Player Features and Ideas Discussion

tl;dr: Incentivise small holding and penalise massive empire building to break up nullsec and encourage ways of living a nullsec life that go beyond the current blobbing and powermongering, making nullsec an attractive objective for all.

~~~~~

According to the dev blog posted a few weeks ago, CCP are planning on revamping nullsec in the next expansion, and one of the things they mentioned was smallholding. In an ideal world, I think it should be possible for a medium sized corp to take possession of and hold on to a system or two, make it into their own little kingdom to treat as a semi-safe haven where they can base their ISK making, and spend their time basing out of there, with an emphasis on roaming PVP.

What I would propose is changing the sovereignty mechanics drastically to make it much harder to hold large regions of space, while making holding a smaller, easier to defend area an attractive proposition. To do this, I would propose the following changes:

1. Enable Corps to take sov without an alliance. Perhaps limit the number of systems they can hold, maybe just to a single one, or maybe make it a corp management skill, but I think it would happen organically anyway with the further changes below.

2. Require Sov holders to nominate a "Capital" system. This system would have to be the most developed system the holders owned. No other systems could be upgraded beyond it. The first outpost built by a holding entity must be here, or if they capture a station system without already owning any stations, they must make the new station system their capital. If the capital system is lost, the holders lose all their sovereignty. The capital can be moved, but there would be a large cost to this, and a long delay.

3. All systems where an entity claims sovereignty must be linked by an unbroken chaing of systems where the same entity also holds sovereignty. In other words, if you want to build an empire, it must be a single, contiguous block of space. No more taking sov in10 systems in a region and claiming the whole region as your own, despite the fact that 90% of the systems have no sov.

4. If the sovereignty chain is broken, all systems which are no longer linked to the capital are lost. This would act as a deterrent to taking vast swathes of space you can't really defend properly. There would be a countdown, to give the owners a chance to take the lost system back.

5. The further a system is from the capital, the more it costs to upgrade and upkeep. Another incentive against over expansion. Alliances will not want to expand further than necessary if they will lose ISK doing so. The costs could be balanced so that it was very cheap to hold a single system, but increasing exponentially. It would still be possible for an alliance to hold vast quantities of space, but there would be very little reason to do so.

6. Create an incentive to raid unclaimed/other people's space. There should be a reason to attack other space, even with no intention to capture it. We don't want lots of little carebear fortresses which are safe just by virtue of no one having any reason to attack them. Perhaps every system only has a single mineral present in it, or perhaps the good mining systems are poor ratting ones, or the good plexes are always in systems that have poor minerals and rats. Whatever the method, individual systems should have character, and the best systems should be the hardest to defend. Good ratting systems could be at crossroads, ensuring high levels of traffic, and many approaches for aggressors, but they may be relatively close to highsec. Good mining systems might be dead ends at the end of long pipes, meaning a long and potentially hazardous journey to get the minerals/assembled products to highsec.

To sum it all up, it should be cheap and easy to take possession of a single system. It would be relatively easy to defend, but far from being a self sufficient fortress. Industry would be possible anywhere, but the required minerals and materials would not all be locally available. It would be an entirely viable way for a corp to exist to hold a single system, where they base their industry, and maybe rat/plex in their spare time. Their industry could be supported by raiding/trading with their neighbours for the unique resources they possess. A sufficiently powerful corp/alliance may be able to possess the only system with a particularly valuable resource in a region. They could then command its supply to all their neighbours.

There are plenty of possibilities, but the overall effect would be to reduce the size of the empires held by the large alliances (who could still remain the most powerful entities in Eve, since they would presumably focus themselves on controlling the most valuable resources), enable smaller alliances to become meaningful in their own right rather than just being pets and renters, and enable corporations to independently live in nullsec and support themselves by virtue of living in space it's not worth the larger alliances' effort taking or holding.

Thoughts?

Not sure what you mean by that? Are you suggesting nullsec systems should randomly have those characteristics you mentioned?

Static predictable routes work both for and against you,
if you setup in one system in null currently, thats pretty much it.

You can move around in system or do what ever but the gates and routes to come kill you are the same day after day.
and that works against small groups and makes it easier for big groups,
to both Come kill you and push you out.

if null was connected by means of randomly moving wormholes, no way could any one alliance both take over, or keep so many systems as they do currently.

so for small holdings im pretty much for wh's as a means to both prevent super easy logistics, and slowdown or prevent alliances pretty much gobbling up the whole thing and keeping every one else out.

I really like your ideas and hope they implement them in some way, but disagree with the taxation factor. While I agree a corp should not be able to get outrageously huge, there should instead be like a max system control of ten or something.

Oh, and the capital systems will likely not be the first target as if loading it means loading sov, obviously it's going to be packed with defenses. Tactics should include invading 'fringe' systems to wear down their resources or draw them out so that attacking the capital can be approached logically.

I think the idea behind the OPs proposed changes are sound, but I think youre going about it the wrong way.

Capital systems are not the first place invading alliances will go, its the only place they'll go, why go anywhere else? taking any other system would be just as difficult and would do less.

Also requiring an unbroken chain of sov would not really do as much and you'd think it would. The major alliance in the area would grab a core constellation and leverage all of the other systems using threat of force and the ability to titan bridge a 500 man fleet anywhere to control the whole region all the same.

I like 5 other than the fact that if I wanted to control a lot of space all at once, I would just create a bunch of puppet alliances.

6 is where I really agree with you, if they moved moon miners outside the shield bubble and made the sov upgrades able to be incapped without SBUing the system I think that would accomplish that goal.

Honestly I would just nerf cyno jumping AKA "teleportation", supercaps and the blobbing "strategy" and I think all would be well with 0.0

I think your point #6 accomplishes that without 1-5.

The way it is right now, in order to disrupt the moon mining operation of a given alliance, you either need to commit capital ships, or hundreds of battleships meaning that large alliances can take swaths of space and claim all of the good moons without regard for whether or not they can defend them because the length of time required to disrupt said operation means that they can easily scramble a fleet to defend it.

If some way of raiding a moon mining operation were in place, I think that would reduce the number of moons large alliances held, specifically in low sec because they'd be just such a hassle, and stifle the mentality that occupying your territory is ancillary

TL;DR
I think its far more "sandbox" to let the players figure it out for themselves than to invent mechanics to encourage people to play the way you think is right. Which sandbox is more free, the one with the bully or the one with the teacher who enforces a strict set of rules?

I think the way my proposal makes it easier for smaller alliances to hold space is that there would be more space that large alliances would be willing to give up or rent out.

I also strongly disagree with your second point; if everyone could, using your illustration "build their own sandcastle" there would be no competition. I was just explaining to my roommate that everything in Eve is competition, everything you do is taking away from someone else (except for perhaps mission running) and that's the way uh-huh uh-huh I like it.

I think the problem is that youre trying to simultaneously make it harder and easier to own space. Going back and re-reading your OP, im not sure how your proposal addresses the problem you just posed any better than mine does.

The only difference between our two systems is that in yours they'd have to have a single group of systems to base out of and raid people, and in mine they have the option of spreading out, even though it may make it harder to defend . . . That and if they lost a few key battles, the largest alliance in the game could get instantly BoB'ed

If im missing something please point it out