Arkady Sadik
Minmatar
Electus Matari
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Posted - 2011.04.19 13:53:00 -
[1]
Scorched Earth
It's easy to make a list of stuff that needs to be "breakable" to hurt someone. One thing I think has been done wrong so far is how this is done (structure grind). The game mechanical background you have is that you want a balance between making it possible for an attacker to do some bad stuff within a reasonable timeframe, but also for the defender to have a chance to set up a defense fleet. Structure grind tries to establish this "reasonable timeframe" with a HP count, but that does not work, as "MOAR DPS" will just totally wipe it out. To make it impossible to just run through with 50 BS and kill everything in 5 minutes, the HP count is big enough to tank that, but that makes it impossible to do anything bad with 20 HACs.
Drop HP grind. Replace it with timers (yes, I'm serious). You park your fleet next to a target, maybe activate a module on it, and then you wait 10, 20, 30, 60 minutes, whatever is deemed a "reasonable timeframe". After that time the thing is broken and defenders have to do a similar doohicky to fix it again. Factional Warfare uses this, and when you manage to get past all the bugs, problems and misfeatures (like, one frigging tells you when an attack is starting so you can't actually defend), the mechanic works really well.
So you can move in with a 5-ship fleet and disable the Pirate Magnet at the ihub by sitting next to it for 15 minutes. If you get attacked in that time, the disruption stops, etc. If you don't, the defenders have to put in some major work to repair it (say, sit next to it for 30 minutes or something).
Moon miners and other resource-creating things (customs offices?) could even drop some of their yield to you. Sit next to moon miner with the Moon Mining Hacking Tool and you get some of the moon yield from the silo every 5 minutes until someone stops you. For example, you get the yield of 1h every 5 minutes, so if you can stay for 2h every day you steal their whole moon goo income. No need to repair anything, even. (Exact numbers need some major thinking through, obviously.)
Independence from Jita
This is difficult, because you will have to compete with a much larger market. I'll say something about this below, but as it will include "make logistics more difficult", I'll mention the other stuff first so people who rage at me for that will read the other stuff ;-)
Give the expensive ore in 0.0 sufficient quantities of low-end minerals so it's not sensible to just mine high-ends and import low-ends from Jita, but to have all the minerals in 0.0 already when you're done mining.
Then, remove the whole region-specific stuff. If you want stuff to happen in 0.0, then it must be possible for an alliance to produce most if not all things themselves based on the resources of a region. All moon minerals, all sorts of ice, etc. etc. need to be available for your alliance, in sufficient quantities, in the one region you call home. While trade is good, the second you add trade, you make it easier for an alliance to run to Jita than to do anything else. Trade should be an option to avoid local work, not a necessity.
But in the end, I'm afraid that "effort of logistics" seems to be the only real factor I can see to balance this out - regardless what else you do, you end up with a much smaller group of people competing with a much bigger one, which just won't work out (even the whole NC is 40k accounts total, Jita has 1/40th of that logged into the system at any point).
The problem here is "ease of logistics" on multiple levels. Not only the ease of logistics from Jita to 0.0, but also the ease of logistics to Jita. Autopiloting freighters bring goods to Jita every day, and that's trivial effort to get the results from Jita. Make logistics to Jita more difficult and you reduce the competition of any single market spot.
Anything that makes it desirable for players to spread out and not stick in any one system will reduce the competition that 0.0 has to fight against. Usage-dependent dynamic agent quality, dynamic factory/research cost, and dynamic sales taxes in empire space would all work towards making it easier to compete with Jita.
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