Warfare & Tactics

Make it so when you win a war you gain 40% of the shares of the corperation. Fighing for an influence rather than fighting for kills. AN OBJECTIVE!

/P

I like this idea, but I don't think you should be able to anchor in NS or LS. The war mechanism is all about HS, and why give the Goons, Test and the like even more of an advantage in wars? A far as why this is needed is that the current war mechanism fails to provide interesting content. I've been in a number of wars, 95% of the time we'd form up a fleet, the opposing side would station up and talk smack, and only come out when the numbers were x2-4 in their favour. The only fights were station games, and the occasion us vs them vs x2 neutral logi. (Thankfully that's gone.) The result was we'd kick our hauler alts out of corp, and wait the war out in our wormhole, and occasional around in cloakies or standard LS travel fits. If I had any fun at all it was getting the other side to chase my BS/BC 6-10 hops before they gave up in disgust. The funny thing is in all the wars I never got them to follow me into LS or a wormhole.

Yes, War Decs are just a bribe, does that mean it can't be any better? People have the option to move to Null or join FW. But it should still be possible to have a high-sec war. I am trying to suggest options to make the war a little more interesting for both sides. Wars as they stand now suck, the sad truth is that high-sec players end up staying docked up and logged off during a war, I don't think that is good. I would like to give them something better to do during that time, something that will bring them into combat zones.

Are moons in HS without POS really that rare? (Never had the urge to setup a POS in HS.) I agree that having a POS involved would raise the bar hopefully. CCP will allow us to anchor POSes or their replacement every where. Also LS POS are pretty fragile due to Dreads.

I'm failing to see how anchorable structures make wars more like actual wars. I'm pretty sure that Germany didn't need to set up an kind of arbitrary structure in the middle of the ocean so they could invade Poland in 1939, also fairly sure they didn't have to pay an arbitrary sum to any overarching authority or allow Poland 24 hours notice prior to invading.

I'm also unsure exactly what structure anywhere in the world an the Iraqi republican guard could have blown up to magically end the coalition invasion of their country. There's also the cases of crazy VC soldiers hiding out in the jungle for decades fighting a war that has been over for decades against an enemy that isn't there anymore.

In reality wars typically don't come with a warning, rarely have formal declarations, may not actually have well defined beginnings or ends, don't often result in one side definitively "winning", spread around so that more and more previously uninvolved parties get involved, the objectives change constantly or even don't exist at all and often aren't even between well defined groups.

Adding meaningless structure grinding as a mandatory component of wars wouldn't make wars more like wars, it would make them less like wars and diminish their usefulness as a tool for people to actually achieve the objectives that they want to achieve. It's a pointless contrived pain in the ass that would serve as another reason for people in highsec not to bother fighting each other.

The war mechanics don't need any more senseless convolution, they need iteration that makes them a more viable option for the average highsec resident looking to shoot at a particular group of people for whatever reason.

If you want a war to end you can go and render the opposing party unable to fight or negotiate an agreement with them and guess what? That's how wars actually end, not with the destruction of a magical structure that has no actual purpose or value to anyone.

This my friend is the crux of the matter. HS wars are not fought over. The average HS player is too risk averse to actually get out there and shoot a WT.

Then you get into up shipping and blobbing until everyone finally just cracks it and leaves.

Nothing you can do about this tbh. It is the nature of HS. High sec would have to fundamentally change to allow this to happen, not placing a structure you can shoot to win.

TBH mate it sounds like you need to leave HS and get into a low sec/null corp that actually fights other people rather than red crosses

Pay the station owner to kick out your war target if you are the defending corp.

Right, but the actual war mechanic itself should be a tool, preferably a cost effective, non self-destructive one that is actually useful, not a convoluted mess full of arbitrary grinding and meaningless structures, or a totally one-sided, hideously stacked waste of money for the aggressor.

The focus of changes to the war mechanics should be on making the system something people will actually consider using when they have a problem with another player entity. It should be reasonably inexpensive and non-suicidal for generic highsec corp to declare war on another generic highsec corp because their miners keep getting into arguments over belts in some system. We're getting there on cost, but the ally system renders aggressors in actual legitimate wars like that vulnerably to every tom **** and harry turning up as an ally to shoot at them for virtually no cost and with the timer for allies joining a war going down to 4 hours this situation is getting worse, not better.

It's great for business as a member of a dedicated highsec PVP corp, but it's godawful for any normal highsec corp with a legitimate grievance against another highsec entity and wants to fight a war against them.

We actually had a case last week where some regular joe highsec alliance declared war on another regular joe highsec alliance and we got hired by the defender. We showed up, destroyed their battleship fleet without a loss and they did nothing for the rest of their war. That's the kind of gameplay a one-sided war system encourages, mercs and griefers with far more experience and resources fighting proxy wars against weak targets because nobody else can afford to be the aggressor.

The issue you're trying to address in the OP isn't really anything to do with wars, it's an issue of a lack of points of interest in highsec space that drive conflict. That's no so much a problem with wars as it is a problem with general highsec gameplay not having anything interesting in it.

I don't really care how people fight their wars, or how they don't fight them. That there are wars in the first place is more important.

But why would anyone want to deploy a structure to do that? The structure has no value outside of enabling a war. Finding hostile POS towers is tedious enough and structure grinding is widely acknowledged as being one of the most boring, unfun activities in the entire game.

Also the need to defend a relatively low EHP structure at the drop of a hat to maintain a war doesn't exactly make the prospect of declaring war more appealing and would render corps like mine functionally invulnerable to incoming wardecs, we'd just find the war hub and blow it up and there wouldn't be a damned thing anyone could do to stop us and we'd anchor our own hubs outside a deathstar POS and log off on top of it in our faction battleships and logistics alts.

The requirement for corp members to check in in order to attack or be attacked is also as dumb as hell, why would you let aggressors immediately get out of a war they declared in 24 hours but the defenders have to leave corp to get out of it?

The entire concept is just adds a pile of completely unnecessary activity for no reason.

Ask yourself honestly: If you lived in highsec and had to do all of that extra stuff just to make a war happen, would you be more likely to declare war than you would currently?

If the answer is no then obviously the mechanic is a bad idea because it makes war a less useful tool for enabling PVP. If your honest answer to the question is yes then I think you're probably insane.

That assumes the signature radius is large enough to inflict full damage from BS weapsons, and like I said, the EHP of the hub is something that would need to be worked out.