Warfare & Tactics

Docking up means you can't do all those things you were planning to do. The defender fights because if they win, they can get back to what they were doing. Also, POS owners have something to defend.

I dont know about you but when i war dec a pos owner -- the pos is gone in the 24 hours warning period before the war -- so while pos'es should have been a conflict point for war, as they are currently implemented they are largely useless as a war driving mechanism. As for your other point -- "The defender fights because if they win, they can get back to what they were doing" -- well again that assumes that the defender feels that they have to get back to whatever they were doing on your time table. In eve, alts are common place. In my experience, prior to dec shield when you war dec'd a small corp - they didnt fight you to get back to what they were doing quickly, rather they switched to playing other toons to wait you out in the hopes of boring you to death. In short, the changes ccp proposes will do nothing to encourage people to fight. Rather, folk are just going to go back to the old ways of avoiding the conflicts.

No. I'm not missing the point. You're being very clear. However, there is a logical fallacy to your entire argument. Your argument is predicated on the belief that war is or should be equal and allow a defender to have an incentive to fight. That isn't CCP's logic. So if isn't CCP's logic then obviously they're not going to fix the wardec mechanics to suit your belief how wardecs should occur.

You're also assuming that CCP wants actual real pvp to happen wrt hisec wardecs. I don't believe they ever stated that. They just want to simply minimize the outrageous tactics people will go through to wardec or avoid a wardec.

If you can find where CCP explicitly stated that they want to encourage actual pvp wrt wardecs, then I would consider changing my opinion on the matter.

Theirs more than one way to avoid an unwanted wardeck. Be prepared! Don't wait till you receive the war notification to start making plans. Here's a few ideas to help the less imaginative player who does not want to play along with war decs.

Have a POS + fuel ships and everything you need to move into a warmhole ready in a hanger. As soon as you recive the 24 hour notice of a war, dock up your shiney expensive ships grab your gear put aside for the wormhole and head out into unknown space. Not only will you be a ***** to find but you'll be supprised how much ISk you can make out their.

Alts! Make sure every member of your corp who does not want to be part of a war has an alt trained up high enough to be good at whatever you like doing and as soon as the war becomes active switch to your alts and continue mining or whatever it is that you do.

Don't accept roles in your Corp... the CEO is an alt of the corps creater. As soon as you are war decced leave the corp leaving the alt in charge and enjoy a week or two in NPC corps, you can still operate together but free of the war dec. This won't stop them suicide ganking your ships but it gets you out of the war.

In my experiance of war dec's the attackers are lazy, they will camp systems where they think you are active and trading hubs where alot of players come together in one spot. MOVE! become nomads move constantly, go visit some place you've never been to before! A week with no fun and no kill mails and most corps will drop the waredec like a hot coal.

And horror of horrors! learn to fight... invest in some combat ships and take the fight to your attackers, you might acutally make some friends!

Exactly. The defender's war objective is to end the war, with kills inflicted on the attacker as an added bonus, if possible. Any defending corp I've ever known would love to fight back, but often feels (rightly or not) that they don't have a chance of winning on the battlefield. The new mercenary marketplace could give more defending corps the means to increase their strength, and therefore encourage more of them to fight. Then the question is whether the attacker docks up.

Of course, attackers will know about the defenders' new options to call allies and hire mercs, plus the dec cost is going up, so they're probably going to declare war more cautiously. Hopefully, that means more wars with a tangible reason for conflict and prospects for interesting fights, rather than "lol-decs".

They can use that money to hire mercs.

Your idea is terrible.

If corp A decs corp B for 100m then corp B can counter that with a higher offer to avoid war and Corp A does not get refunded then no one will want to wage war on the offchance the corp they are deccing has much more isk.

If corp A do get refunded, then u are setting up a whole new greif mechanic.

Thats the point Mr. Watson griefers will think twice about starting random wars, but if Corp A have a good reason they can still declare a war on Corp B. Mercs are always a valid option. Money makes the winner.



Thats exactly the point where the game mechanic is failing.
Example 1: While at war Corp B decide to hire Corp C, 24h later Corp A have only 1 member left, after Corp C ends the war Corp A ist griefing again with full member count.

Example 2: If Corp C joins the war Corp A gets idle till Corp C leaves the war.

Game mechanic at its failure, thats quite terrible!

A few things come to mind as a student of war

First lets talk about the purpose of war, ignoring the griefer factor, for a moment. The purpose of war is to create, obtain or defend a position of advantage, be that position logistical, territorial, political or economic. There are other reasons for war but that is the core

In highsec this means mainly POS, which for most Indy corps is all of those things. If they pull down that POS they are potentially losing a lot; research time, production time, etc. That being the case if an Indy corp pulls down their POS, the attacker has already won. If they choose to stay docked up, and lose mining or trade or production time, the attacker has already won. Sun Tzu teaches that those who don't prepare for war have already lost it. The only way to win a war in eve as the defender is to continue production or cost your aggressor one of those positions without losing your own. In highsec this is very hard or near impossible to do, and the changes do nothing to address this

Now plenty of examples have been provided of methods of not letting your own Indy efforts be disrupted; jump clones, move into a wh, etc. So I wont beat that dead horse but what I have not seen is many ideas of how to make war truly mutual. If engaging in war was as much a threat to the initial aggressor as to the defender, you would see few griefer style wars.

What I would suggest is that instead of expiring after a week of time they should expire after a week of no contact between the warring parties, not allies. In addition make the enforced peace period negotiable in the surrender providing the defender incentive to control those negotiations. This would make war less of an isk sink but would also allow the defender-aggressor dynamic to be much more fluid, and the potential risk of starting a war much higher without eliminating any play styles. Yes this would allow you to just dock up and hide but then you've lost a week of production and risk being wardec-ed again when you show your face.

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Lets talk about hiding in a station until the war ends for a moment, as that seems to really bother some people (I'm guessing highsec greifers). There are examples through out history of peoples and cultures that have done exactly that. Gone into hiding when aggressors came to their down and simply waited. SUCK IT UP AND DEAL CUPCAKE, YOU'VE JUST WON!

I was thinking maybe they could add a mining base that can be deployed in an asteroid belt. Only one can be deployed per belt, giving reason for miners to fight. The structure should add some benefit to mining, so either + X% (10% sounds good) mining amount, or it could increase laser and targeting range by 200%, and allow miners to dump ore directly into it, like a stationary orca. This would help player miners compete with bot miners a little bit better, and give a target to shoot at if someone were to wardec bot miners if they happen to anchor these

Frankly, I'm tired of anyone being able to wardec a corp, then wait in a stealth until an opportune moment happens and skulk them, and I'm tired of docking games. Or, being wardec'ed by a corp that really isn't going to fight much, but just causes you to constantly check local. The defenders have little to no recourse, nor ability to stop the war. They can't stop the war, since there are few war targets, and with current mechanics the aggressors might have no structures to shoot, so the aggressors can camp a station, and dock if things get scary, or just dec so you have to watch local, and so you can't get into incursions. Conceivably the defenders could put a 24hour watch on gates to prevent skulkers coming in, but that sounds like null sec. None of these scenarios sound like war. They sound more like Vietnam, except that the Vietcong chose to go to war, and are given passports to enter the US whenever they want.

The aggressors and the defenders should have some structure within an amount of jumps (4-6) of each other that ends the war if destroyed. When a corp/alliance wardec's, the defender should receive notification of where the aggressors war structure is located during the 24hour "prepare for war". The aggressors should already know where the defenders structure is, since they can easily probe one down before declaring war. I'd also give the defenders the ability to choose which structure is the war target if another is in range of the aggressors war structure, in which case the aggressors would be notified of where that structure is orbiting.

TLDR:
War should be about territory and resources. By making war structure based and adding a mining base, it can easily be about resources and territory in high sec, and not about farming noobs for kills, docking games, or skulking a mission runner.

i wouldnt hold your breath, there are always going to be people that find loopholes and sadacts that drop from corp at the sniff of a dec