Originally by: Seleene

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Edited by: Seleene on 28/04/2006 10:47:12

POSÆs as defense platforms suck. Yeah, I said it. They are giant paperweights just waiting to be smacked aside by any competent military force in the game.

Against a large enough Dread fleet (such as what MC has), POSÆs are nothing more than an annoying time sink to destroy and clear out. Even with maxed out defenses, the chances of losing a properly outfitted Dread to POS guns is minimal. This is nonsense. Attacking a POS should be something that causes players to prepare for and sweat about, not something that causes us to say, ôOh great, more boredom.ö

I am a firm believer that if I set something up that I should be able to control it. EVE has always been a practical game. My point:

When possible, when I have a character with the proper skills in the system, I should be able to control every function of defense on my POS and direct itÆs firepower as I see fit. Many players whine about how this would overpower a POS defenses. Bull****, says I. What it means is three things:

1.) You will need fewer POSÆs to defend a system because they will be much more effective. Even if they increase the cost of towers and the mods, thatÆs fine with me. Make a large POS cost 500 million, or 750 million. Players are already spending more than that to put down five or ten or fifteen Xerox copies of the same Death Star design. Hell, IÆd pay one billion isk for a large tower and another billion on the guns and modules for it if I could manually control those modules. In this way, POS attacks go from:

ôFifteen large towers??ö *groan* ôThatÆs going to take all weekend. Boringà.ö

to

ôFive large towers? Crap, I better insure this thing. Can we wait an extra day for Jim Bob and Billy Boy to log in with their Dreads as well? WeÆre gonna need the extra firepoweràö

2.) This effectively translates to the most important aspect of EVE to me: putting the control of the game in the players hands and NOT the damn AI or computer. POSÆs become important chess pieces in a system and not just some static NPC platform to be dealt with.

3.) Dreads are not exactly common, but they are very replaceable. An attacking force should expect to lose one or two of these behemoths when trying to take a defenderÆs outpost system.

The BoB siege of EC was a joke. An impressive joke, but still... It turned into nothing more than a numbers game. There was no chance with 500+ people in the system for anyone to field a fleet in time to stop the juggernaught that pounded the POS network into dust. Some might say, ôGood!ö. Well, I think it sucks that the outcome was determined completely by the fact that one side was able to field more numbers than the other.

Even if the defenders were doomed, by all rights, the attacking Dread force should have taken SOME losses. The defenders should have had more options than to just sit there watching their POS guns randomly and ineffectually cycle through targets that were completely invulnerable to attack. As a Dread pilot myself, OMG, that gets so dull that I want to claw my eyes out whenever we get a POS-busting job.

To me, this kind of thing is also a serious impediment to true 0.0 colonization:

If I canÆt properly control my assets, why put the money into them? If my defenses are nothing more than computer controlled entities with idiotic and useless targeting routines, why build them in the first place?

You do not even need to change the GUI to accommodate this. A player already has 24 potential slots to arrange his modules / guns. Guns could be sorted or forced into groups such as Large, Med & Small and would have to be focused on only one target at a time. The current grouping and control of drones would be an excellent system to apply to the grouping and control of POS turrets.

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