EVE Information Portal

I understand the point you and others are making - and haven't (because I do not yet think we have enough information to do so properly), run all the numbers myself; however, are you (and others) sure?

Take this trite example....

If I am currently running a Small POS (as many do) in HS to do Ore Compression - and one day that POS will have to be taken down/disappear/traded in.

Small POS & Compression Array -> Medium Citadel + Rigs + Compression module = ~10x the cost

I online it and run it for 1-2 hrs per week - cost 10-20 fuelblocks (and1/2 charters).

In the future it will only be 5/10 fuelblocks........but there's a 360 fuelblock onlining charge - so that's not half, as it could appear, but 36x as much if I do that only once per week as now!

Then again - what you are doing in one POS could perhaps be done in a single structure now?

Or, you put up a structure and let others use it and offset the cost for everyone...

At present we just don't know and haven't explored all the options.

So - it could cost half what it is now under one set of assumptions - or it could cost 50x as much.

No - afaik there are still no plans to bring Caps into HS in any near future.

Prediction: The first XL Citadels in HS will indeed be destroyed - by Battleships, quite happily.

If and when Caps can come into HS to counter what you, I believe wrongly, believe will happen - then it's precisely those 'mega/wealthy Corps' that will use them to crush any smaller competition.

Nah. There isn't a single highsec entity with anywhere near the numbers to field the 100-200 battleships needed to kill even an undefended XL citadel in a reasonable time (while there are plenty that could field a dozen dreads). If one is ever destroyed in highsec (which I seriously doubt unless one becomes a major market hub to justify hundreds of player hours of effort), it will be by one of the large null/lowsec entities.

OK, now I'm genuinely curious so I started to use MATHS to check if your numbers are accurate. Unfortunately, it turns out that your initial assumptions aren't entirely correct.

Back in your first post you said:



Except that the second half of that is completely wrong. 144,000/311.5 (why 311.5? Because your refining rate isn't exactly 75%, it's 75.25232% - that extra 1/4 of a % matters) isn't 2067, it's 463.

However your actual figure of 2067 ice per month isn't wrong, because you don't just need isotopes, you also need 54,360 Heavy Water and Liquid Ozone. And as it turns out, you do need 2067 ice to produce that much Liquid Ozone (well, actually 2064 ice - there's that .25% difference again). But that changes things slightly, because the point is that while you're only just producing enough LO to make your fuel, you're producing more than 4x as many isotopes as you need, plus 2x as much heavy water. That's what we technically refer to as a "surplus", which you can trade to other players without requiring any extra mining time to create.

So, with that in mind, let's have a look at the actual numbers. Assuming you are in fact mining 2064 ice per month, that gives you:
Racial Isotopes: 643,028
Heavy Water: 107,171
Liquid Ozone: 54,362
Strontium Clathrates: 1,553

So, let's remove the requirements for your fuel blocks from that, to just show the surplus:
Racial Isotopes: 499,028
Heavy Water: 52,811
Liquid Ozone: 2
Strontium Clathrates: -4,927

So, what's all that worth? Well, the problem is this stront change is going to shake up ice product values - in point of fact it's doing so already, thanks to speculation on the change. So, I'm going to guess some values based on a very significant drop in value for non-stront ice products and a huge rise in stront price. In fact we're going to assume that you're getting 500 ISK/unit of isotopes, nothing for the water and ozone and Stront costs 5,000 ISK/unit. None of those seem likely to happen, but it's nice and dramatic to illustrate my point, also the maths is simpler:

Surplus Value = (499,028 * 500) + (-4927 * 5,000)
= 249,514,000 - 24,635,000
= 224,879,000

So, the TL;DR is that your 8.5 hours of mining will still provide most of the ingredients for the fuel you need as well as a surplus of resources to sell that will easily cover the value of the extra strontium you now need to buy, plus extra ISK to boot.



That and the fact that structures will drop a percentage of their manufacturing ingredients as loot; given that XLs are going to cost roughly 70bn to build (and even more to fit out) that's presumably going to mean about 35 billion ISK or more in drops.

Now, I'm sure there are large hisec groups with sufficient numbers and PvP experience that that wouldn't be enough to attack them over - RvB springs to mind - but realistically if most of the large PvE-focused hisec groups drop an XL citadel, even if they have hundreds of members, it'll get wardecced by Marmite or Archetype. or another large, PvP-focused hisec group who will show up in a large BS or T3 fleet with logistics support and make a mockery of the defenders inexperience to kill the thing and make off with the loot. And if they don't do it, most likely the CFC will to generate content and make news.

Fixed material sheet. Link here.

Not for this - the bar is just too high. No group who lives in highsec is anywhere close to the size necessary. Even if you manage to hire every single highsec mercenary group you still wouldn't have enough to attack a XL citadel and a defense fleet. Only the large nullsec coalitions have the numbers necessary.

If you do the math, even 30B ISK divided over a hundred players is less money than you could make blitzing L4 missions per hour and the missions don't require you to risk a pirate battleship to a battle station. And you will need much more than a hundred players if someone shows up to defend which they almost certainly will.

Thankfully, this is one debate we will eventually have an answer to. The killboards will show if and when a XL ever dies in highsec, and who the killers were. I hope CCP has a plan when a year or two from now not a single XL has been exploded in highsec by highsec residents. Or perhaps being vulnerable only to the large nullsec groups is the intention - it's hard to see how a minimum bar of a couple hundred players to even try to attack intends anything else.

I'm not sure I really follow this argument; I mean I get that XL Citadels will have 108 mil shield/armor/hull HP, plus 20% resists so 129 mil EHP in each category, and obviously that's a lot of HP. But on the other hand a Large POS tower has 58 mil EHP, and I can burn down one of those in about 2 hours with just 8 characters in tech 1 battleships.

Obviously there's going to be a big difference between shooting an offline POS tower that can't shoot back and a manned citadel with various defences, but I don't really see that upping the number to a 100+ minimum. 20, sure. Maybe 25, with a few in logistics ships and a fleet booster, though depending on Citadel setup multiple Marauders might be more effective. But 100 would be massive overkill. The fact it's got a DPS cap of 75k doesn't mean you actually need 75k DPS to kill it. If an actual defence fleet shows up, that's going to be different, but that's as it should be - if more players show to defend it will take more players to attack, or some other advantage like better coordination, logistics, higher SP etc.

Also bear in mind the way that the mechanics work - first of all, you don't have to plow through Shields AND Armor AND Hull all in 1 sitting - once you've burned through one layer of 129mil EHP, it'll go into reinforcement for however long, you go do whatever and a day or so later you come back for round 2. Second, if I understand the mechanics correctly, once you start attacking you have as long as you need to strip through that layer provided you keep applying damage at least once every 15 minutes. As soon as you first deal damage it goes into Repair mode, which keeps it vulnerable until the defense layer is completely removed or else it goes 15 minutes without taking damage. You only need to start your attack during the Citadel's vulnerability window, it doesn't need to be completed during that window.

Technically, if an XL citadel is completely undefended with no defense fleet and nobody on its weapons, 2 players in 1k DPS BSes could kill it on their own, at least as long as it was vulnerable shortly after downtime (129.6mil EHP / 2k DPS = 64.8k seconds = 18 hours per defense layer). If they did that for all 3 layers and got 35 bil in loot they'd end up with 324 mil ISK/hr each from the whole thing, which is actually pretty damn good, especially since one assumes they'd be AFK most of that time.

Yes, in some respects you're quite right. I've run, successfully, Large POS in HS and LS for many years in the past - and never were they successfully, if at all, attacked - mainly, I might presume, because it wasn't worth it - as you quite rightly point out.

However, I know where my money is at too.

Some, perhaps not all, and eventually things will settle...........of the first HS XLs will, absolutely and positively be blown up.

Just because they can.

I've never been PvP-mad - not my style (RL effect). But this WILL happen just for the Kill Mails - and no other reason at all.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree, because I still think that 50 players is overkill.

All told, including the 20% resists (though I guess not including the effects of any defenses that boost EHP), an XL Citadel has 388,800,000 EHP. Assuming an average of 1,000 DPS, which seems like a reasonable assumption for an organised bashing force (can be done with various tech 1 BSes if they focus on DPS, or Marauders/Pirate BSes with more flexibility), that's going to take 108 player-hours to kill. Obviously that's a lot of work and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, but it's also well-paying. Assuming a 35 billion ISK drop, which isn't counting potential extra loot from manufacturing jobs in progress or surviving fittings, killing an XL citadel pays 324 million ISK per hour.

The thing is, Hisec has never really seen anything like this before - "2 hour bash ops" are basically a new concept, but that's what you'd need to kill an XL citadel with about 20 players (specifically, 3 of those ops, one each for shield/armor hull). However for the prospect of 324 mil/hr (which would be a total of just under 2 bil for each of those 20 players, as an example. Or a PLEX and a Skill Injector) I think it's something we would see. Most of the groups you namedropped who don't have 50 active players do have 20+, not to mention out-of-corp characters like neutral logi who would be needed to assault an occcupied citadel.

So, the next question is, how hard would it be to kill an XL citadel which was actually fighting back? The answer is that it seems relatively easy - hisec citadels lose their most powerful weapons, the guided bombs and the arcing vorton projector. They're left with only the Anti-Subcap missiles for effective DPS, which even with a full set of 8 only totals about 3,200 DPS with about 48k alpha. Definitely tough, but survivable - logi cruisers get a significant signature-based damage reduction, and just 2-3 of them could keep up with that incoming DPS, while BSes should have no problem soaking it with logi reps, or alternately a Bastion-ed Marauder could tank it solo. Throw in energy neuts to interfere with bastions and logis and you cut back the DPS that needs to be tanked. In point of fact, it honestly looks like the best setup for any hisec citadels is actually as a support platform for a defending fleet, using bump/tractor modules to break up formations and neuts and ECM to disrupt individuals. But without that defending fleet, an XL Citadel doesn't have enough punch to counter an organised group.

At the most basic level, if we're talking about a significant ISK reward for dealing with high incoming volley damage, energy neuts and electronic warfare and needing a coordinated fleet with logi support, that honestly sounds more than a little reminiscent of Incursions. The fact that hisec players partake in them, organise, cooperate and risk very expensive ships but come out intact and wealthy should tell you that the same will likely happen here, even if it's a different group of players involved.

Obviously there is the question "What about the defending fleet?" which is relevant, but we're talking about groups whose bread and butter is running rings around hisec PvE players via better ships, fittings, tactics and coordination, which will stand them in equally good stead here. There's a big difference in combat effectiveness. between, say, RvB and a large hisec mining corp who can pool 70bn for the best refinery possible. Ultimately yes, a well-defended XL citadel will be nigh-impossible to destroy without the kind of numerical advantage null powers can bring to the table, but I don't think there's many hisec entities with the ability to defend an XL Citadel well enough vs the opposition they'd face from other hisec groups.

I know where my money is too, and it's definitely not getting invested in an XL Citadel any time soon.

Yup. Unless they are used for ostentatious purposes (like a low-fee market hub in Perimeter) no low/null group will bother with a private XL citadel in some back-water highsec system. And given no local group is large enough to attempt to attack, they will just pile up over time, providing absolute safety for the occupants.

I'll wait until the final numbers are released before deciding how massive a fleet is needed to attack a defended XL, but I can already confidently say the base HP wall is already beyond almost all of the groups that currently live in highsec. We already have the example of the large POS which is essentially never attacked in highsec or low-class wormholes. I don't see why people think releasing a structure that takes 5-times the amount of effort to explode even undefended is suddenly going to usher highsec into a golden age of structure fights.

No highsec group is going to be able to attack these without help from the big null groups even if they, really, really, really want to. So they won't.