I'll just post this because honestly I'm surprised we haven't seen a thread about it yet.

The layout for Vortex is ridiculous. It is by far the hardest of the cosmic planes to defend, and I'm saying this as someone who is raiding it frequently. There are two real reasons for it, one somewhat minor and one not-so-minor:

The first and smaller of the reasons is that the nexus is accessible only through a special exit. This disadvantages the defenders, partly because they lose balance by entering the valve to access the main plane (where the raiding group is probably camping), partly because it makes it impossible to make a demesne and set up effects in safety at the nexus (which can be done on all the other cosmic planes), and partly because it means that the raiding party can structure their demesne so that the room directly outside the nexus is unbreakable (side-note: this can be done on Continuum but requires the raiding party to not meld certain nearby rooms, can only be done for three of the four exits from the pool on Celestia, and cannot be done in any meaningful way on Nil. I am not, however, advocating changes for any of those layouts despite this disparity.)

But the real reason for the problem is the shape of the plane. Vortex is set up as a long string of 25 rooms that loops around on itself (go down for long enough and you'll end up back where you started). The problem with this is that if the raiding party deliberately melds only 24 of these 25 rooms, leaving a one-room gap unmelded in between, the demesne is only breakable at two points along the whole chain! Now, something similar can be done on Celestia, where you can force the defending group to charge through the demesne to get to the breakpoints, but at least you know that the breakpoints are always at the pillars. On Vortex, the breakpoints can be placed wherever the raiding mage wants by simply moving the position of the unmelded room, which forces the defending party to play find-the-arbitrarily-placed-breakpoints, during which time it is trivial to hunt them down and attack them before they even manage to find it at all. This is the strategy we have pursued every time we've raided Vortex in the last couple weeks and the only times it has failed have been when we were massively outgunned.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what to do about this short of restructuring the entire plane to be more like the other three, but maybe some of you have some ideas.

Making all the valves IN exits would be a good start.

Not making the plane loop back on itself might be an easy one. Never been to Vortex though, so I don't know if that looping is integral to the plane or not.

It kind of is. The big issue is that A. The loop isn't an actual loop. It's series of stairs with accompanying rooms, and B. The mother valves.

Breaking the loop would both break some symbolism in addition to only making the plane slightly easier to defend. By that, I mean, it's still a silly mad dash to point A or B, except you actually know where point A or B is this time around. You still have to brave the gauntlet.

Continuum and Vortex both have a lot of flavour associated with the way their rooms are laid out. If somebody really wants this fixed, they're probably going to have to redesign the layout of the Plane so that the problems are fixed while keeping some sort of awesomeness.

I think the layout of Vortex is absolutely attrocious and needs fixing - or else it'll continue be a plane that actually lends itself to the attackers.

My first thought was to make each level wider. So instead of...

We have something like.

Each connected to the one above/below/next to it? Doubling the number of rooms, which I guess is a bit much, but it keeps the same general layout, and there would have to be unmelded or breakable rooms all over the place. Though that might be pushing it TOO far in the other direction.

Maybe making the exit below the special entrance out of the flame into another special exit?

Combine that with making the Nexus entrance an in/out exit and that'll solve the problems?

Changes:

1. Put Flame in loop.
2. Remove valves and use in/out exits instead.

Putting the Flame in the loop means if you put the guards there, you're guaranteed to have a breakpoint next to it. In/Out exits remove the annoying valve problem.

You have just made Vortex from the easiest cosmic plane to raid into the hardest by a significant amount. :3

Put the valve in the falls far away from the Nexus, and I think that'd work pretty well, actually.

Now that I think about it, the Flame>Falls exit would need to be in/out instead of a valve too, so that there's no walking into a hostile demesne without balance to deal with.

That setup also ensures there's no way to make a demesne so that at least some of the approaches from the nexus to the demesne itself are unbreakable-- the one route into the demesne is also the unbreakable room.

What happens if you stand in the middle and sprint up/down?

You stop when you have to go north or south.

There's code to stop you after ## rooms anyway in an open loop

No, something like this happens.

I actually imagined something more like this.