Warfare & Tactics

sovereignty communications structure : for every 100 members more than 1000, an alliance must place antennae to Maintain standings, sovereignty and number of corps in alliance. they are hackable for access to alliance mail, corporation fitting, and spying on chat. they are attackable for the removal of such luxuries. anchorable in hisec but prevents sov.

Scale Sov Structure EHP with "activity" in system. If alliance hasn't done anything in that system for the past month, then it should be trivially easy to take down their sov structures. If the alliance lives in the system, then the EHP of the structures should be correspondingly large.

"activity" can be defined by the owners of the systems do - Productive POS structures, Stations, POCOs, Anomolies completed, Rats destroyed, some combination of all of them, whatever the 0.0 community thinks is a reasonable measure of guys risking their assets in space.

I-hubs
Agreed, there's something silly about having to slowboat freighters through nullsec. This would certainly make sovereignty more accessible to smaller alliances, especially if the hub can be fit inside a T1 fit Orca (ie; target volume of <75K m3).

Contestation
This idea has some merit...but as pointed out, larger groups will be able to bankrupt smaller groups with the 100M fuel every RF cycle. You're relatively new to null and probably haven't thought through the ramifications of what is essentially stront-fiddling a tower, but on a larger scale. Lowsec doesnt have the whole use it or lose it dynamic of null or w-space.

My experience is that RF timers trigger PVP, and demand a response. As a small entity you can't ignore a RF timer fishing expedition as a feint, hoax or just a glove thrown on the floor to troll PVP. Making it cost 50-100M ISK to protect it means that your foes know you'll be investing that ISK because you can't afford to show weakness, or lose one of your few systems, or you'll failcascade or have your territory reduced. So you are forced to commit not only ISK, but forces, to defend.

Conversely a large alliance can afford to let the RF timer slide and respond to the final timer. If they lose, they can recapture again in a trice against smaller foes. If it was just a fishing expedition, no worries. They can pick and choose what to stront up, when to do it, and not be threatened entirely.

The current mechanic serves to protect the small as well as the big. The small guys, with their smaller bankroll, aren't penalised every time someone fishes for fights. Boring? Yes. Slow? Yes. But it's advantageous to have 48 hours to evac, repack and flog your booty, versus 24 because your sole alliance XO is away on holiday and didn't pay the stront bill when NC or CFC came past to troll you.

SBU's
Agreed, this is just boring "gameplay". The idea behind this mechanic is to give the defender warning of an upcoming push, so the defender can marshal their forces. The reality is...it just projects intentions hours or days out and leads to batphoning, which encourages gigantic meta-coalitions.


Hitpoints
Again, the intention in the current mechanic is to prevent overly fluid sovereignty mechanics by giving the sov structures hitpoints that deter casual or flippant attacks. The result is of course that this leads to katamari style responses by pilots who need to form larger blobs or larger ships to turn a mind-numbingly boring process into something close approaching just stupid.

Changing things too much will, however, remove the incentive to hold space and invest in it. If your rewards (i-hub upgrades, bling, mining) are easily wiped out then you'll go back to POS camping and itinerant vagrancy as used to be the case. It will result in smaller coalitions and smaller blobs, but not via making smaller alliances able to hold sov, but via making sov pointless to hold on a cost/benefit and effort/reward basis.

Force projection
There's been a bunch of whine poasts over the years about the unfairness of titan bridging, or JB networks. JB networks can be made more vulnerable by increasing the resources used by the bridges themselves (to trim down on defence resources of the host POS) and more costly by adjusting the fuel cost. Already fuelling a bridge network is a decent ask if you habitually use them to move around; same with Titans to move fleets.

I'm on the fence. Force projection, again, reduces tedium and (to some extent) risk while moving a fleet from A to B. Sure, properly set up JB networks can allow fleets to move whole regions in moments, which allows synergies with larger territory.

Making it more expensive via changes to upgrade requirements in sov infrastructure doesn't help anyone except the big boys, who can afford and grind up the effort to install JB's. Adjusting cost of use is more fair; JB's can be onlined or offlined as needed by people who don't want to pay so ratters can jump back and forth infinite times, or hauler toons lugging Itty's worth of ore. For people addicted to JB's, higher costs will just mean there's a brake put on their war machine when they move hundred man fleets back and forth to defend or attack.

It's more like requiring nullsec alliances to actually utilize the space they claim, rather than leave huge swaths of it unused and fallow. Back in the day there'd be huge stretches of systems claimed by big alliances with not a soul in sight, that we claimed more for bragging rights and to keep anyone else from claiming them. Actually forcing people to live and work in the space they claim would make nullsec more populated, which makes things like nullsec industry more viable, and makes it a more interesting place to live.

Not that I agree with everything he says, but it might help Gevlon's argument that people claim nullsec and work in high sec if alliance members had to work in nullsec to make it worth claiming.

I agree forcing people to care bear in null space will mean they will carebear in null space. Just like forcing people to carebear in fw lead to lots of carebearing in fw.

I just don't like having sov directly decided by carebearing. I realize I am in the minority since that is the new way for eve, but I am not a fan.

I think it should be easier for smaller pvp alliances to inflict damage on larger alliances. This would give them clout. It would mean larger alliances would need to appease them - perhaps by giving them some space. IMO that is a better dynamic than larger alliances wanting to recruit carebears. Its just a matter of whether you want the carebear alliances to have the power or the pvp alliances. I really don't care if they are big or small.

repeat

This. I would love to see a system wherein alliances that encourage the active, productive use of their space are rewarded by making that space harder to take. Invest in your territory by making it productive, be rewarded. Don't, and it becomes easier to lose. This would further the "farms and fields" kind of model that Ripard and Mabrick and Gevlon and others have talked about.