EVE General Discussion

Did you notice that one player states the other whine here about putting an artificial limit on how many you can have in system, because space is small and tiny, LMAO. Then he thought a bit more about it and adds per corp or alliance because space is big you know, so an artificial limit based on what exactly? By the way I am not having a dig at the player who posted this directly, the HTFU group have already gone on about this in the initial threads about them so my comments are aimed at them!

Obviously the shoal of fish idea scares them because people with bigger wallets can laugh at their futile attempts to inflict injury by blapping decoy ones, they don't like the idea that while they are sitting there blapping one laughing amongst themselves at how upset the owner will be, someone is watching them and laughing at their ineffective efforts.

So to all you indy corps, hold on in terms of putting these things down, build up a huge stock of them then blanket an area with 30 of them, then setup three as you need based on the rigs and then watch with amusement the inefficient war deccers waste their time on them, and you my friends will have won Eve, you know that.

I am building ten Raitaru at this moment, this is great fun..., my Raitaru's will blot out your overviews...

Seriously though, if you make something so weak the only alternative is to mass produce them that is a design fault, which now gets into the classic Eve strategy of weaponised boredom, you lot just do not like it done to you, so the plaintive cry for an artificial limit on numbers allowed in space will grow and grow, that is so funny.

EDIT: Here is what you do industrialists, build at least 30 Raitaru's, but get the rigs for three, you know that CCP made it so that for max efficiency you can only do one indy type per Raitaru, so obviously they don't see limiting them as a factor. Once you have made 30, you anchor them. Once the anchoring is complete you then decide which ones will be your production ones, all of them should only be accessible to your corp, no one else, because the key thing is not to allow people to know which ones you actually use. Another trick is wait for an Incursion to occur in your base system then grab loads of those BM's.

When you have them operating run around with decoy ships to the ones you don't use if there are other people in local and be careful not to make it obvious to that cloaky spy.

At this point you have a perfect setup, they will not show up on local as you have not made them public and people cannot see if they are fitted or not , the war deccers will have no idea which one to go for and you can produce your goods in perfect peace.

Nah. That may be true on the macro level when you look at the unwashed masses, but for the expert player it is by far the safest. You see, masters of highsec aggression mechanics like Dracvlad and myself, who have a deep understanding of the nuances of CrimeWatch and a good knowledge the ganking meta so we know what to expect from our likely opponents, can operate perfectly safely if we wish. We know the most dangerous pitfalls, can fit our ships to maximize the advantage of CONCORD, and know the tricks that make us immune to all but the most committed and patient (or lucky) attacker. It does take a small amount of effort (and some skill points to get out of T1 haulers), but avoiding the random violence of the trade hub and lanes is trivial for those that understand the sometimes arcane mechanics of highsec.

You do make a good case though that local is way too powerful an intel tool in nullsec that provides far too much safety for what is suppose to be the most dangerous space in the game. One has to imagine that such a source of free intel is living on borrowed time. Of course, that is a discussion for another thread.

I don't care about this topic one way or another, however it is an example of the kind of mistake CCP has made in the past. CCP should have never ever let players of EVE online have "starbases with automated defenses" of any kind, anywhere, ever, but especially in high sec. But they did.

Now they are taking them away, and replacing them with something that you have to actively defend and that is easy to take out with a smallish force if you don't have proper support. As it should have been from day one. OF COURSE people are going to complain, for more than a decade you (CCP) let them have something that was super tough and that protected itself 24/7.

Like i said, CCP did that a lot, off the top of my head lvl 5 missions in high sec, the old Ishtar, the Modus ships and off grid fighter assignment come to mind (there was plenty of anger over the removal of those features too, hell I was one who lamented the end of fighter assign). Seriously, CCP should stop giving players stuff that is so good ie unbalanced that all hell breaks loose when it's nerfed.

A citadel being worth 1 battleship worth of offensive power vs 5 really isn't going to make or break the game one way or the other. The problem is that they're stuck in this half arse in between place of being a station and being a POS.

Okay, so you're a small corp, you shouldn't own one because you can't defend it, use other people's citadels... alright fine. But then they should be a hell of a lot more reliable for third party people to use. Let me me put fuel into them so the 20 junkers near me with every service module offline is actually useful. Let me specialize my own bonuses on them so I have don't have to hunt 15 systems only to find a "This EC has a ship making bonus, but only smalls and on Sundays" raitaru. Right now us third party peeps are at the mercy of EC owners who don't even get feedback on when off-lining a service module will screw us over.

Considering the vast number of Citadels in High Sec perhaps it's good if they are "Easy" to take down. When I first heard of Citadels I thought they would be insanely expensive and mostly used in Systems without regular Stations (and mostly in Low/Null) but as it turns out they infest High Sec and makes it a nightmare to navigate the Overview.

... or maybe even a Structure Browser!

There are two vastly different situations here that people conflate.

If somebody owns the #1 market citadel in Eve right next door to Jita and makes an estimated 10b of passive profit a day, he will eventually have to defend it against large player organizations. Because that's more money than a whole bunch of R64 moons make, and you can't keep those without some serious muscle behind you either. It was silly that the Perimeter citadels stayed up as long as they did and I'm glad somebody finally started some action about them.

If your corp owns citadels out of the way without any special qualities, the danger to them is very limited. You will have to deal with other corps of similar size or some small merc outfits and those guys really are not impossible to defend against even if carebear corps love to break out in panic at the sight of a war dec. A correctly fit citadel - even if it's only an Astrahus - is a great force multiplier, and it's in fact quite easy to engage an enemy on a citadel on equal terms and wipe the floor with them. If you do that on the third timer, they just lost a week of progress and that alone is already demoralizing enough to wardeccers to make them immediately drop the war.

Well the OP has highlighted some valid issues, and I don't fully appreciate the attitude of, "if you can't defend it you don't deserve to have it". The problem here is essentially the wardec mechanics. Yes, Citadels are a corporation level asset. But the 100 or so battleships being sent against them are not corporation level threats. They are alliance level threats. There is no possible way that a 5 or 10 man corporation could defend itself against a 100 man wardec, small corporations can't deal with those threat levels without some outside help. So the wardec mechanic allowing this situation is doing much to make small corps nervous and lessen their enjoyment in creating this, "little place they call home".

Though, at the same time. I don't like the clutter at Perimeter. the 20+ Raitaru is absolute madness, and I'm not sorry to see some of them gone. Frankly, if you're little 10 man corp put a citadel in Perimeter then you're playing with the big boys, so you ought to have a defence strategy. If not, then sue for peace and un-anchor your citadel if you don't want to loose it.

I also need to ask the question. From the subjective experiences on the DPS of Raitaru missiles. What fittings were these stations using? Were they half hearted defences with skeleton fitting? Or was it a proper defence with all modules and rigs?



@Dracones: The reliability of fuel supply, and specialisation of rigs and modules on a prospective EC is one of the things which you should ask the owners about. You need to get on good relations with the owners of the Citadel, and if they are not willing to give you a corporate office, tell you what rigs and service modules they have, then take your business elsewhere.

I'm considering setting up an EC. But, if I do, then I'm only going to have it open to corporations who are willing to open an office in the facility. So that I can directly communicate with them and give feedback on the status of fuel and modules. So that I can give a guaranteed and reliable service... That way, if I need to offline the manufacturing service modules I can give advanced warning - without inadvertently cancelling my customers jobs.

Maybe the Astrahaus in high sec have all been boosting defenders and the defenders are getting the kills?

*he says extremely hopefully*

I'd love to own my own little piece of Eden, but the citadels and engineering complexes look like they have been mainly designed for disposability.

Which is fine, but CCP has to realise that NPC stations, most famously Jita, are popular for a reason.

This also means that no astrahaus in all of hisec has been on a killmail ever. Most are probably undefended but all of them having been undefended is unlikely. Also, in total the astrahaus has only been on about 100 killmails (an oddly high number of their kills are from pandemic legion and pandemic horde and I am not sure why; it's about 30%)