Aralyn Cormallen
Wildly Inappropriate
Goonswarm Federation
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Posted - 2011.08.05 09:45:00 -
[1]
Reposting someting i posted elsewhere on this topic:
Simply, there is nothing in the sovreignty system that allows someone to defend in depth, to fall back to regroup, to bolster the defence by sacrificing ground. It really doesn't matter where in your space the first blow comes, if both sides throw everything into the mix, and the defender goes down (with all the defensive benefits they can muster), it wont take long before they realise how completely the writing is on the wall. Personally, I love a pitched backed-up-against-the-wall defence, but I'm clearly not in the majority. Any defending force will leak members after that first defeat, while the attackers will just be bolstered by victory (both in moral, and by bandwagoners hopping on); all this ensuring the second 'big battle' goes the same way as the first.
I have no idea how it would be possible to do (hence why i usually keep my trap shut on such discussions), but there has to be a better way than all-or-nothing. I find it a little pathetic to look at the influence map and see blocks of colour, taking up large chunks of space, vanish overnight because the defender knows after the first battle that its over, and walks away rather than put up a pitched defence. At the moment there is no reason or incentive to take only a portion of someones space; if your going to try and take a bit, you might as well take it all - both because you know you can, and theres no disadvantage to taking a region even if you have no intention of living in it.
The best example I can think of is the AAA/Initiative to-and-fro last year (its a good example to use since I've literally only once flown through that area of space, there are guys i like in both groups, and I had absolutely no dog in that fight). In both AAA's fall, and then their driving out of Init, there was fierce fighting for the first region, then when that was clearly decided, the other 2/3 regions were handed over without a murmur, since there was no point bothering.
Something about that is just intrinsically wrong. In a way, it no longer matters how much space you own; a constellation, a region, or three regions. If you lose that first constellation you hand over the keys to whatever space you had anyway, so everyone might as well just hold sov in a single station system for all it matters. Holding tracts of space should matter, and taking tracts of space should be commesuratly more difficult that just in number of weekends the supcaps are grinding abandoned structures for.
I think Supercaps are part of the problem... but I don't mean in their power, I mean in their importance. At the moment, people hold sov to get Supercaps (folks like PL excluded), rather than get Supercaps to win sov. Its a small distinction, but it means people value their Supers more than they value their home. That's like me valuing my car more than my house (and my car isn't flash enough for that...). I think thats what needs to be changed when any nerf comes around - people should want to sacrifice caps to save (and to take) sov, while at the moment, even on the alliance level (Atlas, MM, IT have all done it in the last year) people are sacrificing their sov to save their Supers, often quite literally bartering the transfer of space to allow the completion of Super builds. I can understand joe-carebear doing a midnight flit with his ratting Super, but on the alliance level, sacrificing supers to preserve your sov for another month, another 3 months, should be a sensible choice, when at the moment it is not.
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