Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Here is a link to the discussion on the DUST 514 forum.

In Planetary Conquest 2.0 location should matter! Since the plan is for the Warbarge to travel to the planet, moving the Warbarge will have to be where the significance of location comes in.

For a better DUST/EVE link, a PC battle should be in two phases.
1) EVE Phase, the fight to defend/destroy the Warbarge. (See below for DUST only corps.)
2) DUST Phase, the fight on the ground to take/defend the district.

When moving clones from a district or a Clone pack to a Warbarge to initiate an attack on a district, your intention to attack that district should be registered with CONCORD. The Corp the target district belongs to should receive a notification from CONCORD that someone intends to attack their district. If the Warbarge anchors over the target district within two hours of registering the attack, the Warbarge becomes invulnerable and the reinforcement timber for Phase 2, the DUST battle, begins.

Clone packs should only be purchasable from stations with a Genolution office. (It should be easy to add Genolution offices to specific stations without any impact on EVE.) When initiating a Clone pack PC attack the Warbarge must be docked at the station where the clone pack was purchased. When initiating an attack using clones from a district, the Warbarge must be anchored over the district you are taking the clones from. The Warbarge is always invulnerable when anchored over a friendly district.

When the Warbarge is loaded, the defenders are notified that an attack on their district has been registered. If they have EVE connections they will scramble a fleet to intercept and attempt to destroy the Warbarge. The attacking Corp will do whatever they can to insure the Warbarge reaches its destination intact. If the Warbarge is destroyed, or does not reach its destination within 2 hours of registering the attack, there will be no attack and the defending district will not go into a reinforced state. If the Warbarge succeeds in anchoring over the target district, it will become invulnerable and trigger a reinforcement timer for the district for a DUST Planetary Conquest match.

DUST Corps with no EVE support:
There will also be the option of using an NPC Warbarge. The NPC Warbarge will either be dropped off at your district by an NPC carrier, in order to pick up clones from your District, or it will Leave from the station where you purchase your Clone pack. When the attack is registered and the clones are transferred to the NPC Warbarge, the Warbarge will proceed to the target district, where it will anchor to initiate the DUST Planetary Conquest match.

The player owned Warbarge and the NPC Warbarge will differ in design and capability. The NPC Warbarge will be considerably tougher so that it will take a lot of damage to destroy it and it will have a very strong warp strength so that it can not be Warp Scrambled (stopped). However, it will also be slower, and Union pilots being sticklers for navigation protocol insist on dropping out of warp 30km from the gate or from a district anchoring point.

The idea of the NPC Warbarge is to give DUST only Corps the ability to participate in Planetary Conquest and expand their empire. However, every gate the NPC Warbarge jumps through gives the defending fleet time to ware it down and eventually destroy it. It should be balanced so that it would take a massive fleet, or a couple of Capital ships, to take the NPC Warbarge down in just the approach to the district. But if the NPC Warbarge jumped through 2 or 3 gates a much smaller fleet would have time to take it out. Finally if the NPC Warbarge attempted to go through 4 or 5 gates, then a half dozen Battlecruisers might be able to take it out, provided they started the attack at the first jump. To help scale for distance, make it shield heavy, and have it loose 20% of its shields every time it goes through a Jump Gate. Than after 5 jumps it would be reduced to Armour and Structure and only have the Health of a Battleship.

The key to the system is that the more jumps you try to go from your starting point the more risk you have of losing the Warbarge, thus making location important.

The advantage of using a Player Controlled Warbarge is the inelegance and experience of the pilot. They can use tactical bookmarks, and warp to zero on the gate when they are ready to jump.

The advantage of using an NPC War barge is its brute fore approach is very effective over a short distance. But it is balanced so the farther you go the more it sucks.

Edit: The Kill mail for an NPC Warbarge would reflect the value of the clones lost. Currently a Clone Pack costs about 30 million ISK.

For EVE pilots to care there must be a significant benefit EVE side to your Alliance owning Planetary Districts. That would have to be part of Planetary Conquest 2.0. This post was focussed on the mechanics of the conflict, not the incentives behind it. However, those incentives would definitely have to be there, or the whole thing would be pointless.

Ok, let me do some brainstorming on the incentives for EVE Alliances to care about Planetary Districts held by DUST players.


The current bonuses are clearly not enough. For one thing they only apply to Corporations, when it would be better to have the bonuses apply to the Alliance. It is common to have DUST Corps and EVE Corps in the same Alliance, but it is rare to have a mixed DUST/EVE Corp (other than alts of the management team) due to the challenge of managing on both sides of the fence. The current bonuses, based on district infrastructure are:

- Cargo Hub: 10% per district owned to a maximum of 4 districts (40%) decrease in manufacturing time at a POS.
- Research Lab: 5% per district owned to a maximum of 4 (20%), reduction in POS fuel usage.
- Production Facility: Nothing? I could not find an EVE bonus associated with it.


So we need new Incentives. Lets start with PI. CCP has gotten away from the idea of DUST players being able to take over an EVE player’s PI setup, but rather than looking at DUST harming an EVE player’s PI, lets look at ways they could benefit PI.

How about Corps that own districts being able to build facilities that would give a bonus to any Alliance member doing PI on that planet?

- Power Stations: Gives a 10% Power Grid bonus to ever Allied PI Command Centre on the Planet.
- Server farm: Gives a 10% CPU upgrade to every Allied PI Command Centre on the Planet.

How about giving an increase to PI harvesting yield and processing time when your PI facilities are within an area controlled by a friendly district?

How about if a Corp owns all the districts on a planet they have the ability to set an export tax on top of the tax at the POCO?


What other bonuses or benefits could a district offer to the EVE players in the Alliance?
- Higher bounty payouts for Rat’s killed in the system proportional to the percentage of the districts in the system owned by your alliance?
- More POS bonuses?
- A corporate/personal hanger in the POCO if your Alliance owns the POCO and at least 1 district on the Planet.
- Have the hanger size for POCO hanger increase with the number of districts owned.
- Factories in the districts to produce components for POS fuel such as Oxygen.
- Factories to refine minerals. Drop off the ore at the POCO, and it gets processed on the planet at the factory in your Alliance's district for a lower cost than at a station, but with a 24 hour delay. Gets returned to your hanger in the POCO for pickup.

I am more of a PVPer than an Industrialist so I don’t have a full understanding on how POS’s work, so that is hampering my abilities to come up with good bonuses for them.

Do any of these ideas have promise? Do they give you any ideas?

One of the things I like about PI bonuses is that it gives benefits to individual pilots and small operations. It would be much easier for a DUST Corp to entice a small PVP gang to join up if the individual members got something out of it. It is a better fit for Low Sec.

POS bonuses only benefit much more experienced players with more robust infrastructures in place. Still beneficial, but not enticing to as wide a spectrum of EVE players.

I would like to have benefits for the Ratters, Mission Runners and Asteroid Miners as well.

Interesting idea about using planets as a replacement of the pos mechanic in one of the dust threads

https://forums.dust514.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=140263&find=unread