Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here's the skinny:

Structure bash
Good: you get to shoot guns, bringing more people makes it go faster
Bad: sitting in one place for a long time, difficult to involve smaller groups fairly

Structure Entosis
Good: small groups can participate in sov warfare
Bad: sitting in one place for a long time, no weapons fire unless there's actually a fight


So right off the bat, we can ignore the part about sitting in one place for a long time because it happens in both the old version and the new version. Somebody else can try to fix that. Now the entosis style only fails when there's no actual fight happening, but anyone who's done much of it will probably tell you that an actual fight to defend one's space is pretty uncommon. So that means entosising is a lot of ships sitting around running a blue beam and waiting...a lot like ice mining. Not particularly exciting.


So what if we could make a system that had all the good parts, and only the one mutual bad part? It would look like this:

New Structure Method
Good: you get to shoot guns, bringing more people makes it go faster, small groups can participate in sov warfare
Bad: sitting in one place for a long time

Sounds good in theory, right? Easier said than done, I hear you say. Well I believe I have solved the problem:

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tl;dr is in the upper portion, but there's also some at the bottom


The first trick is to make it so that a larger assault fleet does more damage to the structure, but not too much more. The larger fleet should still take time, while the smaller fleet shouldn't be left on the project all day long. And the solution is: the structure takes extra damage when it is under attack. While the structure is being shot at, it periodically depletes some of its own hitpoints in order to ensure that the structure bash is over with in a reasonable amount of time. The rate of self-depletion is not affected by how many combatants there are and is only either on (when it's being shot at) or off (when it is not being shot at).

Now we don't want trollceptors or other cheap devices taking out large structures, so of course a force, even a small force, needs to be committed to taking it out in order to succeed even as far as alerting the defenders of potential success. Believe it or not, the entosis mechanic actually does fairly well in this regard. You might think a lone trollceptor can come in and entosis all the things but that is far from the truth. One lone ship running an entosis link in hostile territory during their vulnerability hours is a sitting duck with a target stamped to its face. It also is unable to leave the structure to go after the command nodes. It takes a team effort, even if it only takes a small team.

So we have the structure start out with hitpoint invulnerability, meaning you can't deal damage to it even during its entosis vulnerability window. To allow it to be shot at, it must be entosised first, but we can significantly shorten the link timers and other factors so that the whole process goes faster. Then comes the structure bash, which fits into the time we saved on the entosis links. The opposing force begins firing at the structure--once the first hit is recorded, it starts a timer, say ten seconds and that timer reactivates with each shot. While this ten second timer is active, the structure gradually depletes its own hitpoints.

So the fastest speed of the op is pretty fast for the structure bash portion because the aggressors can bring in a fleet of dreadnoughts and have it down in seconds, but the whole op speed is still limited by the now shorter entosis timers. On the other hand, the slowest speed of the op isn't much different from how it is now, assuming the structure degradation speed is balanced with the time saved on shorter entosis timers.



So to summarize:
* Attacking force goes through standard entosis capture, but with reduced timers and fewer command nodes
* After entosis capture, structures must be shot until HP depleted in order to finalize the attack
* During structure shoot, structure depletes its own HP to create a minimum success time no matter how weak attacking force is
* Total capture time for a weak attacking force is about the same as before, while for a strong attacking force it is significantly shorter

It does. There's still defense systems. If it were a POS bash, for instance, the attacking fleet would at minimum need enough defense and logi to withstand the POS guns.

Adding armor plates would not make the structure easier to destroy, that doesn't even make any sense. The periodic depletion of hit points would simply cause sustained fire to gradually tear its hit points down, even if it's small artillery from three frigates.

I love it!

They bring as many people as they can. I'm a member of a large and powerful alliance that controls a lot of capital ships, and I can tell you from first-hand experience most strat-ops are done with only subcaps and a lot of them are done with less than a hundred. And that's us. You know who will bring dreads to every structure bash? Pandemic Legion will. Nobody else will.

Trollceptors are a myth published by folks who don't want to work to maintain their sov. But there are lots of small groups who aren't able to call in a fleet of dreads to shoot structures. Notice how my system gives similar capture times (at least in the same ballpark) between both extremes of the spectrum, requiring no more than a willingness to fight and work as a team to capture sov.

If the game had an arena, it could support betting assets and space.