EVE General Discussion

It's a love-hate relationship for most of us...

I haven't defended a Citadel yet so I might be asking a stupid question, but here goes:

Can you remote rep those things while it is under attack?

Thank you for confirming that Astrahus cant kill anything. Was thinking setting one up to kill few attackers and let it burn in glorious fire. I guess that plan goes out of the window.

I have never read so much self-pretentious doggie poo since watching the last Mittani diatribe.... You guys posting here need to get a life, or better still, log in on EvE and build a citadel ...

Yeah, your citadel surely won't get destroyed in LS or NS.

Well, that's kind of the point. There could be dedicated Merc groups to do this and make a ton of ISK. You could also join a corp with a Citadel and sign up to run the defenses, do drills, etc. The smarter you make the mobile defenses, the more you'd just own any attacking force.

So, I say folks should stop complaining about how effective Citadels are in defending themselves and start working on ways to make ISK off of defending them for what is apparently a lot of owners with ISK to burn that don't know how to defend them.

Those circomstances are simply : Not shooting the damn thing.

Good luck - hopefully you are getting a lot of experience from it.

We've killed 1 medium and 1 large citadel and defended the onlining of 5 mediums and 1 large. That said, the biggest danger from a citadel defense perspective is the on-lining process.

I think given that I've watched two different groups defend their citadel from our attacking forces, and defended others, I would have a pretty good idea of what it's weaknesses are.

We haven't attempted to siege a fully deployed citadel because it's so much of a pain in the ass and we don’t currently have the proper motivation to attempt it, but I’m sure we will in time.

During that vulnerability phase it’s just so easy to kill that outside of j-space I wouldn’t bother to put one up without being part of a very large alliance. And I say that as CEO of a medium sized corp. (We’re 105 members living in a C4 and comprised entirely of PVP pilots). The first citadel we blew up was a smaller corp who didn’t even try and defend it. The second one, the large, was defended by a 7b fit fax, an 8b fitted dread, and a 14 pilot fleet of bhaalgorns (DPS&neut fit). They died all the same.

Once we had hole control, we seeded in enough pilots from my alliance (45 man t3 fleet) and another 65 of my friends (big thank you to Hard Knocks, Lazerhawks, and Of Sound Mind for helping make it an OP success!!!) that we could simply overwhelm whatever fleet that corp could manage to put together. It was a slaughter.

The key is making it past the vulnerability window. In WH space, you have a fighting chance to do that by maintaining hole control which can be done with a small but committed group. Elsewhere in space, it’s just not possible without the backing of a very very large group. These kill mails are huge, 26b for just the fortizar, and you can pop it so quickly that it’s a no brainer during that onlining vulnerability.

One way to address that, is by giving the citadel the use of its weapons systems while it is onlining something I think is critical for some of these smaller groups beset by larger groups.

The otherside of the argument for me is the general application and balance of the citadel weapons systems.

The medium is perfectly capable of shutting down a 3-4 man basi-guardian logi group. Making it an excellent force multiplier but not much else. The large, potentially can shut down as much as an 8 man logi group. As to applied DPS, the medium is horrible, not sure about the large. One thing I would like to see, for the large and XL especially…frigate fleets and t1 cruiser fleets should have almost no chance of surviving an attack on one of these things. I do like the general idea of forcing “losses on the opposing fleet” in order to take one of these out. Sort of how the doomsday works. Even though the Titan may eventually go down, it won’t go down without taking a few caps with it. The losses inflicted on the attacking fleet being proportional to the size (and more specifically the outrageous price) of the citadel and likely all the value contained in it.

I’ll recall an example of what I expect from a large citadel. Ages ago I had a connection to a full capital escalation fleet, 4 capitals and 2 webbing loki’s in support through a frig hole and we brought in 300 t2 frigates, mostly bombers but assorted other things. That 6 pilot fleet destroyed 150 of our bombers before we eventually warped off. Obviously not an ideal outcome for us, but it’s essentially how I would expect a frigate fleet to fare if going up against a 26b large citadel. Right now, the “power per isk to create” cost is just not where it should be for a citadel of any size.

Yeah I didnt bother trying. I've already written it off.
Everyone offering help for ISK with no way to be sure they would even show to help wasn't going to happen.