Assembly Hall

The projection of power in Eve Online has been an important issue since major power blocs have been able to maintain assets all over Eve without too much concern since it was so easy to maintain and protect them. This needs to change.

Below are some thoughts on why things are the way they are and how things could change by relating to some real world examples.

Power Projection is the ability of the most powerful political entities to move significant combat forces great distances for extended periods of time to protect their interests.

The biggest factor in the projection of power is the logistical capacity of the political entity. Eve Online has made the movement of combat forces and the logistics to support it so easy that most organizations of any significant size can project power to every corner of the Eve Cluster in an extremely short period of time, therefore forcing the ones of lessor power to be renters or outlaws.

The biggest issue with the projection of power in Eve Online is that many things related to it are tied to the isk cost of doing it. In Eve Online the isk cost of doing something has always been less of an issue than the designers intended.

Just consider how many Titans were built when the Devs thought that the cost alone would prevent too many from being built.


There are several factors to the projection of power that should be considered.


Home Waters:

Every political entity needs to have a place of origin where they are most effective in gaining resources and producing items.



Home Advantage:

This place of origin should not be a “Winnebago” where you can pack up and move anywhere. Where the organization plants first its flag is its home until disbandment. This place of origin should have indigenous massive bonuses where you can extract resources vastly more easily, safely transport, and build assets within these home waters. But the storage of those materials and building of those assets are vulnerable to attack and destruction or delay. Ores, minerals, ices, fuels, and etc should not be able to be stored inside POS shields or Stations. They should be vulnerable to attack, but far easier to defend in your “home waters.” This could be a constellation, but certainly not a region.



True Logistical Structure:

There has to be a tangible logistical structure that is vulnerable to interdiction. This may not be in the actual movement of items such as fuel, but it should require the transporting of that fuel to forward bases that have silos to store the fuel with distribution points to fuel ships. These bases, silos, and distribution points should be vulnerable to attack and should be far easier to interdict than such installations in one’s “home waters.”



Construction of significant naval forces was almost always done in “home waters.

In Eve Online it is too easy to build significant assets in any location on the map. Your organization should have a point of origin where you can most effectively get all your resources, construct your major forces, and conduct major repairs.
That organization always has the best bonuses and least difficultly obtaining resources and constructing forces in that location by default. These bonuses for that home constellation should be massive. How much easier is it for a country in RL to create fuel at home and then ship it versus digging a well, building a refinery, and then transporting it. That remote refinery should be massively more vulnerable to attack than that one in your home systems which should make it far more effective to build and create at home fairly defended and then transport to the front lines.



Home waters were almost always a single contiguous area on a map that would expand but certainly not move to another location.

In Eve Online it is too easy to form an organization and move it all over the map. You should be able to do this to some extend with combat forces, but not your seat of power or logistical home. You should plant your flag in a home constellation and that is your home. A Region would be far too big for any organization as “home waters.” The only way to change that would be to create a new parent organization and plant your flag somewhere else. That should be a significant cost and effort with maybe a time limit in order to prevent a “whack-a-mole effect.”

You should be able to extend your “home waters” to immediately adjacent constellations, but no further. Extending your home waters should involve significant building up of logistical infrastructure and defenses in your home constellation to a point where it either overpowers the current owners or the constellation base neutral power effect, similar to how cities worked in Rise of Nations.



Ships needed fuel, food, and water.

It is far too easy to move fuel around in Eve Online for ships. Jump Freighters can move far too much fuel far too easily. Logistics should be the hardest and most limiting aspect to the projection of force. The further you have to move it, the more difficult it should be. It should be relatively easy to move fuel around your home solar systems but exponentially more difficult the further you move away.

You should be required to build vulnerable remote bases with required distribution systems to get fuel from tankers to holding silos to fueling stations for ships. All of these should be vulnerable to attack and degradation. It should take time to defuel a tanker and fuel a waiting ship.



To be continued

Meanwhile I enjoy some of your ideas, but you are prone into supporting smaller fleets compared to the big power blocs. However, are you aware that if the focus switches into smaller fleets then what a gathering of small fleets can achieve practically the same end result? Could you please elaborate on how specifically easy it is to move from one side to another? Easy as in time, enemy threats...?

This is a very logical and solid image, I like it. But there is an inherent problem in all this black ops stuff targeting the infrastructure, which stems from differencies in timezones. This is why the mechanics of POS/station timers were added to the game. We need some kind of a timer here too, or it will be too easy to disrupt any infrastracture just by attacking your enemies while most of them are having dreams.

How about that: every silo can be switched off and retracted back under the POS shield after miners have finished their job? In this fully retracted and deactivated state it stops processing its content right away, until it's activated again. But you can't deactivate it right away as local starts rising, it has a dealy of 30 to 120 minutes. In this "offlining" state it still protrudes from uder the POS's shield and fully active, and can be attacked with results you are describing.

So now it requires a little bit more of a planning from "mining overseers" (like, "we mine today until 9 p.m. so we should initiate deactivation process at 8 p.m." or "today we can't ensure enough military presence after 6 p.m. so lets finish early than usual today, we don't need unnecessary risk")

Moreover, some tools for CEOs or directors to switch a huge ammount of such intallations to "offlining" state at once are needed that it wouldn't become too much of a hassle.

I wouldn't be for dumping activities such as any resource collection. What I'm talking about is simply adding some NPC logistic traffic that can be interdicted nearly 24 hrs a day, similar to why the timer mechanic exists. But interdicting this 100% doesn't mean that 100% of what was being transferred is destroyed.

Adding NPCs to doing some of the more boring tasks could make this game more fun for everyone. But this NPC work should be limited to the transport of material and maybe defense, like POS guns do now. This could be gate guns, station guns, POS guns, transport escorts, and maybe some other things.

But those NPC transports and defenders do cost something, along with the loss of the material interdicted. But that could be a whole other discussion.


This specific idea is that the transporting of material needed to support Capital Ship movements outside of your home could be transferred to a NPC mechanic. This would be mainly jump fuel and maybe ammo and maybe could even include POS fueling.

The idea is to make it progressively harder to support your operations the farther you are from your home systems. This could be done with fuel cost, as it is now, but doesn't seem to work very well due to cost not being an issue with the bigger organizations. This could be done with making it physically longer to travel anywhere, but many players would be against that.

Or this could be done by making it take longer to move fuel from one point to another along with making it interdict-able along the way, but within a NPC mechanic.

Doing this in an NPC mechanic with hundreds of transports moving from your home systems to your remote base on a daily basis, could create a true logistical infrastructure that can be more readily interdicted. This is similar to timers, where you create an ability for someone living on the other side of the planet the ability to interdict your logistics.

So instead of a few 5bil ships ninja moving all your fuel like nearly invulnerable supertankers, you would have hundreds of NPC fuel haulers moving your fuel 24 hrs a day, which allows interdiction from those in a different time zone. Kind of like timers.

But since this is a NPC mechanic, destroying 100% of the ships shouldn't destroy 100% of the fuel to be moved. Just a portion of it based upon some balance.

The idea is to create a NPC logistical chain that provides for others to interdict without the ability to shut if off 100%. This creates a lot of targets for those in different time zones to interdict someone's logistics.

This could be even extended to fueling POS towers where the NPCs actually fuel the towers as long as enough fuel makes it there. So instead of players fueling POS towers themselves, these NPCs do, leaving the player to decide how much fuel he should ship to ensure the POS stays fueled during interdiction of these logistics.

This could create some interesting gameplay where only so much fuel can be sitting at the POS and by the attacker varying his attack times, he might be able to create a temporary shortage if the defenders are trying to limit how much they send. Or the defender can just max out fuel transfers limiting the affects of interdiction, losing the extra fuel transferred, and at a significant cost increase.


Like I said earlier, there are some really boring things that NPCs could do much better in this game. The track the Devs have taken so far is to make it easier for Players to move the stuff via jump freighters, but that limits the interdiction of one of the most important parts of supplying forces, the Logistical Chain.

And in doing that, the Devs have made it far too easy to move vast forces all over in short periods of time with little chance to interdict.


Putting these things in an interdict-able NPC mechanic can bring more complexity to the game regarding logistics and dramatically increase the ability for small gang warfare to have a greater commutative effect on the largest political entity's activities.


Note: How much fuel is moved how quickly at what cost would be a subject of balance.

I guess what I'm talking about is more high level ideas and would leave the details to those who would implement these mechanics, but for some ideas I would suggest the below as possibilities.

Although other people might have better ideas how to implement the higher level ideas.

My idea on these NPC transports are:

• The route can be set like any autopilot route with waypoints and system avoidance.
• Transports spawn at distribution points of fuel depots in your home system or advance bases, which could be new structures placed near POSes or similar structures. Advance bases could be new structures that cost somewhere between a POS and Outpost.
• These transports are immune to warp bubbles and could warp to zero or 15km depending on balance considerations. They align like any ship of their class on other side of gate and can be pointed. They travel to destination via the waypoints.

These are just some ideas of how to implement this high level idea. There could be better ones out there.

• Transports can be set to travel in small groups or massive groups less frequently.
• You should have the ability to schedule the most busy times for your convoys, but there should be some ships moving 24 hrs a day. It shouldn't completely shut down.

• I like the idea of a distribution network that the player can customize.
• There could be refineries and depots in your home system that you concentrate the fuels your harvest.
• Then you could have remote bases as describe above with additional fuel depots and distribution points.


• So you can link your home depot with mid path depots then have a destination depot.
• You can set how much fuel you want moved to a depot and these NPC ships will move it to that point which could be several depots down line.

Capital Ships can fuel at any depot that has a distribution point.

Heavy interdiction can significantly impact how long it takes to get fuel to the very end of the line.


The main point I'm trying to make is that there should be a NPC run Logistical mechanic that can be interdicted by hostile forces.
Of course this mechanic can be adjusted to better meet the needs of the owning organizations, but they shouldn't be able to insure all their logistics run during friendly high time.

A significant amount should run nearly 24 hours.

Another consideration is how far Capital Ships can jump. Maybe limit that to adjacent Constellations instead of light years. Or use both. So you max skills you can jump to any system that is in an adjacent Constellation as long as it is less than you max jump range. You can not jump further than an adjacent Constellation.

Maybe balance jump fuel usage to where you need to fuel at least every other constellation.
Or maybe allow a Capital Ship to use the destination distribution point fuel supply to jump to a depot so you don't strand Capital Ships without fuel.
So you can't jump if there isn't enough fuel at your destination and will have to wait until the NPCs deliver more fuel.
(You don't want to strand Capital Ships out of jump fuel)

So therefore you would need a fuel depot and distribution point in each Constellation on the route to where you are going.

That might not be the best way of doing it, but is just an idea based upon needing a significant NPC Logistics mechanic to support force projection via Capital Ships.