Marlakh
Minmatar Knights of the Silver Dawn
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Posted - 2011.08.04 02:41:00 -
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A major suggestion, and a few smaller ones. Apologies in advance for not having read all the posts. If something has already been suggested, please excuse me.
I'd like to add one more guiding principle to the future design of 0.0: Not be immersion breaking with respect to the Sci-Fi genre. This means that whatever game mechanics are chosen to determine ownership/conquest, should not be artificial in nature. I always had issues imagining how a physical structure like an Outpost would undergo the two reinforcement cycles before switching allegiance, or how a number of anchored SBUs can "magically" affect the owner of the system on my HUD, or the vulnerabilities of the TCU/Outpost many AUs away. I've been a sci-fi fan for many years and there's no logic around this "artificiality". So IMHO, present sov mechanics (and any mechanics that switches ownership or structural behavior) are immersion breaking.
So my proposals are:
Remove the sov mechanics system. Instead just let sov indication be a hidden "flag". By this I mean that , depending on which alliance owns the majority of planets on that system will be passively flagged as owning that system. The only utility of this "hidden flag" is to feed into Eve's sov map or an external app like Dotlan/Veritas' sov map, as an indication of bragging rights. Whats the implication of this?
(1) Every system can potentially become a place where multiple alliances and corporations can own planets, moons, multiple Outposts and other orbitals. There is no restriction on whether any object (orbital, celestal etc) can be owned by an individual, corporation or alliance), as long as an "ownership" trigger like a command center is owned by that entity. As a consequence, TCUs and SBUs become redundant.
(2) Conquests become much more multi-level in nature, from orbitals, to moons, to planets, and beyond (think massive stations like Ringworlds or Dyson Spheres). Being free of artificial sov mechanics at the system level, this encourages scalable levels of ownership and also corresponding levels of conflicts for various conquerable objects. This allows smaller entities to participate in 0.0 space, and in turn reduce the size of fleets (and hence lag) as the cost-benefits of mass scale deployment to conquer individual moons/objects are weighed against the smaller returns.
(3) "Sov" becomes much more fluid and dynamic, and the geographical boundaries between alliances/corps much more blurred. As multiple parties fight for celestials wihin a system, there is much more room for intra-system emergent behavior (read: drama) and interest. Entire alliance wars can take part within 1 system. True victory or defeat thus depends on how well each object within the system can be conquered. Again, there is no clear marker of "victory", and is more akin to real geopolitical situations.
(4) Provides more avenue for DUST 514 events to take place. Again, it is immersion breaking to keep firing on an Outpost to conquer it. In the future, the final step to conquering a station is to reduce its shields and armor to zero, which then allows DUST mercs to enter it and conquer a central "control room". Similarly for command center on planets, moons and even POSes. Imagine the final holdout battles! Imagine the aggressor fleet having to hold position against defending fleets while DUSTies duke it out on the Outposts/surfaces.
Thanks for reading, and any comments plase.
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