access to internal statistics, testing tools, balance simulations, or the countless other interactions between mechanics that the developers do. Changing the health, range, damage, upkeep, or any one of the values in the game can have huge impacts on the game. Changing those numbers is SiegeCamp's job, not ours.

What players do have is thousands upon thousands of hours living inside the games incentive structure. Players know what feels rewarding to do, they know what feels frustrating. They know what kinds of behavior the game naturally encourages, what kinds of behaviors the game demands despite making it difficult to do.

Players are uniquely qualified to answer questions like:

*Why are builders quitting?

• Why are fewer people choosing to build? *What incentives are encouraging or discouraging certain behavior? *What kind of battles are becoming more or less common?

These questions and observations are how we can identify the problems. The developers then have the information and tools needed to determine the best solutions to those problems.

####The Discussion We Should Be Having

I don't think we need to be arguing over individual and specific balance points. We should be talking to help reach a shared understanding of the incentive structures that currently shape building, and what behavior those incentives are leading to.

That's what this post is ultimately about. Breaches, msupp, arty, building itself, etc.

None of it exists in a vacuum and all of it impacts how players build. How players build determines what sorts of fights happen. What sorts of fights happen determines what kinds of wars play out.

If builders increasingly conclude that building isn't worth the effort, the game won't just have fewer builders, it will gradually lose the layered defensive battlefields that have helped distinguish Foxhole from any other game like it.

Whether the answer is changes to any specific aspect of building or pve is entirely up to the developers to solve. Our role as a community is to identify the incentive structures and communicate why we feel the way we do. Why less people are building.

From WC115 through WC135, Colonials take and hold Abandoned Ward day 1 of the war. There are only two cases in the last 20 wars where Wardens push into AW and take it without surrounding it—WC123 where Collies initially captured AW day 1 before losing it immediately, and WC118 where Wardens capture AW day 3. Every other Warden capture of AW has been precipitated by a breakthrough south of the river somewhere else, that then leads to AW dying from behind.

WC130 and WC121 are east west wars.

What do we think causes this pattern?

Do we think this is reasonable?

What factors do you think most heavily impact this pattern?

Should something be done to address it?

Is this pattern healthy for the game?

What a "map update" specifically entails is up to your interpretation, but do you think it would benefit the game enough to justify major development time?

Personally, I'd be looking for a few things:

• Larger cities
  • Urban fights are fun, but our current cities really don't seem to fulfill the fantasy of urban combat. I'd love to see some larger towns designed for us to fight over, with multiple town halls. As it stands now, town fights are over once the town hall is killed and people lose spawn. There's some missed opportunity here. Koskinla is amazing.. almost. It's also tucked into a corner of the map, which feels like such a waste. (It'd be far better if it was positioned where Suosalo is, we'd actually fight over it.)
• Towns designed with modern logi flows in mind
  • The design philosophy for towns seems to be ignorant of and older than the way modern logi works. We need both small and large gauge access throughout logi towns. We need the ability to place t2 and t3 cranes that make the process more efficient. I need to not be constantly playing bumper cars. I could go on. The entire dev team involved in map design all need to spend a war doing logi in the different towns.
• "Terrain Unsuitable"
  • The bane of every builder. Why is it unsuitable? Fuck if we know. The older the map, the bigger an issue this is. If you want a great example of this, go look at the terrain south of Cgate. The entire buildable area down to Cbelt requires you to use tricks just to build. Whatever needs to be done to reduce reliance on arcane and esoteric builder knowledge can only be a good thing.
• Map asymmetry
  • This one is likely to be contentious for any number of different reasons. Go through any discussion on map balance (and there are plenty to pick from) and you can see the same pattern play out in every discussion: Both sides bring up many, many examples of how the map screws over one side, endlessly one upping the other. For the most part, both parties will be correct with each example they bring, showcasing that the real problem is that the map DOES have a plethora of serious issues. The only thing I can ask for here is for the broad strokes of asymmetry to be toned down a bit.
• Trees
  • You've heard it before. The one thing I'll add is that the forest in Wresta is damned amazing, and it's a crying shame we don't have it somewhere that isn't on an island, where we'll see some actual world of tanks. There's some serious progress the Devs have made with trees in recent times, and I think the game would be so much better if the time was spent going back and fixing the older trees. Hell, there's a lot of potential to be explored in the realm of environmental destruction that forests could bring to the game. Burned out forests leading to longer sight lines, arty craters that reveal root networks that function as trenches, etc.

Anyways, that's off the top of my head. Would love for some people to chip in some more ideas for things they'd like to see addressed in a map update. Specifics, too. Bring up that specific map grievance you keep in the back of your mind that you know is just bullshit.

I was following the technique from this recipe:

https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-slow-cooked-italian-american-tomato-sauce-red-sauce-recipe

In it, Kenji suggests putting the halved onion (as opposed to diced) into the sauce while you bake it, keeping the texture of the onion out of the finished sauce.

So, now I have a baked onion that is steeped in delicious tomato sauce.. and I'm not sure what to do with it. There are so many ways forward I find myself struck with indecision.

Do I blend it up? Slice it and fry it up crispy? Leave the halves whole and use them on a sandwich? Suggestions, please!

Title. Been at this place 6 months. Long enough to know that the other two guys I work with don't really give a shit about doing anything remotely considered a good job.

Kitchen manager talks like she has the standards, but she's only there for service two days a week, the other three she does prep. She hardly sees the slacking the other two do, though I've made her aware of it. (I plan on a longer talk tomorrow)

I feel myself running ragged, trying to pick up the slack from the other two. Talking just basic hygiene, let alone putting out shit product. I can already tell stressing about it isn't sustainable in the long term.

So how do you handle yourself in this position? I don't want to lower my personal standards, but I also don't want to let them take advantage of me cleaning up after them.

Been running a fac this war, near the front line. I've done a fairly large amount of building, fac construction, fac production, concrete work, front line delivery.

None of it generates commends at an appreciable rate.

I just want to commend the people that help me, man. Sitting on zero constantly sucks.

My Dearest Elsbeth,

I hope this letter reaches you before the frost truly settles in. The postmasters swear the northern roads are still open, though knowing them the couriers are probably carrying sacks of letters over mountain passes with holes in their boots. If you receive this late, blame the Army and not your husband.

I received the scarf you knitted. The blue one. The lads gave me endless grief for it until the rain came in sideways off the sea and suddenly everyone wanted to know if you had sisters.

Jade Cove remains standing, if you can believe it. You would laugh to see how seriously the officers insist on calling it “the Jewel of the Western Coast.” There is precious little jewel left in it now. Most of the harbor smells of fuel and wet ash, and every building along the southern ward has had its windows boarded over twice.

Still, we endure.

The river remains beautiful in the mornings. I mean that sincerely. At dawn, when the fog rolls in from the sea and hangs low over the water, you can almost forget there’s a war on. The sea gulls land on the barricades as if they own them. Sometimes the boys toss scraps to them between bombardments.

The Colonials continue their assaults up the southern ramp. Every day or two now. Sometimes every day.

You remember the road I wrote about before? The broad stone incline leading from the countryside into the city proper. I wish I had never seen the thing. Whoever designed Jade Cove centuries ago must have imagined triumphal marches and merchant caravans climbing into the city from the south.

Now it is just a chute.

The mountains protect the sides well enough. Sheer cliffs on one flank, the river on the other. There is nowhere for them to spread out once they commit to the climb. So they come straight at us.

Straight at the guns.

The officers say it is the perfect defensive position.

I suppose they are correct.

Sometimes they try the water instead. Small boats probing the shoreline at night. We hear the motors sputtering through the fog. Green flares drifting over the river. Once, three Colonial marines managed to climb the seawall beneath the eastern watchtower before Sergeant Vale caught them with a pillory.

Another time they came over the mountain paths with climbing gear and reconnaissance uniforms, looking like ghosts crawling down the cliffs. Half of them froze to death before reaching us.

But always they return to the ramp.

Always the ramp.

I still try to count the attacks. I think that makes it feel organized. Contained, like something measurable.

The first week I counted seven assaults.

The second week I stopped counting bodies and counted banners instead.

Now I cannot count anything at all.

The dead stay there.

There are too many to move.

At first both sides tried truces to collect the fallen. That ended after artillery struck the work parties. Now the corpses simply remain where they land unless they interfere with the firing lines.

You would not believe how high they pile. God forgive me, sometimes they use their own dead as cover while climbing.

The ramp used to be gray stone. I had forgotten that until yesterday as the rain washed part of it clean.

The worst part is the noise. Not the guns. You would think it would be the guns.

It is the screaming. During the lulls.

The wounded collect in pockets along the seawall and beneath the barricades where neither side can reach them safely. You hear them for hours. Begging for medics. Begging for water. Begging for mothers and wives and saints I have never heard of.

Sometimes they call to us directly.

A Colonial boy no older than seventeen spent an entire night crying out in broken Caovish for someone to shoot him because his legs were gone. No one did. By morning he had lost his voice. We found him dead at sunrise with his hands frozen around a photograph.

I almost wrote that we buried him.

We did not.

The gulls got to him before dusk.

I am sorry. I did not mean to write that.

You asked if I still play cards with the boys. Sometimes. Though the deck sticks together from damp and blood and whatever else coats our hands now. We joke often. Men do that here. One fellow tied a Colonial helmet to a broom and danced with it atop the parapet while artillery fell around him. Everyone laughed like lunatics.

I laughed too. I think we are becoming strange creatures.

Last week they breached halfway up the ramp during the fog. Close enough that we fought hand-to-hand among the barricades. I killed a man with an club because my rifle jammed from the cold. After I struck him on the head he fell to his knees with a vacant look in his eyes.

I remember thinking how absurd it was that he had freckles. Or maybe it was simply the mud and blood upon his face.

Yesterday we rolled burning fuel drums down the incline after the machine gun nests overheated.

The screaming afterward sounded almost animal.

There are parts of the ramp now where the mud bubbles when it rains because so much blood and fuel and rot have soaked into the ground beneath the stones.

The engineers say the foundations are weakening. Good. Let the whole damned thing slide into the sea.

I have watched boys arrive fresh from the north with polished rifles and clean uniforms, still speaking about glory and victory and banners.

Within a week they stop speaking at all. Within two they begin shooting wounded men who cannot be recovered. Within three they stop asking permission.

You remember how I used to complain about the slaughterhouses near the river district back home? The smell carrying through town in summer?

Jade Cove smells worse. Every hour. Every day. And still they come up the ramp. Wave after wave after wave.

I no longer know whether we are defending the city or feeding it.

The officers say Jade Cove cannot fall because it protects the entire Western coast.

Then let it fall.

Or better yet, let Command drop the bomb and erase the place from the map entirely.

Nuke the ramp. Nuke the harbor. Nuke all of us standing on it.

There is nothing left here worth defending except ghosts.

I miss you terribly.

— Tomas

Sadly it seems no paladin this patch. Any armor/ES builds that have caught your eye anyway?

Bonus points if it's ssf friendly.