OK, so last night was good fun.
The patch changed a lot. A couple of new bugs (the weirdness when you first spawn for one) and old ones getting worse (falling through the world a lot more). You can only have one brick of C4 deployed at any time, which is a shame. A fair few new certs that I'm not sure about yet (although I burned over a hundred points to test them). Will say more about them when I've played around more. I will say that at least the NC HA basic armour cert seems bugged. I was dying with a third or so of my life left from time to time.
Big change is AA has been buffed beyond belief. Assuming it isn't nerfed again instantly this pushes the AA MAX burster to a must-buy. In one life I got three liberator kills, one liberator critical assist, four scythe assists (one critical) and a galaxy assist. Got hit by a magrider. Respawned and took down two more libs and another scythe solo before running out of willing victims and blindly charging tank positions.
AA MAXes are also my new primary target because they are total area denial for air forces. Fortunately they are easy to deal with because they will be facing in one direction and looking up so long as there are planes in the sky. I caught two standing on a roof with an engineer supporting them. Only the engineer saw me, and that was moments before the first C4 brick blew up beneath his and the first MAX's feet. The second MAX didn't even turn around before his brick detonated. Then I caught a third just outside the same building with a close-range AV rocket followed by a couple SAW headshots. Instantly removed the enemy AA long enough for our air to devastate their other ground forces, and our side pushed and destroyed their spawn generator. Took and cleaned the base within a minute of that after a solid half hour of back-and-forth.
EU1 Vanu are on the move. They had a (slight) population advantage for a few hours and dominated the map. NC were frankly embarrassed by them. All the above action took place within three hexs of the NC warpgate, in a desperate counter attack against them.
And I'm afraid I will be staying on EU1 for a while at least. Right now I'm looking for the large scale combat. Maybe I need to try later at night, but East3 was incredibly quiet in comparison. My first action of the day on EU1 was a 50+ tank armoured column. Much accidental tank stacking and the entire formation almost drove straight off a cliff within the first two minutes. We drove across a quarter of the map, diverting around a valley, then ran directly into a fortified position and got blown all to hell. Then I did some solo and small squad play on East, met with Siquo (I think?) for a few minutes, finally found a full squad plus galaxy and ran with them for a while, but rarely had a fight that involved more than twenty troops. Then I got disconnected.
Back on EU our outfit filled a four squad platoon. Loaded two full galaxies and provided a complete squadron of air support. We rolled over a half dozen small bases before meeting up with two other gals to hit a well defended tower, blowing up a parked Vanu galaxy on the way in. We had one of ours on each of the four pads of the tower at the start of the fight. Fifteen minutes later we were down to one of the unaffiliated ones and were holding off constant air and armour attacks while drop pods continued to rain in.
Then the server crashed and reset. But you can't have everything.
There was also one of the classic TR MAX crashes in West Highland Checkpoint which was utterly brutal. We held for about ten minutes, which is pathetic compared to some of the fights we've managed there in the past. Still, a fun and successful counter-attack down the cliffs that only ran out of steam when we reached the outposts of the nearby biolab. Got pinned down in the safe room on the other side of the teleporter from point B, farming kills from people foolish enough to walk in front of the barrier. One engineer even set up a turret directly in front of me and just stood and watched as I lined up the rocket. Then, when the base was lost and the barriers flipped to the other team, I planted C4 and took out the first few through the barriers.