Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I too think that they should require fuel at all times but dont think any grace period is acceptable. If my lawnmower runs out of gas there isnt some grace period where it keeps functioning for a month or two on an empty gas tank. My lawn mower will instead stop functioning the second it runs out of fuel and so should citadels, etc.

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Fuel is expensive and one of the design criteria for citadels and engineering complexes was to make it feasible for small groups to have them. The purchase price of these structures already pushes the limits of what many of those smaller groups can afford and adding fuel costs to the equation would make it even more expensive preventing them from having one. I know we struggle to fuel a POS part time, if we had to pay for fuel all day everyday it would be impossible for us to have a structure.

Timers are used to balance structures across time zones giving defenders and attackers a reasonably even chance to defend / destroy. As long as time zones are a thing in this world we need to have timers to balance them.

Not the whole abandoned structure line of crap again, I thought we would leave that behind as the POS faded out of the game.
If the structure is abandoned there will be minimal defenses to deal with and no one will come to rescue or repair it. So just like those POS if you want it gone you get to do the time to remove it.

Sounds okay to me. I've seen a few proposals to the effect of having a baseline fuel consumption that overlaps with services fuel consumption, with the net effect being that it's really only an additional cost for no/low service structures.

As already mentioned, citadels are too expensive to be used at all if you risk lose it instantly. Better approach, from my point of view, is no concord protection if high sec citadel do not have faction charts in special cargo hold (like POS once did). You do not pay for safety - your structure will be not protected by concord , so anyone can shoot it witout wardeccing your corp. And also damage cap can be lifted - one afk drone frigate can kill fortizar if given enough time.

The OP needs to rethink their solution. The consequences for loss of fuel supply are far too drastic. Also, 100 blocks is a LOT of fuel. The nominal consumption ammount should be much less. I'd suggest 1 to 10 units per day - and should be zero with service modules online.

The consequence of zero fuel should not be destruction, vulnerability to attack, or unanchoring. Citadels do sometimes become unfuelled and this is sometimes due to operator neglect - it doesn't mean the structure has been abandoned. If you make the risks too high, then, no one will use these structures... Ever.

Instead I would recommend the following consequences instead:

1. Refitting & Repair will be disabled;
2. Structure teathering will become inoperable;
3. Structure defence modules will be brought offline

I believe that these are satisfactory consequences. When in highsec, a wardec will still be required to destroy it, and the station can easily be brought back online without loss for the operator. Their assets are still intact - and yet, are rendered more vulnerable and open to attack. I believe this strikes a suitable balance between the needs of everyone concerned.

REALLY average a citadel uses over 300 blocks a day if its running services and that on a medium . Fact is a cosntant fuel upkeep would be enough to make citadel spam less pervasive and if you loose timers when the fuel runs out after a set period of time it would make it possible to then prevent mass spam as unfueled citadels become kill mail fodder.

Before I respond the answer is NO I do not deal with this stuff in game, there are others in the group that want to handle it so I leave it to them. I do oversee the ISK aspect of the corp and this 300 fuel blocks a day revelation does clear up a significant difference I was seeing in the corp finances.

Our old Large POS used to burn 40 fuel blocks every hour or 960 a day, with average costs of 21,000 per block that is 21.16 million ISK per day.

Based on this 300 fuel blocks per day and the average cost of the fuel still at 21,000 per block our fuel costs have dropped to 6.3 million per day. No wonder I can distribute so much more ISK to the corp member every month.

Since I am not involved in that aspect I based my estimate on a citadel using 4 times the fuel of our old large POS, now you tell me that essentially our citadel is actually using roughly 1/3rd the amount of fuel our large POS did. You are right this does significantly change things, it means that we can actually afford 12 to 15 citadels instead of just 5.

Cost never has been and never will be a useful factor in controlling the proliferation of an item in game and the citadel will be no different. All these increased costs due to fuel burn will do is prevent many small groups from benefiting from these structures.

As I stated before the purpose of timers is to balance the game and actions taken in it across time zones. As long as there are time zones on this earth the timers must stay.

Cost is a balancing factor; that's exactly what they're doing with pirate battleships right now.

The cost doesn't have to be high, and you could even eliminate it entirely if you have any service module online, so it doesn't change the cost of actively running a citadel. The main thing I'd advocate is that as some point in time, the cost to refuel citadels, whether that be ISK cost, or a time cost of warping around to citadel after citadel refueling the things, causes someone to say "Yeah, we have enough, I'm not fueling another one". Also, if someone completely abandons the thing, after some period of time someone else can take out the trash without running through 3 timers.

If this doesn't happen, I fully expect some rich coalition to put 30-50 citadels in their staging system to make taking that system a miserable multi-month affair that no one is willing to do.