EVE General Discussion

[edit] I rewrote the whole post because it was quite confusing.


Fighting over structures in EVE often revolves around reinforcement timers. These timers give the defender a chance to face the attacker at a pre-set time. In essence, this stops somebody from blowing up your structures while you're sleeping. Customs offices, POSes, stations, and some sovereignty structures have reinforcement timers.

The timeframe of a structure attack is this:

1) Attacker attacks the structure until it falls below a reinforcement threshold. This varies for different structures, for POCOs it is 25% shields.

2) After the structure gets below this threshold, it enters a reinforced mode. While in RF mode, the structure cannot be attacked or repaired, and in most cases it cannot be used. (Reinforced POCOs cannot be used to transfer goods from/to the planet.)

3) The structure exits RF mode after some time. The defender has some control over when this happens. For POCOs, you can set the rough RF exit timer in the configuration menu. This is so that you can fight the attackers on your terms, in your timezone.

You can see the reinforcement timer tick down if you look at the POCO from anywhere in the system. The timer continues to tick down even through downtime, and it's not affected by time dilation - so if you add the timer to the current time, you will get the precise time of when the RF timer ends.

4) When the RF timer ends, the POCO starts with 0% shield and is vulnerable again. Now the fight between the attacker and the defender begins. There are two possible outcomes:

5a) The defender repairs the POCO to above 25% shields. The POCO is "saved" and if it gets shot below 25% shields again it enters another RF timer (start from 1).

5b) The attacker destroys the POCO before it can be repaired. (Note that some structures will enter a second reinforcement timer in armor. POCOs only have the shield timer, so if you lose the first timed fight, you lose the POCO.)

POCOs enter a reinforced cycle at 25% shields. This reinforcement timer can be configured by the POCO owner through the Configuration right click menu. Owners are able to set it to any 2hr window within the day (01:00-03:00, 02:00-04:00, 03:00-04:00, etc).

When a POCO is put into reinforced mode it will have a timer from 23-49hrs, depending how long it is until the pre-scheduled ref timer. If a POCO is reffed at 00:00 and it has a ref timer set to 11:00-13:00, then the ref timer will be for 35-37hrs. It will always try to be at least a day. If a POCO is reffed at 00:00 and it has a ref timer set to 23:00-01:00 then the ref timer will either be 23-25hrs or 47-49hrs. Reffing a POCO right near the ref timer creates this ambiguous situation where it could be a one or two day timer depending on if it falls before or after the set time.

POCOs come out of reinforced mode at 0% shields, 100% armor, 100% structure (unless of course they had injured armor/structure from before being reffed). If a POCO's shields reach 25% then it becomes "saved" and would need to be put through another reinforcement cycle to be vulnerable to be killed. There is no stront, fuel, or player action required to save it. They just need to reach 25% shields. It takes POCOs 2hrs to naturally regen their shields up to 25%. POCOs take about the first hour just to reach 1-3% shields, after that the shield regen rate picks up dramatically. If you want to cut about an hour off the natural shield regen time you should manually rep it up to 1%, and the natural shield regen will pick up dramatically.

Interbus Customs Offices do NOT have any reinforcement timers.

Interesting, someone probably didn't like the idea of you taking POCOs in space they wanted for themselves. Check for POCOs owned by them, and ask for defenders in your war, and you may be able to counter attack.

If that fails, you can always use another corp, and the second your poco gets killed, drop another at that planet and anchor/online it before they can do theirs. Thus re-stealing the planet.

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/Ney/celestials

If I had to guess, you're probably a planet 8 or 9, one of the storm worlds. Maybe at 1 or 7 for a lava world.

Someone is going to lose their High Sec POCO.

Admitting you don't know something is the only way to lose EVE apparently.