Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Morning All

So whilst utterly unqualified to post this, I was reading a set of posts on suggestions to changing the Citadel destruction mechanics that would benefit generating more fights, in particular a review of the asset safety mechanism.

It got me thinking and at some point this little gem of an idea cropped into my mind which I felt like sharing. Feel free to slate it, it might not be that good an idea.

The Rational
So the idea behind the change is that current asset safety mechanics allow defenders to forgo defending a citadel in favour of anchoring another one in the system and retrieving all the assets from the original lost citadel at no cost.

However there is a flip side to the coin, for many smaller corps and entities, citadels provided the means to move into unpopulated systems which had previously been inaccessible to such groups. Be it the mining system of a 10 man industry corp or a small alliance hiding in the back end of a wormhole or NPC null sec pocket. Citadels opened up a lot of gameplay for these groups. But these groups also fall prey to being the smaller fish in the pond and when it comes to defending the citadel. It is not uncommon to find themselves utterly out gunned and classed by a numerically superiors opponent making a defence of the citadel unviable.

So any fix has to balance both sides of the coin

The Idea
My idea I hope fixes the in balance in safety whilst also making the destruction of citadels a more fun mechanic.

New Vulnerability timers/calendar
Change the allocation of vulnerability time thus: Regardless of citadel size the owning corp picks 5 days out of the 7 day week and then on each of those 5 days individually specifies 2 hours of vulnerability. So that every citadel has 10 hours of vulnerability spread across 5 days which the defender can set to maximise their response time.

So for example a Euro corp might opt to pick Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, then set the weekday timers to 18:00 – 20:00 and the weekend time to 19:00-21:00.

Vulnerability windows are no longer secret and the entire calendar of times can be viewed by any person Friend or Foe on grid with the citadel.

The new Initial Assault
The mechanics for attacking a citadel now changes. The DPS cap limit and the requirement to provide 15mins of uninterrupted DPS on the citadel remains. (in fact it might be beneficial to increase it to 20mins.)

The attack can now choose to launch the initial assault on a citadel at any time, they do not need to wait for the vulnerability timer. This means that the attacking entity can pick a time of its choosing to initiate the process, or even task it’s out of primary timezone pilots with the task.

If the initial assault is successful the citadel enter reinforced.

The new initial reinforced timer works like this (the numbers might need tweaking. Intitial reinforcement is the citadels defensive mechanism designed to prompt its owner into saving it. Regardless of at what time a citadel was knocked into reinforcement, the citadel opts to come out of reinforced X many days later in the vulnerability timer specified by the owning corp of that day. X is the number of days in reinforced dictated by the citadel size and might be something like 3 day for an astrahouse, 4 day for a Fortizar and 5 days for an XL.

If X any days later is one of the two days the corp decided to not put a vulnerability window then it rolls back to the next available vulnerability window on the corps calendar.

Thus regardless of when an attacker started the assault it should always come out at a time when the defender feels confident that they can defend the structure, at the same time if the calendar of vulnerability is also public its possible for an attacker to pre-calcualte the reinforced exit so as to pick one which benefits them also.

The Defence Timer
Upon exiting reinforced the same rules as current apply and that attacker attempts to apply another 15mins of caped DPS to the structure.

If the second assault from the attacker is successful the citadel now enters emergency shutdown

Emergency Shutdown

At the point of entering emergency shutdown the citadel snapshots the attacks involved for the purposes of creating a killmail later.

The emergency shutdown routine is initiated by the citadel in an effort to save the assets of its owner, however to much structural integrity has been lost and the citadel is now beyond saving.

Emergency shutdown is another reinforced cycle during which time it is not possible to damage, repair or use any facility on the citadel except fitting. The emergency shutdown window timer is set to 18 hours for an astrhouse, 32 for a Fortizar and 48 for an XL .

At the end of the emergency shutdown timer the citadel explodes and provides a killmail to those who put it into this timer.

The emergency shutdown timer provides a window of opportunity for people to manual evacuate assets rather than have them go through asset safety. Of course this manual moving of assets also provides an opportunity for content for the aggressor as they can now attempt to intercept the evacuees and destroy them or maybe ransom the owning corp into paying a hefty fee to be allowed to evacuate freely.

Asset Safety Changes
The big change to asset safety is that there is no longer a free way to retrieve assets, the only free way of retrieving assets is to run the gauntlet in the emergency shutdown timer and take the risks associated with that.

Otherwise at the point of explosion assets enter asset safety, where they can be retrieved to a friendly station, npc station or citadel at a cost % of their original value + some additional cost for distance moved. Again Wormhole citadels can only asset safety to other citadels in the same hole.

Any thoughts?

I like exactly nothing about this post.