Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Hi,

Let me introduce myself. I am CEO of the PVP corporation Adversity., a medium-sized band of pilots that can/has flown every ship in the game and died in them many times as well as killed them many times. I'm not relevant in the grand scheme of things, but I have had the opportunity to delve deeply into the mechanics of Citadels - how to kill them effectively despite the significant advantages for defending forces, and how an attacking force can use them to destroy alliances or simply acquire many buckets of tears.

I've come to realise that I both love and hate citadels, for reasons I will mention later. However, I've also realised that the current gameplay surrounding them is not sustainable to a game that mostly relies on people shooting other people's stuff to keep it going.

Citadels - On Offense

A few months ago Adversity. deployed to Venal to hang out with our bros in PL and shoot at CO2/TEST as they are easy targets that provide content for solo-to-large scale pvp. We haphazardly shifted our focus to an alliance called Cede Nullis in Branch which was easily farmable and provided some of the most laughable moments in recent memory of how fail an alliance can be. On top of that, they were our timezone (USTZ). If you have ever looked at a map of Venal, you will realise that it is quite challenging to attack someone in Branch because you cannot stage nearby due to lack of stations. Since we are too lazy to put poses down, we would have quickly stopped our campaign against CN. However, god bless cheap citadels! Since we are all decently loaded with ISK we plopped down an Astrahus 1j from their staging and as it anchored successfully without opposition we proceeded to load it up with our favourite spaceships and bring along our spare supers to see what we could do.

Within 60 days our 150man corp had killed a 1000 man alliance and forced them to evacuate from Branch, upon which they failcascaded. The offensive capability from our single Astrahus 1j from their staging made it incredibly difficult for them to counter us. They tried to kill it, but it turns out that a decently fit Astrahus can easily kill a fleet of cruisers by itself, or at least tip the odds in your favor if you also form a fleet to defend it. The 3h vulnerability made it insanely easy to fortify our position and prevent CN from trying to push us out of their home. It felt even better than staging out of an NPC station. The cost of our citadel came out to be 1.5bil and had a monthly upkeep of 100mil-ish a month for a cloning bay. We had no fear in our hearts about our Astrahus dying, we could easily plop another down and safely move our assets to the new one, for free.

It became clear that using Citadels for offensive operations is one of the best methods to either force a fight, or continuously harass another entity. This is particularly more pronounced in sov space, where sovholders typically don't want you to have a foothold in their house.

Conclusions:
- Using citadels to invade an area is overpowered;
- The 3h vulnerability window of an Astrahus means that you are guaranteed at most 13-14 days of staging (uptime + rf'd)
- If you research your foe well enough, you can make your citadel invulnerable %100 of the time thanks to timezone differences
- They are cheaper than poses in the long run, and offer many more advantages that poses, of which cloning is the most advantageous feature (don't need to burn 20+j from nearest npc station)
- The offensive capabilities means that it is a PITA to get rid of it

Citadels - On defense

It was a real pain in the ass to shoot Cede Nullis. They were huddled on their Fortizars and there was absolutely nothing we could do to their Citadels during USTZ. Shortly after we arrived, they switched all of their structures to AUTZ. This meant that unless my entire corp had taken 1 week off of work there was literally no way we could kill these structures. Luckily there was a corp that forgot/was too dumb to switch their timers and we killed a fortizar. However, after spending 30-45mins shooting it 3 times over a 1-week period it was not worth the effort other than for the killmail, because they don't drop anything and pilots asset safety their things anyway.

So we did what we do best to kill CN. We terrorized them, sabre camped, cloaky camped, blops'd, etc. The only real damage we did to their infrastructure was their poses, since those are never vulnerable. We also had so many spies we managed to steal their fit from their staging fortizar. That was the extent of our damage to their stuff. We couldn't kill their citadels, and we were not interested in their sov. They could have bitten the bullet and waited us out until we got bored since we couldn't do anything to their infrastructure but instead they rolled over and died.

In the end, their alliance leader unanchored their last 2 fortizars out of the 3 they had but we stole them after they came out. I was lucky to notice them pushing the unanchor button during my morning coffee at 6am, right after downtime.

Conclusions:
- Citadel timers can be used to deny all forms of pvp
- Citadels are one of the safest and cheapest ways to stage
- Citadels are not worth killing, shooting them involves a huge risk for almost no reward
- Worst comes to worst, you can spam citadels infinitely in a system to extend survival as a defender, or to asset safety to lowsec or eachother
- Upkeep is cheap/non-existant, and there are no drawbacks to having too many citadels

These structures are not the pvp-enablers that CCP thought they would be. In fact, there is no reason to ever shoot one, other than a final blow to seal the deal, if you can be bothered. Read below for suggested alternative mechanics.

pro tip

walls of text are largly ignored cut out all the crap about who you and your group are. drop the story time bits and cut it down to what you want changed and why

but there is a reason to attack... to ensure the enemy doesn't have such a strong staging option.

and yes they are defensive assets, defensive assets that have allowed and caused many fights.

having actually read what you posted the issue seemed to be the incompetence of those you were up against not the citadels themselves

Groups that are willing to spend 80blocks/h to fuel an astrahus deserves to have it standing, however, are they ready to fuel the other 10 citadels that they may have laying around their area? I'd rather be able to kill 9/10 of their citadels, because they half-ass the others, instead of not killing any at all, which is the current situation in general.

Indeed, they are the safest they can be, but at a significant cost, which brings back the whole risk/reward metric that was lacking with the simple "plop one down and dw about it anymore".

The risk hasnt changed, but at least you know that killing a citadel that someone stages in causes significant headache to logistics, and may drive your enemies out of just plopping another one down and want to pay for again.

You can't really spam them with this new proposal, because they will be like sticks, and be vulnerable most of the time

Sounds exactly how poses function currently, doesn't it? You dont need to pay 80, its a choice.

Expensive is a point of view. The average group willing to put that a citadel, especially a fortizar, can probably afford the equivalent of 3 large poses to fuel it every month... There is always the option of NPC stations :)

yeah thats exactly how it works... and ccp decided not to go with this


your idea makes small groups weaker and strong groups stronger

tl;dr:

Our big group(read us and our friends) couldn't kill a smaller group fast enough, and we couldn't be assed to sov wand. CCP, nerf small groups pls, too stronk.



Nah. -1


This game is already WAY too 'balanced' to favor N+1 due to the last 3-4 years of development in particular. We need alot less N+1, and more: A)reasons to be in smaller groups with fewer blues and smaller chunks of space, or B) more penalties/reasons to NOT form the ridiculously massive coalitions and corporations that exist in the current environment.

As usual, you look at a situation... and come to the 100% wrong conclusion Rivr. Citadels are immensely useful for invading, withdrawing, moving, etc, for those who don't have massive fleets or blue lists longer than my arm to just YOLO through space. Sure, they can be destroyed. Absolutely fine. But they can be set to favor your strongest TZ's if you want a fight, or your adversaries weakest. They can be replaced without too much pain. They can be put where you need them, not leaving you restricted to having to capture the station systems first.

And... duh.... you can't do anything in this game if someone bigger than you with bigger friends decides they don't want you to. Citadels are not the cause of this. Citadels help people move away from it though, by giving them more options. Obviously Malcanis' law applies.




Making them less capable of doing this does NOT help smaller groups move away from the blob, rather it shuts them down before they even start.

Left the first bit in because it seems to contradict your second point about offense. If they're good for forcing a fight then by definition they're enabling PvP by creating something to fight over.

They're only cheaper than POSes in the long run if you don't lose them. A POS is *much* cheaper to lose than a Citadel, especially if you have enough of a heads up that you can strip modules off it and evac them.

Also the time zone thing applies to staging POSes as well and always has. It's a double edged sword though, if you put your Reinforce in a time where you don't have many defenders then your enemy can and will kick over your sandcastles easily. An undefended Astrahus or Fortizar Citadel can be killed by a few capitals with the correct fitting. Your 'guaranteed staging' number also assumes that you deploy just after the normal vulnerability window passes.

You seem to have missed that if the Alliance you were attacking has an IHUB in that system with any strategic index at all anchoring would have taken longer.

Overall a lot of your complaints here seem to stem from an overestimation of the defensive value of a Citadel without support, the complete failure of your enemies in opposing your own Citadel, and your own Alliance apparently being almost completely mono-TZ, which completely prevented you from simply moving a few dreads with support in to knock over your enemy's Citadels.



Again, the denial here relies heavily on your enemy being basically mono-TZ. I could literally bat-phone *one person* and have them bring enough cap alts to kill your Astrahus easily if you didn't defend it. Citadels are a force multiplier yes, but anything times zero is still zero.

Citadel safety is something you enforce and your enemy attempts to disrupt. Citadels are much easier to disrupt than a staging POS during setup but safer once they're setup. This encourages being active in your space and actively defending your space when you notice threats to it. The people you kicked out clearly didn't do those things, to an absurd degree.

IMO POSes are worse. They're better able to defend themselves against small groups of ships without any support and required a fair number of caps to easily kick over. With Citadels once you hit the damage cap everything else is support.

If you spam Citadels in a losing fight you're just going to lose money, at the cost of a 1-2 Billion per Astrahus, not prolong your staging presence.

There also is at least one drawback to "too many Citadels" that you seem to be discounting or ignoring, which is the cost of the Citadels themselves. If you start losing, or even if the enemy simply runs around and reinforces them all to the point where you can't defend them all, then you're going to start losing a lot of assets pretty quickly. We've already seen this happen in High Sec and elsewhere. The only advantage from tons of Citadels in a small area is basically forcing your enemy to grind through them, but that's pretty marginal.