I think that making them something to be in awe of would be nice. but with your limiting method of the low percent mining thing the Russians would still rule with their horde of bot miners.

Oh. hey, it's THIS idea again.

Alright, it might be a rehash of a few old ideas. What do you think is wrong with it?

Get rid of all super-caps currently in game. Reimburse pilots for skillbooks and hulls, fittings can be sold. Possibly reimburse skillpoints, but that is probably fairly controversial. Reintroduce them as described above.

Find a way to move the inherent costs in a supercapital away from the player and towards the alliance. While under this scheme, alliances will probably subsidize supercapital purchases; it still makes little sense to keep a character locked up for something he can fly infrequently. Possibly implement some sort of super storage facility at an alliance level?

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This would also further incentivize mining bots, as well as the use of them at a macro scale by groups of nefarious players. So that would need to be dealt with or mitigated, somehow.

While I would protest that my concept is much more elegant than the thread linked I do see your point. Even in an underdog alliance that might desperately need supers individual pilots of that alliance would still be tempted to sell the topes, not to mention the rest of the mining playerbase. The vast majority would indeed most likely end up on the market and the big spenders would have an advantage.

However, I can still see the principle in general working, with enough tweaking. For instance, what if every jump made by an isotope not inside a super had a chance of destabilizing (shortening the lifespan) and/or destroying the isotope? You'd then incentivize the local use of the topes, limit the ability of the market to access the them, and all the while drive a further integration between industrial and pvp players.

I just thought of that in a couple of minutes but I'm sure there is a mechanic out there that doesn't suck.

To be honest, if you are going to artificially remove all supers from the game and then reimburse the owners surely it would be easier just to tweak supercap production so they aren't so damn common/cheap?

That, coupled with giving supers points that can hold other supers (meaning more dead supers, yaaaay) and also extending the self destruct timers of supercaps (so people actually have an incentive to attack them) would probably lessen their number in game quite effectively.

If you increase the build requirement for supercaps all you do is cement the supremacy of the existing supercap blobs by making it much more difficult for other powers to catch up.

Supertackler modules further solidify the existing 'bring more supercaps = win' status quo since it removes the escape clause for a smaller group of supercaps dropped by a larger group. Under the current system if 20 supercaps drop onto 10, the 10 and their support fleet can at least attempt to kill the relatively fragile dictors and hictors to bail out, with supertacklers there's no escape. The end result isn't 'more dead supers', its ever-larger supercap megablobs because the smaller entities will never be able to use their own (and will either unsub their supercap accounts or sell the hulls on to the megablobs). It also further marginalises subcapital combat - at least under the current state of play the supercaps need dictors and hictors to tackle for them.

Self-destruct is a non-issue - a ship that self destructs is just as dead as a ship which dies from enemy fire. Fake up a killmail if it bothers you so much.

sub-cap ship specifically for the role, [tackling supers]

You mean a HIC, right?

I was just thinking that myself, I think it could be safe to say that they have a pretty decent tank.

The CSM advocated adding a supercapital-tackling point on Supercarriers, given the fragility of Heavy Interdictors in a supercap fight and the need to see supercapitals dying in combat more often.

just more researched and with answers to all supposed objections

This seems like it would just get exploited by alliances with infinite money and alts to grind everyone out of competition. The solution to supercapital abuse is to severely nerf their direct-combat abilities and drastically enhance their fleet support role, so it becomes a ship you want your side to have on the field of a major battle--or resupplying from a distance, whatever--but not something that it makes sense to put together a 50-strong gank fleet.

As long as carriers and moms function as uber-dominixes, any attempt to tweak availability will give one group or playstyle an advantage over another.

Only allow one per station under alliance control?

First of all I think we can all agree that supercapitals were a bad idea.

No, we can't agree on that.

I think you hobos should just not be allowed to fire on supers, and supers shouldn't be able to fire upon you.

Next, we should boost caps and burn all space poor haters with fire.

We can start the fire with this OP.