Jita Park Speakers Corner

Supported, and I will do my best to spread the word among the killers-for-hire that I find myself flying with these days.

Thanks! I've been meaning to bump this with my unrequested opinions (and without sarcasm, that's part of what this is all about) but someone appeared from out of town today. Expect more opinions tomorrow.

I´ll support this fine gentleman.

Can we / you also ban large towers from highsec? And while at it also medium?
Highsec: small
Lowsec: up to medium
Nullsec: up to large

A simpler way to do this would be to create a "micro seige module" that can only be used on Marauders. This would have the advantage of being far simpler to implement, and giving a new and useful niche for a much neglected ship class. Make it give +200-300% damage, immobility, EW immunity, cannot be remote repped/cap trfd, 90% tracking penalty, 75% missile velocity penalty, 400% missile bombardment bonus.

However, per the informative disussion on this subject on FHC, this has wider implications for W-space. Battleships able to do 2500-3000 DPS to POS would be a real game changer there, and probably not in a good way. If a module is usable in hi-sec then it's going to take some heavy handwavium to stop it being useful in W-space too

Large dickstars in highsec and C1's are an incredible pain in the ass. Your first instinct might be to say that you should bring more friends, but even entirely full nullsec fleets can have a large amount of ass pain hitting a large dickstar using only subcaps. The solution in lowsec and nullsec is to drop dreads on it, but in highsec and lower class wormholes that simply isn't possible. (Well, it's technically possible in C1's, but it's difficult enough as to not really be an option.)

My prefence would be that there were no large towers anywhere that you can't have Dreads.

This suggests two solutions immediately:

1) No large towers in these places. I would rather see solutions buffed than problems nerfed, and this feels like a band-aid solution. I would be happy to see that change implemented, but there are several other solutions I would much prefer.

2) The implementation of something like a Dread in a BS hull. This would be a nice niche for the line of BSs that don't currently have a tech 2 variation, such as the Hyperion and Rokh. There's a strong concern that you don't end up with the problems associated with tracking dreads, although with Fozzie balancing ships I'm confident that would turn out well. My only concern is that designing a brand new ship seems like it would be quite labour intensive and there are a number of other things CCP could be working on, rather than building a tool meant for one specific job.

A third, subtler solution is also possible.

3)Large towers are largely used for industry (when you're not living out of them) and industry is fairly competitive, so profit margins are thin. If the fuel costs to large towers in these places were increased they would stop being feasible for industry as compared to mediums and smalls and somewhat move research jobs out of highsec.

As a logic exercise, if fuel costs for large towers were increased in all space that would also drive industry POSs in nullsec into mediums as well, which would provide a way to prompt fights by reinforcing a softer target, which means that there isn't as high of an investment to develop a fight. Alliance support structures, like jump bridges CSAA POSs are going to stay up almost no matter the cost. This would have to be looked at much more carefully from a spreadsheets perspective, but at first glance, that seems like a decent solution.

4)And then, lastly, there's the possibility of lowering the fitting on such POSs, leaving less room for hardeners and EWAR batteries. Ships get frequent rebalances, so I don't think some POS rebalances would go amiss.

So I gather that you don't like this solution, but in a world where it's on the table and heavily favored, would you at least be willing to defend the use of large towers in C2-C4 wormholes (as I believe you mean "can't jump dreads into these systems" by "these places" given the context)? I know there are mixed opinions about large towers in C1s, but C2-C4 space is where a lot of up and coming corps start out and get their feet wet with w-space, capitals, and living in POSes. Living out of a medium tower is not enjoyable.

I thoroughly agree. Having a medium POS as your main base of operations is absolutely ****. If I were getting told that large POSs were going to be banned in such areas I would be pleased that at least something was being done, but I strongly feel that this is one of the weakest solutions. I would much prefer that either the fuel costs for larges go up (either in only these places or across the board), which would mean that people would be more likely to only up large POSs for strategic purposes, such as jump bridges or main HQ sticks for wormholes, or that the POSs or POS mods get a rebalance making ****-starring POSs much less effective.

One solution that fixes the issue in highsec only is to dramatically increase the starbase charter requirement for large towers compared to medium/small towers, but doesn't address the C1-C4 wormhole issue.

Agreed. And pet project moongoo reaction farms in C1s are way too much effort to dig out for the amount of effort put into defending them, which is often none.

From the discussion I'm seeing here so far, it sounds like people want it to be easier to hit industry POSes in W-space or highsec, but want to preserve the current difficulty of hitting main staging towers in W-space to avoid the little guys getting stomped on. I can definitely see how it'd be frustrating to be unable to destroy someone's no-risk reaction farms in a C1 (especially a C1/high where there are zero risks associated with getting moongoo and fuel in).

I generally would agree with this train of thought; as a little guy (we dabble in a C2 on the side), it's a useful property that we can't easily be evicted outright from our C2 unless we make a serious enemy, and I'd be okay with it being easier to hit our industry under the farms and fields doctrine (we happen to put our reaction POSes in sov null though because we're better able to protect that).

I'm pretty sure though that increasing the CPU requirements of hardeners/ECM modules would be sufficient to make it an either or of "have useful CPU for running reactions" or "have enough useful CPU to harden"; CHA's don't require *that* much CPU, and SMA's require none, so staging towers can be dickstarred without issues.