Picture this: you are on a large continent and you have just finished capturing two enemy bases. As your flag flies over them, you crest a modest hill to see a short bridge connected to an island. As your forces gear up to renew their attack, the enemy across the waterway is preparing for a counter offensive – In a few short minutes upwards of 600 or more people are going to converge on this singular bridge and base.

Welcome to Planetside’s battle for Gunuku.

Gunuku is the name of the central base on the largest continent in the game. Situated on an island with three bridges, the dropship center is easily fortified and defended. To the west of the base lies a tightly packed forest, mostly impassable to vehicles. To the North and South lie the bridges connecting it to the main continent and two smaller satellite towers. And to the east lies a flat, open plain suited to vehicles and the base’s back entrance for infantry to attempt to assault.

Most of the time this battle was fought between the Vanu Sovereignty faction, who assaulted the continent from the south, and the New Conglomerate faction who owned the continent ‘by default’. The VS stood to have an advantage in the battle – their main buggy and tanks are amphibious and can easily out flank the NC – however, the NC have the advantage of having a fortified position, and while not as maneuverable, their tanks, the Vanguard, are much more heavily armed and armored than the nimble Magrider.

When these two forces met, it was one of the great clashes of classic Planetside. Massive amounts of spam hit the bridge heads on both sides, attack aircraft made strafing runs on anyone and anything that got near the main battle lines, and columns of hover tanks crossed the water in an attempt to outflank the other side. Quite simply, it was a battle in a war that was on a scale that no other game has thus far been able to emulate.

The NC had limited options when it came to pushing back the Vanu: the VS had a large advantage in being able to move their tanks literally anywhere, and if the NC were able to push across the bridge, they had to choose one of the two bases on the opposite end to attack, and would end up being flanked by the force at the other. They did, however, have access to Galaxies at Gunuku, since the base is the continents only dropship center they were able to produce large troop transport aircraft. Using this, they could shuttle troops behind Vanu lines in an attempt to cut off the flow of tanks to the front lines by attacking a rear base’s generator.

The Vanu had two options that they could engage in simultaneously: Go straight forward into the meat grinder and engage in a slugging match with the NC while attacking another base far to the south that they also had a link to (capturing bases in Planetside works on a lattice; a faction has to go in a certain order when capturing bases. Lines drawn on the map between bases adjacent to ones you own are capturable). Cyssor is the largest continent in Planetside, both in number of bases and square meters of playable area; to walk from one shore to the other on foot would take a soldier at least 30 – 45 minutes, its that big. By sending a smaller force south, the bridge turns into a stalemate meat grinder, while the Vanu take the rest of the continent behind the back of the NC. The only other option tactical option for the Vanu is to cut off tanks and other benefits to Gunuku by destroying the generator of the base directly to the north of it. Doing this makes the advance much easier when they don’t have to contend with the much heavier NC vehicles in close quarters.

While both teams had local options, Planetside wasn’t made up of just Gunuku, and any remaining forces could attack another continent held by the other side in an attempt to draw resources away from that fight. This typically was a strategy that worked better for defenders. These ‘global’ options are something else unique to battles in Planetside that don’t occur in other games. And it’s a big part of what made this battle great and unique.

Additionally, the geography and sheer massive number of participants lent itself to almost any kind of FPS play style, and the sense of accomplishment gained if one took some kind of action that lead to your team moving across the bridge head was extremely gratifying. You could spend all night trying to push a mobile spawn across the bridge, die 19 out of 20 times, but that 20th time when you finally managed to get a beach head for your team, even if you didn’t kill anything all night, was a great feeling of accomplishment.

My favorite memory was not actually near the bridge, nor was it near the base. Driving a tank around those areas was always a lot of fun, but for a moment to truly be memorable in all the chaotic spam that accompanies battles in Planetside, an almost perfect storm of circumstances to create a meet-up of epic proportions.

The outfit I helped run at the time, called Planetside Triads, ran tank columns, when we all logged on the battle on Cyssor was well under way, the Vanu having Itan and Kaang and pushing against Gunuku. The ten of us got in our tanks, formed a column of five and warped into the southern warpgate of the continent.

We drive north along the western road, intent on going over the water and flanking Gunuku from the east. Right where the road splits to go to either east to Itan or west toward Tore, the forest breaks and right in front of us, nearly point blank traveling east toward Itan is a column of five enemy vanguards. I didn’t realize until after the battle that nothing interfered, no friendly our enemy troops poked their heads in, just our column, versus theirs.

My gunner, my gunner immediately opens up on their lead tank, the driver barely seems to notice as he continues to drive, the shots barely glancing off his much heavier armor. The screen flashes red and the health bar of the tank turns a quarter red, the second tank in their column’s gunner returned fire. The cry goes out over ventrilo “SCATTER!”, our column splits up, weaving between the confused gunners, our thinner and more streamlined tanks hid the size of our column, the number of targets and our speed momentarily confuses them.

The tanks continue to exchange blows, weaving in and out of the trees, but neither group looks ready to retreat, at this range our magriders can’t engage in this kind of a slugging match, and two of my squadmate’s names go dark indicating their tank has been destroyed.

“Run to the water”, one of the other drivers says over vent, and we turn to run to the safest place for a magrider, open water. While shells will explode on land and cause splash damage, they pass through the water, meaning only direct hits on our nimble tanks will do any damage, a difficult feat for any of their gunners.

They get greedy, chasing us all the way down to the shore, the entire column does an about face to bring both the driver and main guns to bear on their tanks. The four remaining magriders concentrate all their fire on the vanguard stupid enough to chase us all the way to the waterline, his tank’s remaining health evaporates and the vehicle explodes into flaming wreckage. The NC column realizing their mistake turns to flee up the hill in front of the shoreline and out of view of our line of sight rail cannons. One more of their tanks that ventured too close to the water explodes as he was about to crest the hill out of sight.

Now it is our turn to chase them, all of our tanks are hurt and theirs are much less damaged overall, despite their numeric disadvantage. Our magriders quickly catch up to the slow lumbering vanguards, we weave in and out of the trees effortlessly, taking pot shots at their retreating column, this is a battle we can win. As the forest clears into a wide open plain, we have the advantage of being able to sit far away near the forest and take shots with sniper like precision, while they must attempt lob shells into the trees.

Another vanguard explodes, their remaining two tanks turn in a last ditch suicidal effort to at least take down a few more of us with them. My view is blinded as a shell hits the front of the tank, a direct hit takes my life down to a quarter. Another squadmate’s tank explodes, as does one of theirs, another shell explodes near my tank, its life now down to a tiny fraction. A message flashes on my screen ‘you have lost control of this vehicle’, my gunner and the other tanks focus their fire on the last vanguard, I wait for the inevitable respawn bar, but it never comes, the vanguard sits a burning hulk a few meters from my tank, breathing a sigh of relief I get out and begin to repair what’s left of my magrider.

While Planetside still exists, battles like this one are largely a thing of the past thanks to dwindling populations. The game itself still offers the largest battlefields, and the small but very devoted player base of long time veterans keeps the game chugging along, while still having population levels in-game larger than any other MMOFPS still on the market today.

For those Planetside veterans that experienced it, the battle of Gunuku is the most exciting battle in an FPS game that they will be involved in for a long time.