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Dev blog: Citadels, sieges and you v2

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Dracvlad
Taishi Combine
Astral Alliance
#181 - 2015-09-18 11:16:15 UTC  |  Edited by: Dracvlad
Langbaobao wrote:
Ok, this is actually not bad, and I can't believe that CCP listened to people saying that structures should be DPSable. It gives me finally some hope for CCP. IMHO sov itself and everything related to sov (like indexes, production and so on) should be entosis driven, while structures should be DPSable.

Damage mitigation is actually not bad as mechanic to limit the actual DPS amounts that you have to apply, thus lowering the requirements enough that even small entities with 30 man fleets can easily take down stuff. Overall I think it's a good proposal which finally takes into consideration some of the feedback that people have been trying to make CCP aware of in the last few months. There are however a few things that I think need some tweaking, and in particular:

1) Structures and SOV should be separated, the former requiring DPSing, and sov entirely entosis driven. I know that they've mentioned that in the deblog already, but I think it should be emphasized.

2) IMHO the vulnerability windows should be larger. I know that the reasoning behind the reduced vulnerability windows is that it helps smaller entities, but still, 3 hours of vulnerability per week for small citadels and 6 h/week for large ones is a bit too small I think. Especially when the whole vulnerability window can be shoved into one day per week, thus making the structure invulnerable the other 6 days. I think the numbers should be tweaked. Also, maybe a system where there is a diminishing returns system implemented could be the way to go. This way if you set your vulnerability window to be a small amount every day or every second day would incur no or very small penalties, while if you set it all in only one day then you would get a penalty to vulnerability that would increase that window by a certain amount (dunno, maybe 50%?). So for example if you have a large citadel (6 h/week of vulnerability), if you put one hour of vulnerability per day you would have no penalty (=6 h/week total), if you put them every second day the vulnerability window would increase by 25% (=7.5 hours of vulnerability per week), and if you put it all in only one day you get a 50% penalty (9 h/week). Hope this gets my point across.

3) Medium and Large Citadels should have some form of defense akin to current POSes since M and L citadels will be used as a substitute for these. These defenses would not threaten an organized fleet, even a relatively modest one but would discourage trolling. Since you've mentioned that you're looking for a way to discourage trolling without putting throwaway assets, this could be a way to go. XL citadels on the other hand should not have defenses since they will act primarily as substitutes for outposts and will require a non trolly amount of assets to be deployed to affect them or kill them.

4) If a citadel is destroyed the person inside should spawn in the ship he was in at the same spot where the citadel was before (akin to what happens currently with POSes). This was discussed previously when we had the first citadel blogs, but I would like to reiterate. Otherwise people will just use the workaround of undocking in their ship from the citadel and log off while being invulnerable and I think CCP has agreed as well that in such a situation is it is basically useless to go again the stream since people will use the workaround and it will make everything just unnecessarily tedious.

5) Also CCP plz, loot pinatas for everyone, not just WH, although not necessarily with the same percentages as WHs. Maybe for example outside of WHs a certain percentage can drop and the rest goes back to the original owner like described in previous blogs (although I'm still against magical Pony Express to lowsec)


I think that you make some good points, like 1) I agree with, but there is self interest there in 2) 3) and 5), the smaller the vulnerability window the more structures you will see. Also you seem to forget that there are structures to do different things, so for example my small corp will have a medium citadel and some other structures for manufacturing and even mining and the one taking over the POCO job all in NPC 0.0, so if it gets more than 3 hours per week for the medium level one and I have four or five different structures to juggle with 1 hour of repair timer, I for one won't bother and there are a lot of people like me, there is casual play and there is committed play if you force Eve to do committed play then its going to have small numbers of people.

My reply is based on my own vested interest, if its too easy for people to attack and I have to baby sit them too much I won't bother, but that will hurt gameplay I play minimal as it is to make myself hard to get at and quite a few do the same as me. And the excitement of this game for people like me is to build stuff and use it and have a chance to hold it, I am certainly not there as cannon fodder for easy kills and easy loot. Which gets back to the loot drops, you want to play as a nomadic pirate alliance moving into an area killing stuff and looting, fair enough, but what you get already is the drop that you can get from the Citadel itself which will be quite valuable, be it the rigs and the material to build the rigs and the station, but you want more don't you?

Also there is nothing wrong in having an XL station able to defend itself, I would rather like to see it have a weapon that can kill Titans and Supers, that would shake up things a bit.

And for those people asking for some mechanic for abandoned structures, its not as if they are going to be sitting on moons and stopping others from being there like now, you can drop these things anywhere though I wonder how they will work with moons and as customs offices with multiple ones sitting around these resources, could get quite interesting in terms of local wars but people could do spoilers of course in key areas, is this what you are getting at?

When the going gets tough the Gankers get their CSM rep to change mechanics in their favour.

Blocked: Teckos Pech, Sonya Corvinus, baltec1, Shae Tadaruwa, Wander Prian, Daichi Yamato, Jonah Gravenstein, Merin Ryskin, Linus Gorp
Aralyn Cormallen
Deep Core Mining Inc.
Caldari State
#182 - 2015-09-18 11:23:06 UTC
Gyges Skyeye wrote:
On the subject of Damage Mitigation.

Pros:
Creates predictable behavior and engagement patterns which can be tweaked for balance
Places a sanity check on how many people are needed for a thing

Cons:
When the number of people needed for a thing is achieved, everyone else who wanted to participate may as well go f*ck off.


To be honest, I don't see this as a problem. Sure, there is an "ideal world" max number of ships that contribute, but carrying more is never going to be a bad thing. For one, you are going to want to bring ships in case a fight occurs (you'll feel foolish leaving 20 DPS ships behind then get dropped by a fleet with 10 more ships than you), also, carrying more ships allows you to be a bit more casual about having to absolute max-DPS, or make tactical plays that mean changing situations dont cause you to lose max-DPS on the structure. for ex:

- keep the 'extra ships' as a rapid response to deal with harrassing ships (like bombers) without damage having to be taken off the structure to deal with them.
- transfer unneeded extra DPS ships into tackle, ECM, or or recons, knowing these ships aren't costing you dps to be there.
- you don't need to worry about using max DPS ammo; if you're DPS capped already, it costs you nothing to switch down to T1.
- if you have more Dreads on field than you need, you can keep a bunch out of seige so you don't lose the whole fleet in a counter-drop.

There are a lot of tactical options open to groups taking advantage of the fact they have DPS brought that they don't need, these ships aren't automatically 'useless'.
Langbaobao
Tr0pa de elite.
#183 - 2015-09-18 12:01:23 UTC  |  Edited by: Langbaobao
Dracvlad wrote:
I think that you make some good points, like 1) I agree with, but there is self interest there in 2) 3) and 5), the smaller the vulnerability window the more structures you will see. Also you seem to forget that there are structures to do different things, so for example my small corp will have a medium citadel and some other structures for manufacturing and even mining and the one taking over the POCO job all in NPC 0.0, so if it gets more than 3 hours per week for the medium level one and I have four or five different structures to juggle with 1 hour of repair timer, I for one won't bother and there are a lot of people like me, there is casual play and there is committed play if you force Eve to do committed play then its going to have small numbers of people.


As I said, I'm not entirely sure what would be the necessary amount of vulnerability. I just think it's a bit too short for medium and large citadels, especially since you can push it all to only one day and the remaining 6 days the structure is invulnerable. While I can appreciate that some people play casually, I think that 3 or 6 hours of vulnerability per week (which can all be pushed into one day) are a little too short even for the most casual player. Having to log in once per week to defend shouldn't be the measure of 'casualness'. I think you will agree as well that having only one day of vulnerability (3-6 hours) in each week is a bit too little, especially since nowadays POSes are vulnerable all the time and still people don't go shooting them down all the time. Hence why I also suggested the diminishing returns system as a possible solution together with a tweak in the number of vulnerability hours. Of course my suggestions are only related to the citadels. Smaller, sub-medium citadel structures, like assembly arrays and so on can have smaller vulnerability timers to reduce the chance of drive-by trolling. They won't be in use anyway if whoever owns them doesn't own sov and the actual space they're in, they are basically abandoned if someone is pushed out of their space. Citadels however have a tactical and strategic importance and can be used as bases of operation and as such they should be more susceptible to interdiction. In any case, it's something that can and should be discussed.

Dracvlad wrote:
My reply is based on my own vested interest, if its too easy for people to attack and I have to baby sit them too much I won't bother, but that will hurt gameplay I play minimal as it is to make myself hard to get at and quite a few do the same as me. And the excitement of this game for people like me is to build stuff and use it and have a chance to hold it, I am certainly not there as cannon fodder for easy kills and easy loot. Which gets back to the loot drops, you want to play as a nomadic pirate alliance moving into an area killing stuff and looting, fair enough, but what you get already is the drop that you can get from the Citadel itself which will be quite valuable, be it the rigs and the material to build the rigs and the station, but you want more don't you?


TBH, I don't really care about having minerals, building components, rigs and stuff like that being dropped as loot. I don't want it. I would just like to have a loot drop as we currently have with POSes, nothing more. I want the loot pinata that we already have in the game, nothing more or above it.
Saron Dax
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#184 - 2015-09-18 12:08:02 UTC
TheMercenaryKing wrote:
Couple of thoughts:

Use Entosis Link to disable guns on a Citadel (should they be added)
Use Entosis Link to Raise the DPS Mitigation cap.



Have to say I agree with the above two points. Maybe also allow entosis to lower the DPS cap (for small defender advantage).

Whilst I like these changes, it seems strange to have totally abandoned the idea of entosis entirely for a whole class of interactable-things-in-space. Adding some options into the mix for entosis to affect the battle would add some more interesting gameplay options (especially if entosisable nodes were spread around a bit and not all in one place - around grid, or around system maybe) and bring more dynanism to fights by having multiple things going on, rather than just shooting a structure.

The other thing that feels odd with the current proposal is that there are a lot of all-or-nothing mechanics in play. The hard cap for DPS, the fact that the hitpoint are all repaired at the end of the timer (this especially feels very 'gamey'). It would feel less odd I think if these straight lines and hard corners were bent and rounded out (if you'll pardon the analogy).

Example: The DPS cap starts to exponentially take effect after some point - ie diminishing returns, rather than hard cut-off.
Example: Structure hit points regen over a short amount of time once the timer expires rather than all at once.
h4kun4
Senkawa Tactical Division
Crimson Citadel
#185 - 2015-09-18 12:29:04 UTC
It was a good read, and it looked mostly fun.

Altough the Damage Mitigation looked awkward to me. A huge Coalition can still bring a bazillion people to the fight against a smaller group repelling any attackers or defenders with no difficulties.

As an attacker you simply put 200+ Carriers with Sentries or alternatively 75 Supers on a Citadel and watch it die within 30 minutes, nobody will do you any real harm, considering Carriers and Supers will still be able to do damage when this change goes live.

Does it need to get actual damage to prevent it from repping or is it enough to agress it with a frigate from lets say 100km off with a civillian autocannon?
Dracvlad
Taishi Combine
Astral Alliance
#186 - 2015-09-18 12:35:29 UTC
Langbaobao wrote:
Dracvlad wrote:
I think that you make some good points, like 1) I agree with, but there is self interest there in 2) 3) and 5), the smaller the vulnerability window the more structures you will see. Also you seem to forget that there are structures to do different things, so for example my small corp will have a medium citadel and some other structures for manufacturing and even mining and the one taking over the POCO job all in NPC 0.0, so if it gets more than 3 hours per week for the medium level one and I have four or five different structures to juggle with 1 hour of repair timer, I for one won't bother and there are a lot of people like me, there is casual play and there is committed play if you force Eve to do committed play then its going to have small numbers of people.


As I said, I'm not entirely sure what would be the necessary amount of vulnerability. I just think it's a bit too short for medium and large citadels, especially since you can push it all to only one day and the remaining 6 days the structure is invulnerable. While I can appreciate that some people play casually, I think that 3 or 6 hours of vulnerability per week (which can all be pushed into one day) are a little too short even for the most casual player. Having to log in once per week to defend shouldn't be the measure of 'casualness'. I think you will agree as well that having only one day of vulnerability (3-6 hours) in each week is a bit too little, especially since nowadays POSes are vulnerable all the time and still people don't go shooting them down all the time. Hence why I also suggested the diminishing returns system as a possible solution together with a tweak in the number of vulnerability hours. Of course my suggestions are only related to the citadels. Smaller, sub-medium citadel structures, like assembly arrays and so on can have smaller vulnerability timers to reduce the chance of drive-by trolling. They won't be in use anyway if whoever owns them doesn't own sov and the actual space they're in, they are basically abandoned if someone is pushed out of their space. Citadels however have a tactical and strategic importance and can be used as bases of operation and as such they should be more susceptible to interdiction. In any case, it's something that can and should be discussed.

Dracvlad wrote:
My reply is based on my own vested interest, if its too easy for people to attack and I have to baby sit them too much I won't bother, but that will hurt gameplay I play minimal as it is to make myself hard to get at and quite a few do the same as me. And the excitement of this game for people like me is to build stuff and use it and have a chance to hold it, I am certainly not there as cannon fodder for easy kills and easy loot. Which gets back to the loot drops, you want to play as a nomadic pirate alliance moving into an area killing stuff and looting, fair enough, but what you get already is the drop that you can get from the Citadel itself which will be quite valuable, be it the rigs and the material to build the rigs and the station, but you want more don't you?


TBH, I don't really care about having minerals, building components, rigs and stuff like that being dropped as loot. I don't want it. I would just like to have a loot drop as we currently have with POSes, nothing more. I want the loot pinata that we already have in the game, nothing more or above it.


Good answers, but CCP has to get the vulnerability right so more casual players don't get turned off, after all they are replacing POS's . In terms of POS's being shot, well you see people shoot them in hisec for BPC's or even BPO's and stuff they don't really need to leave there, they are shot in WH space because of the mass of stuff in them, in null sec they are shot for moon goo (not for loot) or for strategic reasons, I have about 8 enemy POS's in the systems where I operate, I could easily blow them all up and have contemplated doing so, but there is no value for me apart from low level moon goo and removing a reason for them to come in system.

I realised you don't want the minerals and rig stuff that drop, but that has a value, you just want the ships and nice modules and stuff that people will store in them or the stuff that people are setting up ion their market hubs, but the issue is if CCP do it on the same basis as POS's then whats the point of using one for casual players in any meaningful way, all my stuff will stay in NPC 0.0 stations, which is the current system we have now the only difference between now and this suggestion is the end of fire sales in 0.0 sov systems and while I understand your reasoning we are still talking about a game that has to balance the gameplay against the issue that many people can only play a few hours a day.

When the going gets tough the Gankers get their CSM rep to change mechanics in their favour.

Blocked: Teckos Pech, Sonya Corvinus, baltec1, Shae Tadaruwa, Wander Prian, Daichi Yamato, Jonah Gravenstein, Merin Ryskin, Linus Gorp
Skia Aumer
Planetary Harvesting and Processing LLC
#187 - 2015-09-18 12:38:16 UTC
Game of Drones wrote:
Damage mitigation

Now that you've vocalized the problem - we can work on the solution.
First of all, this iteration is infinitely better than the previous. But still not perfect. The proposed solution is a very straight-forward one, and it has a huge drawback - it's hard limit.
I'm strongly against hard limits, as they leave little to no room for inventive emerging gameplay, which is a hallmark of EVE. Furthermore, they set strong mental anchors - in this case, for fleet size and composition. Enthosis links are the opposite pole, providing virtually no restrictions for fleets (so ~fleet~ often degrades to a single trollceptor). I believe that the optimal solution, as it usually happens, is somewhere in-between.

So lets set a soft limit instead, shall we?
There is a very interesting and promising (yet half-baked) ship module, that was once invented to solve the same problem of blob warfare. It's called Target Spectrum Breaker. If we tweak it and build it into Citadels - that's be great.
I have an immediate example how this can be more interesting than static DPS limit. Let's suppose attackers bring a moderate number of dreads to shoot a Citadel - their target lock is not often lost. Defenders form up and land on grid. As this is a rage-formup, their fleet is inferior and they cannot defeat attackers right away. But they can "jam" dreads by getting more target locks on Citadel! Thus, they force attackers to react to their skirmishes instead of just grinding the structure. Fun times!
Leatien Cesaille
Dreddit
Test Alliance Please Ignore
#188 - 2015-09-18 13:05:11 UTC
While I do like the idea of shooting things instead of shining pretty lights at it (that's why I prefer hybrid weapons over lasers), something bothers me about this system as presented in the blog. Probably somebody has pointed it out already, but reiteration is always good on the Interwebs, isn't it?

So from what I gather the structure enters the vulnerable timer at a predetermined time but the repair timer starts the moment it gets shot at and will repair the structure to full after the timer runs out. Even if it has been damaged in the previous vulnerability phase.

There are two problems I see with it.

First, there is no real reason to have this vulnerable state going on longer than the repair cycle since all the defender has to do is shoot his own structure once at the beginning (with an out of alliance char if necessary) to start the repair timer and the structure will be as good as new after that relatively short time. An attacker planning to attack near the middle or end of the vulnerable timer will have to start anew. To be fair the current entosis mechanic has a similar consequence that not being on field the moment the vulnerability starts puts you at a potentially huge disadvantage but it still takes time and effort to capture nodes distributed over several systems. It's far more difficult to block an attacker from several systems than from just the system the station is in.
Shooting your own structure to help repair it faster seems counter-intuitive to me...
There are two ways to address this: If you want to have both attacker and defender to be present on the field the moment the new vulnerability starts just start the damn thing in the repair phase right away. If you do want a bit of flexibility for the attacker to properly deploy at any time or break through a gatecamp during the vulnerability window apply the repair to previously shot down HP pools at the end of the vulnerability window regardless if a repair timer has run it's course or not and allow multiple repair cycles to occur during a single vulnerability period that only deal with damage to the current pool.

Second, I don't think it's right that everything is repaired. What a repair cycle should do is either repair the damage done to the current vulnerable pool or the one before it - and only that one. So let's say the structure is in structure vulnerable mode, survives a vulnerability period uncontested it doesn't get it's shield and armour repped to full but just the armour. It will need a second vulnerability window to get repped to full. To be fair to prevent delaying tactics by a single player (or small force) that has no real hope to actually apply enough dps to be a threat I would like to see some sort of threshold. For example, as the damage to the current pool doesn't exceed - say - 25% the next pool gets repped too after the repair cycle. Or you could just go with repping the current and previous pool although than this is only really relevant if the structure is already in structure.
Alexander Tekitsu
State War Academy
Caldari State
#189 - 2015-09-18 13:24:14 UTC  |  Edited by: Alexander Tekitsu
Saede Riordan wrote:
As a wormholer, this is absolutely not okay and I if no one else will raise hell over it. Why is wormhole space special in that we alone get to deal with the risk of total asset loss while everyone else gets their stuff magically spirited away to safety? All that is going to do is incentivize people in nullsec (whose assets are safe and unattackable) to attack wormholes for the loot. Not only that, but there's absolutely no counterplay, we can't go attack nullseccers and blow up their ****, its safe. We're getting this huge risk that no one else will have to shoulder, and what do we get out of it? Nothing. We can't hit them back, their assets are untouchable. We don't get sov and it's benefits. This feels like the real **** end of the **** stick.


To be fair, Citadels are planned replacements for outposts. WH space currently has no equivalent and the argument for WH dwellers is why would you bother with a structure that allows you to accumulate more things than you currently do? Is J space the same as K Space? K space has static gates and cynos and other force projection mechanics in place. J Space has dynamic entrances that are a natural protection during the vulnerability window ( 3 hours a week, you do nothing but roll holes, don't bother with guns ).

These structures are not intended as a POS replacement, they are an outpost replacement ( which you currently can't deploy in J Space ), so answer a simple question, K Space has stations/outposts which have asset protection by nature, what equivalent structure exists for J Space?

I honestly don't feel it's fair to WH Dwellers to allow these to be deployed in J Space at all. It promotes accumulation of junk, gives a place to death clone to and also breaks the new(er) Shattered wormholes as they become available to be occupied.

If I kill a WH dweller in null, and get the pod, he can now reship and be back on my doorstep without having to find a way back to his home WH?
Thron Legacy
White Zulu
Scorpion Federation
#190 - 2015-09-18 13:54:17 UTC  |  Edited by: Thron Legacy
Alexander Tekitsu wrote:


To be fair, Citadels are planned replacements for outposts. WH space currently has no equivalent and the argument for WH dwellers is why would you bother with a structure that allows you to accumulate more things than you currently do? Is J space the same as K Space? K space has static gates and cynos and other force projection mechanics in place. J Space has dynamic entrances that are a natural protection during the vulnerability window ( 3 hours a week, you do nothing but roll holes, don't bother with guns ).

These structures are not intended as a POS replacement, they are an outpost replacement ( which you currently can't deploy in J Space ), so answer a simple question, K Space has stations/outposts which have asset protection by nature, what equivalent structure exists for J Space?

I honestly don't feel it's fair to WH Dwellers to allow these to be deployed in J Space at all. It promotes accumulation of junk, gives a place to death clone to and also breaks the new(er) Shattered wormholes as they become available to be occupied.

If I kill a WH dweller in null, and get the pod, he can now reship and be back on my doorstep without having to find a way back to his home WH?



They are both POS and Outpost replacement
EDIT: you also cant set them as home station/jc when they are in a wh, try harder reading dev blogs
Lavayar
Haidamaky
UA Fleets
#191 - 2015-09-18 13:57:20 UTC
Quote:
Damage mitigation

What a dirty hack!
Aryth
University of Caille
Gallente Federation
#192 - 2015-09-18 14:03:04 UTC
The numbers are a bit low. At this level is isn't quite right on the risk/reward mix for what someone is going to lose in a max XL with stuff in it. You could very easily make the cost analysis to decide to suicide all 3 timers losing a couple fleets of subcaps at most to kill a citadel. Oh sure, the defenders will kill a fleet but probably not both in 30 minutes and then you lose a few while extracting. But who cares if you are losing 20b x 3 if you are blowing up 100s of billions in assets+fees to move. Large entities
could do this every week and not care.

Not sure of the best way to balance it. Off hand you could increase the XL DPS required and how long someone must be on field for so the losses are bigger but in the age of logi meaning nothing dies that is iffy. Maybe a way for defenders to rep but cap out at 50% of max dps. So if max DPS was 60k for the attacker. Maybe defender can rep 30k. The structure will still die but it will extend that fight out and make the battle longer and more costly.

Leader of the Goonswarm Economic Warfare Cabal.

Creator of Burn Jita

Vile Rat: You're the greatest sociopath that has ever played eve.
Alexander Tekitsu
State War Academy
Caldari State
#193 - 2015-09-18 14:05:21 UTC  |  Edited by: Alexander Tekitsu
Thron Legacy wrote:
They are both POS and Outpost replacement
EDIT: you also cant set them as home station/jc when they are in a wh, try harder reading dev blogs

Reading is hard work :P Fair point and I raised it as more of a question, but missed my previous mention of it on an edit.

I was thinking of the other structures that are coming later according to the first blog, but see they are just specialized structures that replace the functions of a POS. Rest of the post remains valid.
Max Fubarticus
Raging Main
Bullets Bombs and Blondes
#194 - 2015-09-18 14:06:36 UTC  |  Edited by: Max Fubarticus
CCP Phantom wrote:
After great and very useful feedback from you, the player community, we are excited to bring you an update about the new Citadel structures!

Entosis links are not going to work on new structures, to attack those new structures you need to go through their hitpoints. To prevent boring structure grinding, and to prevent the requirement for massive blobs, a new game mechanic that mitigates damage after a certain threshold has been introduced. The attack process has been streamlined as well.

Read more about those new aspects in the latest dev blog from Team Game of Drones (written by CCP Ytterbium): Citadels, Sieges and You v2


We welcome your feedback! Please note that all numbers and proposals are open for discussions and not finalized.


Devs,
Will the following relevant topics / concerns be addressed in the next progress blog?

1. Existing skills ( eg Stabase Defense), new skill requirements? How will this be handled to ensure players have sufficient time to train new skills or level up existing skills. Skill book availability and pricing? Will existing skills in gunnery / missiles / drones transfer over into defensive systems integration?

2. Structure modifications / Rigs / Upgrades, New / existing skills? BPO / BPC market seeding with sufficient lead time for research and market price stability. Existing player owned structures conversion / reimbursement.

3. Existing stocks of researched BPO / BPC. Reimbursement or conversion? Fair market price in the conversion process? Consideration of player investment, both isk and time?

4. Citadel variants, Observatory, Market Hub, etc. Will these be separate classes with individual BPO / BPC or one standard variant that becomes a different class through upgrades / rigs. If So, will a player be able to change the class of citadel while anchored by removing / destroying rigs and replacing with ones that create the desired class?

I am sure there are more relevant questions to be asked, and I know that many of the questions asked in this post have been touched upon to some extent. I simply would like to stay ahead of the information curve ( like many others ), to make informed choices in the coming months.

Thanks for the hard work and listening to the player baseBig smile

Max

Civil discourse is uniquely human. After all, when is the last time a pride of lions and a herd of water buffalo negotiated SOV over a watering hole? Never. Someone either gets their ass kicked or eaten. At the end of the day someone holds SOV.
Harry Saq
Of Tears and ISK
ISK.Net
#195 - 2015-09-18 14:08:44 UTC
CCP Ytterbium wrote:
Tobias Frank wrote:
Looks promising!

Also, will we get docking scenes in the new citadels as we have now in stations/outposts when we are docked? Ship spinning is an important feature!


No docking scene. When you dock, the camera will be centered around the structure instead, so you can now play structure spinning.

Unless this is a design limitation I do not think this is a good idea.

When you can see outside the citadel you can gather intel, and know what's going on around. It also implies that you are still in your pod, and not out and about inside the citadel.

I think climbing into the citadel to defend should work exactly the same as climbing into a ship. That is, get in your pod and then board your ship of choice, in this case, it is the structure your pod is "plugging into".

I get that these are replacing POSes but are they not also replacing outposts. For the grandiose these things are going for, it will all be lost if you are still just basically sitting in space.

I think being docked working like current outposts should be the same for XL Citadels atleast.

At a bare minimum this will require the defender to undock to know what is going on in space around them, rather than sit in the citadel and know for free (interfaces and all). Only the ones plugged into the citadel and using the defenses should be able to see outside the station, that way it gives reason to undock if you want to actually know what's going on.

Citadels, certainly XL ones, you get out of your ship to go into, not park your ship outside of and just look at, the difference between a drive thru and a restaurant. Otherwise you might as well have a tower with a bubble, and just get rid of the big city looking thing I can't actually go into (even though it looks like I absolutely should).
Robnik Charante
The Scope
Gallente Federation
#196 - 2015-09-18 14:38:55 UTC  |  Edited by: Robnik Charante
I think these changes are great. Really feel like CCP is listening to community feedback on this one.

I think the hard limit on damage mitigation is a little... inelegant and perhaps not ideal. I think a wonderful design goal is to reduce the problem of N+1... but at the same time, there should still be a bit of a carrot for attackers to commit EVEN MOAR. You would also want to avoid a scenario where additional fleet members feel useless if they are not contributing more DPS. My suggestions may not make any sense in the light of future changes to capitals, so these changes are based around what's been disclosed (obviously).

I'd prefer to see the incoming damage DR'd logarithmically rather than simply capped. Suppose 1 dread is needed to RF a Citadel in 30 minutes, sitting right at the damage limit. The goal would be to make 10 dreads speed up the grind by a factor of 50% (15 minutes), or 100 dreads speed up the grind by a factor of 66.67% (10 minutes). Definitely an advantage to having more stuff on the field, but with poor scaling.

I'd suggest the following logarithmic function as an improvement to a hard cop:

If DPS_incoming < DPS_soft_cap, DPS_effective = DPS_incoming
If DPS_incoming >= DPS_soft_cap, DPS_effective = DPS_soft_cap*(log10(DPS_incoming/DPS_soft_cap)+1)


I created a graph of these calculations which you can view here. For this example, I chose 6 dreadnoughts as the soft cap (you can consider that to be 60,000 DPS if you like). 6 dreads hit the soft cap, so a XL structure would take 30 minutes to RF. 20 dreads map to 9 effective dreads, so the RF time would drop to 20 minutes. 100 dreads would map to 14 effective dreads, so the RF time would drop to 13 minutes. 1000 dreads (lol) would map to 19 effective dreads, which drops RF time down to about 9.5 minutes.

I think this is a good scaling law that lets attackers bring more to the party while keeping everyone feeling useful, while sidestepping the issues that the hard cap so nicely addresses.
Raddan Eldre'Thalas
Naval Defence Force
Naval Defence Alliance
#197 - 2015-09-18 14:46:53 UTC
In regards to Wormholes:

So here is what we know about the current system in place comparing Null sec and WH space. Wormhole dwellers use POS's, nullsec does too, but also gets all the lovely sov structures including stations. Risk vs reward are both high in both spaces, however currently it can be argued that Null sec can be much more profitable, also there is more content in null sec, (ie moon mining, ratting, expeditions) that you can't get from living in a WH. If we look at this from a risk vs reward stand point, which keep in mind is a HUGE factor in this game, it clearly points to the fact that the proposed changes to the new citadel structures in WH space should actually be the mechanics of Null sec.

Woah did he just say that? Well no, you actually just read it from a stand point based on a simple game observation. But think about the uproar in Null sec this would cause.

Now lets have another look and base our decision this time on game mechanic discrimination. We have a citadel in Nullsec, cool if it gets attacked and blown up I know that my items, blue prints and ships are all safe. Now we have that SAME structure in a wormhole, well crap... if it gets attacked I lose all my blue prints, ships, manufacturing, poof! all gone. Oh don't forget, I didn't just lose my items, I also my lost foothold in that system. That means corps and alliances that have lived in WH space for years can literately be wiped out in 48hrs. Mean while the person who just lost their citadel in nullsec can happily just pay some isk and setup shop again with alot less repercussions.

Most important point: People wont use these structures if the risk is to high. Unless there is some kind of super boost to the content reward in wormholes it will simply not be worth the effort to try and defend your keep.

TLDR: The risk to reward ratio will be too far off if in WH's you lose all your stuff and nullsec gets to keep theirs.
BFE
Shadow Flight
#198 - 2015-09-18 15:28:00 UTC
Cobat Marland wrote:
Sbrodor wrote:
omg. we fall back to the past!

i really dont see the point of difference of the past where 30 super of (choose your name favorite ally) again blobbing at own pleasure player trying to build something with time and effort.


30 dudes should always be able to kick over one guys sandcastle doesnt matter what kinda ships they use


Wrong. 30 Ravens shouldn't be able to knock out a Citadel, at least not a L or XL. L Citadels should require 50 BS, or 20 capitals.

XL Citadel should be safe from anything smaller than a 40 capital ship fleet..... or numbers somewhere in that range.....

From the size of the citadels listed in previous posts, the XL citadel seems to be on par with a current NPC station.... and 30 BS wouldn't be able to take one of those out (If there were attackable).
Ayumi Shekki
Thee Almitee Ones
#199 - 2015-09-18 15:34:35 UTC
CCP Phantom wrote:
After great and very useful feedback from you, the player community, we are excited to bring you an update about the new Citadel structures!

Entosis links are not going to work on new structures, to attack those new structures you need to go through their hitpoints. To prevent boring structure grinding, and to prevent the requirement for massive blobs, a new game mechanic that mitigates damage after a certain threshold has been introduced. The attack process has been streamlined as well.

Read more about those new aspects in the latest dev blog from Team Game of Drones (written by CCP Ytterbium): Citadels, Sieges and You v2


We welcome your feedback! Please note that all numbers and proposals are open for discussions and not finalized.


What is the cost for the Citadels
are we talking 100Bill isk for an XL

who is going to leave stuff in a Citadel when they can just log out in a charon with the items which will bypass having them stored in a Citadel at least know your stuff is safe even if the citadel is blowen up,
Philip Ogtaulmolfi
We are not bad. Just unlucky
#200 - 2015-09-18 15:52:38 UTC
Ayumi Shekki wrote:


who is going to leave stuff in a Citadel when they can just log out in a charon with the items which will bypass having them stored in a Citadel at least know your stuff is safe even if the citadel is blowen up,



Probably those that, like me, have tens of millions of cubic meters of stuff there.