Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Citadels have been around for a year and they're pretty good, but a few significant issues have made themselves known:

• The three-timer event mechanics is rather tedious and requires no effort on the part of the structure owner to maintain
• Sovereignty has very little relevance in the current game mechanics
• Time Zone Tanking of structures often prevents conflict from taking place

I'd like to address these issues with a set of revisions to structure vulnerability windows, structure timers, and sovereignty tie-ins. They do not need to be implemented together, but taken as a whole, can significantly improve the quality of life of the attacker and defender, and help restore value to having sovereignty.

1. Add Fuel Block Consumption to Structure Shields

Structures currently require no upkeep; an abandoned Citadel or Engineering Complex takes just as many man hours to take down as a fully occupied and utilized structure. By adding a single fuel block per hour to structure shields, a constant upkeep cost is added to reduce the value of structure spam, while allowing active structures to maintain their current defenses.

2. Apply ADM Multiplication to Damage Caps Through Access Lists

Aegis sovereignty's distinctions between your capital, busy home systems, and idle backwaters is one of the highlights of the system, but it has no impact or relevance to structures. Attaching the damage cap to Activity Defense Multipliers restores some value to sovereignty itself, and opens the door to increasing the base damage cap value; a 50% or 100% increase in the base damage cap would not go amiss if ADMs begin to affect structures.

While the ADM effects could strictly be applied to in-alliance structures, there are more gameplay opportunities in assigning these multipliers through Access Lists, ranging from sovereignty overlords offering defenses to their protectorates, to rogue directors shutting down the defenses without instantly giving themselves away to the ones they've betrayed.

3. Coincident Structure Vulnerability Windows with Territorial Claim Unit and Infrastructure Hub Timers

With carrots, must come sticks - and the opportunity to solve two problems at once. Player assigned vulnerability windows make it very difficult to attack alliances that live outside of your own alliance's most active hours. Previous sovereignty and asset defense mechanics included elements outside of the defender's control, ranging from random exit times to fixed reinforcement timers, but hours of attack outside of their control. We can add the former to Structures by attaching a vulnerability timer to the start of Entosis based Node Events. With this mechanic, defenders can be forced to react outside of strictly controlled hours. More importantly, the attacking fleets in a structure node contest have the opportunity to participate in the attack, beyond chasing down the fleets who are hunting down and destroying your own entosis ships.

In Conclusion

While not all of these ideas need to be implemented, the set would serve to reduce the burden of attacking abandoned infrastructure, restore meaning towards and re-balance the state of sovereignty warfare, create entirely new mechanisms for player interaction, and alleviate the frequent complaint that Node Warfare is boring for the attacker.

Thank you for reading.

Number three means that if you reinforce a TCU or Ihub, the structures that are inside of the system (all of them) have a vulnerability window that starts at the same, randomly generated time as the node event.

Point 1) just adds more logistics burden to the WH dwellers, but if Drilling Rigs allowed us to rip ice from moons then that would mitigate this.

How would point 2) and point 3) apply in WH's? I'm assuming no change in 2) and 3) would mean that vulnerability stays the same for citadels outside of sovereignty areas since we can only contrl space by force of arms anyway?

since its 1 block per hour, even a single DST could fuel a citadel for over a year.
(50k m3/ 5m per block / 24 hours = 416 days)
I'd even add max fuel bay for 90 days to still prevent a citadel being alive for a year without interaction.
Your WH logistic team would only need to ship in fuel once a year :)





Having structures become vulnerable after entosising something is a bad idea.
You shouldnt have to attack someone sov to be able to take down their structures.

I'd like the ADM to have effect on the vulnerability window set.
The lower the ADM, the more time gets added to the set vuln-windows

ADM 0 +5h
ADM 1 +4h
ADM 2 +3h
etc


For example:
System A has ADM 0
The structure has a vulnerability window from 15.00-16.00
The actual vuln window would be 12.30-18.30 (set 1h+5h)

System B has ADM 1
The structure has a vulnerability window from 15.00-16.00
The actual vuln window would be 13.00-18.00 (set 1h+4h)

How about not adding this utterly annoying tedium to the structures and instead do it this way: The damage cap feature becomes an actively managed function of the structure. You have to renew its active status every couple of weeks, let's say for the sake of argument every 5 weeks. If you do not do that, the damage cap of the structure turns off and you can kill it with as many supers you like in the blink of an eye. The damage cap cannot be turned on or off during a vulnerability window.

A 5 weeks timer (again only exemplary number) gives enough time to bridge an inactivity gap due to RL issues without being too much time for smaller attackers to lose interest. And it is a lot less time than a fuel block based shield activity status which can go on for months and months (under the assumption of 1 Block per hour, 1440 fuel blocks give you 2 months of active shield) as well as easier to manage for the holder. Graphical indicators on the model or a line in the Show Info's attributes tab can indicate the damage cap activity status.

For number 3, I personally prefer that invul timers be removed altogether and use RF exit timers instead. Throw that on top of the number of timer scaling with the structure and you've got an actual scaling system of defense capability for different sized structures,

While the method for number 1 may make people cringe to think of logistics involved, I definitely believe that abandoned structures need to lose some of their strength. With real-estate being almost infinite now, the harder we make it to kill them the more and more trash we'll accumulate. I wouldn't want to see this problem try to be addressed years down the road when the problem is even worse and harder to deal with.