EVE General Discussion

But then there's no reason to conquer: if holding space is a pain in the ass, why go kick over your neighbor's sandcastle and take his toys?

I'm concerned this will lead to alliances holding one region, and burning the regions around them for the "upgrade vampire" and leaving them empty. There will be nobody who can really live there, so you'll have large alliances all spaced out, needing to cross entire desolate regions just for a fight. Nobody will want to live in these desolate areas because they'll be vamped out to be worse than lowsec/npc sec.

That period was largely caused by the CFC having severe supercap inferiority, and supercaps still being broken. The logjam broke once we'd built up a sizable supercap fleet and the opposing supercap fleets began to fracture. Titan blapping made conflict in 0.0 tremendously unfun for the CFC, but the CFC was strong enough to repel any supercap-heavy attack (see: "VFK by september").

If you get yourself a white fluffy cat, a mild german accent (I could help you with that) and a phat golden ring, you could run for this years Super Villain Championship.

OR the simplest solution is to Gimp the small POS's and or force all moon mining and reactions into small POS's only.
That would help but allowing players to steal from modules when they go offline would definitely sweaten the pot for their troubles.
Right now destroying production is just that destruction, okay now what...

Destroy production and then try and get out of there for the pay day.
A LOT more fun......

As I pointed to before I think there needs to be a fundamental re-evaluation of the "working class" ways of making money in nullsec if you're going to try and run alliances off taxation income. All the real money in eve is in ways you can't really tax. I don't really want to have to run the alliance solely off taxing the poorer members of the alliance, while the richer ones can't be taxed.

The trouble is anything profitable needs to be more profitable to do in our space than elsewhere, and needs to be more profitable to do with your alliance character than an empire alt. Take industry, for example.

If I try to make money on station fees I'll just drive out what little industry exists in nullsec. Due to the lack of good mineral compression and sources of lowends in 0.0, combined with the complete lack of refinery/factory stations, nobody does t1 ship manufacturing in nullsec. Because moon minerals are regional, you must get all the supplies in Jita, so t2 ship manufacturing takes place in empire (what little profit you can make through faster amarr slots is eaten up by having to ship stuff). That's exacerbated by how easy it is to ship t2 ships - I'd love to make battleships in deklein to avoid jumping those in at great expense but for t2 ships it's not even enough fuel savings to be worth it (and most of that fuel will be burned jumping the supplies in).

Yeah I remember fighting PL + NCdot + Raiden + the Drone Russian Federation during that time of broken supercaps (they had about 65-85% of the game's supercaps at the time). I mean, you guys do what you gotta do, not judging you here. I'm just curious that if tech was such a great conflict driver like Soundwave and Poetic seem to claim, why the majority of last year's sov conflicts happened over non-tech space.

I get the feeling you are missing out on several key elements of 0.0 warfare here. It wasn't "less than a month". It was proceeding by months of warfare with the same entity. By the time we went for Tenal, it was an empty husk we just pushed over. This is much the same every nullsec war goes. It's lost or won long before the space falls.

I also don't know why you think ISK is the driver of the winners of null sec wars. This has maybe only once been the case ever and that is pretty debatable . ISK doesn't win wars in null, morale/superior doctrine,fc's do. Pretty much any decent alliance is going to be able to field whatever ships they want. Attrition isn't a factor that you beat someone with.

I think at one point the moons were a conflict driver but now the haves used the income to build super strong defenses. Haven't most of the major changes in null recently resulted from internal fracturing and not from a determined drive to conquer an area?

As for the question are moons good conflict drivers I would venture the opinion they are not. When playing an RTS game it's a bad idea to have an area with high resources because once a decent defense is setup around them the winner is more than likely decided.

Reducing income from moons is a great idea although I'm not sure what's the best solution. Tech is expensive because it's a bottleneck for manufacturing. Eliminate the bottleneck and you remove the value. I'd think the easiest thing to do would be look at the total distribution of moons and then adjust the manufacturing formula's to match the moon diversity. Then all moons have equal value and they are a source of ISK, but they would no longer be a significant aspect of the market.

As for how to create conflict the only thing I can come up with is something like a node where a system offers some kind of advantage but not the way tech moons do. Instead of an ISK boost why not something like reduced construction times, higher refining yields, longer jump bridges, or reduced construction costs.

Since wormholes can have a system wide effect I would assume the same thing could be done to any system. So a system would have 15% reduction to all manufacturing, while one ten jumps away might have 20% yield to refining. Have these types of booster systems scattered all over and always in an area with lots of access and not a dead end system. So there'd be a reason to take specific areas while at the same time preventing any large power bloc from having too great of an advantage. Also, all of the benefits would require player action and not just be a passive boost to the system owner.

I'd like to point out that largely the only thing you can spend money on to increase your defenses are supercaps: nerf supercaps and isk doesn't buy defense.