Originally by: Joerd Toastius

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As it is and especially now that it has subsumed ATUK, BoB has basically won the current arms race - the race to overwhelming numbers of capital ships - by industrial effort and blobbing up, and the apparent losers may well be effectively cedeing victory of this round and moving to a new paradigm in which having twenty dreads simply isn't relevant. This will remain the status quo probably for as long as one force (ie BoB) retains an overwhelming capital advantage - and while this status quo remains, that capital advantage will be effectively useless.

What may result from this possible scenario is a stagnation of capital ship production, especially by BoB, as every time they increase their fleet size they make it less likely that they will ever see decisive combat and justify their investment. If this stagnation happens, and if then new fledgling powers decide they want to fight in the old ways again and start preparing in secret, the balance could be shifted quickly to the point where there are multiple alliances which can field EC-sized capital fleets. If new groups manage to steal a march on BoB in this way, and can again compete on equal terms, proper territoral conquest becomes viable again.

However, it will be POS wars in a very different manner. The effort needed to run POS will likely not change, but with large fleets of dreadnaughts it will be much easier to destroy them. Currently, POS wars are something of a grind, with POS being attacked individually by dread assaults and being fairly significant actions individual actions. The ****ing around in D7 has illustrated this nicely - five alliances on two sides duking it out, with to my knowledge two POS destroyed in the system in like a fortnight of fighting. With EC-class dread fleets on all sides, it will be much easier to knock over individual POS unopposed, to the point where you could reinforce normal-sized systems in a day and finish them off the day after. However, with large capital fleets on both sides, it will also be easier to mount defences in specific locations, by counter-deploying dreadnaughts. This will, I would hope, lead to a more dynamic POS war, with the focus coming back from the POS themselves to the enemy fleet. The defender at a POS always has a firepower advantage from the station defences, and if you can deploy an equal number of dreadnaughts, you should be able to fight the attackers off. This should put the fleet back on top as the major deciding factor, with wars turning not on POS grinds but on decisive fleet actions, usually with significant capital presence on both sides and often being full-on engagements between opposing capital fleets, with dread-on-dread combat determining the outcome of the war - the loser gets smashed, and the winner steamrolls on through all the hostile POS.

Of course, BoB could probably prevent all this from happening and curtail POS actions indefinitely by simply maintaining their current lead and cranking out more capital ships. I don't think this would be good for the game in the long run; thankfully, judging by their latest announcement I think they'll probably realise this and let events take their course. Here's hoping...

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