warning: coarse rambly late-night theorysos
for once i am actually content with the state of the map, if only momentarily. my faith in skybridges has dwindled in light of a couple new tactics that have appeared before me. i haven't spent enough time with either yet to make any bold claims about them, but if nothing else the prospects have me excited.
let me tell you a couple things i've noticed about skybridges. i think we're all pretty familiar with the wonders of the skybridge. being physically above your opponent provides a lot of advantages in terms of combat and mobility and these have been the basis of many a victory. they do have a weak point, however, and while we've never actually named it at such, i think most of us has witnessed its exploitation, from one side or the other.
thanks to gravity, it's a lot easier to move down than up. this is intuitively true; it should be abundantly clear to any seasoned player that the best means of one-waying the enemy's bridges is to break/obstruct their ascents (usually meaning their stairs). one-waying level bridges requires a greater investment of time/blocks, but is still potentially effective, while breaking the enemy's descent is simply counterproductive in the case of descending stairs - or impossible, in the case of straight drops.
nobody should be surprised, then, when i assert that a skybridge's weakpoint is its ascending portion. the struggle to eliminate this weakness goes back to the early days of high-altitude play when it was debated whether stairways or ladders were better for skybridge access. while both were proven to have their failings, stairways ultimately won out, being much harder to break and much easier to repair/deobstruct. that said, they're still much easier to one-way than flat bridges, and fighting an uphill opponent means subjecting yourself to considerable fall damage when knocked back. and let's not forget how much havoc can be wreaked on them with a single bucket of lava... despite our best efforts, we haven't found a reliable way to protect that initial portion of our sky bridges. we can handle the odd raider or two coming on down - but once the enemy extends their control to our stairway, our only remaining advantage is that we spawn a lot closer to it than they do (mitigated somewhat by one-waying efforts, which help equalize travel times between the two teams). god forbid the enemies have a forward bed. at that point, you can pretty much kiss that bridge goodbye.
this weak point seems very appropriate. it's nature's way of balancing skybridges - in order to reap the benefits of altitude, to make use of the forte of the bridge, you must cross this indefensible stretch of bridgework; the greater the height advantage, the longer the stretch. every attempt to cure this deficiency filches from another pocket.
for instance, you by starting your stairway farther out (on the first node or center planet instead of the home planet), you push your weak point closer to the enemy, but you also lower the consequences of having your skybridge overtaken. this is one of the reason early game skybridges from the skybridge are often so inconsequential (usually successful only due to a lack of vigilance or counteraction on the part of the defending team). they're so close to the opposite planet, it's easy enough to get up to them (or, just as often, underneath them - a tactic not always available against home planet stairways), and so remote from the attacking team's planet that the loss doesn't do much to kill their momentum. their being so frequently composed of dirt doesn't help them either, but that's a separate matter. conversely, this relationship confers home planet stairways both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. their proximity to your team's spawn point makes them immediately accessible and far removed from danger, making them an excellent tool for contesting a center planet firmly held by the enemy. but, as many of us have seen before, that very placement means that the loss of control of those stairways usually spells the end of your planet - especially if it's your only line of attack. but i'll come back to that.
(another approach, although i don't believe it's ever actually been attempted, is to reduce the slope of your stairs to 1/2. in doing so, the weakness of the ascent is reduced, but the zone of said weakness is doubled. as an added bonus, lava will flow harmlessly off the side of such a stairway. ascending ladders have an inverse effect; the zone of weakness shrinks to a single block in the horizontal dimension, but players within that area are far weaker. mind you, the relationship between the rates of change isn't quite 1:1; the inefficacy of ladders is more a matter of construction than this phenomenon.)
now consider this. high bridges start with an ascent that is safe to traverse but difficult to defend and end with a descent that is dangerous to traverse but easy to defend. low bridges (that is to say, those located below the home planet) are constructed in reverse, beginning with a descent and ending with an ascent. this paradigm shift means that low bridge play has its own strengths (and weaknesses) that, for any player bold enough to capitalize on them, could lead to untold success.
what i consider (at least for now, at this early stage of testing and for this current node configuration) to be the proper construction of a low bridge is as follows. the first step is to build a bridge off the left side of your planet to your second node. while also possible reach the node by branching off the center line, building from the home planet allows you to construct several blocks lower than bridges extending from the first node tend to be, allowing for a less painful descent. connecting directly to the base also means your side bridge remains as a line of attack in case you lose control of the area beyond your first node. from the second node (which is full of sturdy blocks to facilitate easy bridging or tool-making) it is a simple enough matter to commence construction of a low bridge directly to the underbelly of the enemy planet (often unnoticed, which is not the point but still frequently beneficial). it is advisable to bridge to the enemy's quality of life node as an intermediate step; building at a lower level provides a better defense against those who would drop onto your low bridge from above, and the contents of the enemy qol include many valuable tools for your assault, including a bed for setting up a forward base in the second node, and ender pearls which can be used as a speedy shortcut to the enemy planet (or taken back to the home planet for team usage - same goes for the bed).
as mentioned above, the low bridge is, in many ways, the inverse of a high bridge. the beauty of the low bridge lies in the fact that it isn't connected to the home planet. even if the enemy overtakes it, they'll need to invest time and blocks connecting it to anything meaningful. and even if they do, they'll need to ascend every time they wish reach it, rendering them vulnerable to attack and obstruction. it's very difficult for your opponent to turn a low bridge around on you.
on the other hand, that very height difference makes low bridge ill-suited for rushing. as you are guaranteed to sustain injury on the way down, you're vulnerable to combat damage upon descent. another problem lies in that you need to ascend to reach the enemy planet. bridge management can be a challenge in such a vulnerable position. a sustained rush can face a number of problems with actually getting to the planet. for that reason, i wouldn't advise having more than one full-time rusher.
the low line is a safe line to attack through, but it's not a very strong one. but no line is so weak that, when threatened, it can be simply ignored.
it may be prudent for me to say a little more about lines of attack. it's another topic of which i think everyone has some intuitive understanding, but not so much as a whole that we're incorporating them into our planning. you know those games in which there's a furious tug-of-war up on the skybridges, and while everybody's distracted by the constant grind, a lone attacker slips through the neglected front door? this is the essence of line play.
a line of attack is basically any path, traversable in at least direction, that allows you to . straight bridges attack on the center line, skybridges attack from the high line, and low bridges attack from the low (and often left/right) lines. while i do sense the makings of a rock/paper/scissors relationship between the three heights, the point i want to make here is less about which trumps which and more about the value (and folly) of attacking on multiple lines.
the number of lines available to you need not equal the number available to your target. when the enemy "forces" you onto your planet, what they're doing is eliminating any lines through which you might exit, though they may be able to attack you on one or more lines. alternatively, one exit from your planet may diverge into two separate lines of attack.
concentrated rushes mounted through a single line are seldom effective on their own. under normal circumstances, they can be reasonably repelled by sending a force of equal size. in this case, the point of control is determined mostly by bridge management, relative distance from spawn, and the combat aptitude of the individual combatants. progress made in this state usually happens in baby steps, except for when huge, sudden shifts in momentum occur. this bilateral-but-unilinear game is a kind of equilibrium that should be familiar if you've taken part in one of those hours-long battles of attrition. multilinear combat, by contrast, is a state of chaos. when threatened on two lines (or more, theoretically, but i've never seen this come up), the defending team usually seeks to decommission one (whichever they aren't also using) so they can focus their resources on defending a single line. the costs of maintaining pressure on multiple lines are quite high, especially if they both require extensive management.
rather, the idea behind a multi-line attack is to constrain the enemy team, forcing it to take action to stop you or else permit you into its core. in the ideal scenario, the enemy takes no action (because it failed to notice you) and you can just waltz on up to the switch. more likely, though, the enemy expends some manpower and time halting your progress, for as long as it takes to neutralize the extraneous threat. this relief in pressure from the main line creates an opening in which to strike - to take out a key ascent, to break the enemy's bed, or even to run for the switch. the key here is timing. if you come into the opponent's striking range as your team's rushers are respawning and heading back out to the battlefront, you'll squander your opportunity.
to facilitate the execution of such maneuvers with good timing, i advocate the preparation of these secondary bridges in advance. a bridge that is unmanned and too distant to be a threat is easily disregarded when there are more pressing concerns at hand. a low bridge built, say, only as far as the enemy qol node will serve as sufficient preparation if unmanned for a while. it's like a false sense of security thing. when the timing is right, the bridge can be completed as quickly as it needs to be (depending on your intent).
the main role of the low bridge, then, is to threaten the enemy on the low line, whether for the sake of distraction or infiltration. the low bridge setup i proposed earlier does leave itself open (in the side bridge portion) to attack from bridges built off the center planet. i wanted to talk more about lines of attack, but it's getting late and my writes are getting all sloppy and my thoughts are getting all muddled so i should probably zip it for the night.
tldr go to bed forks
