Aeaus
The Black Rabbits The Gurlstas Associates
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Posted - 2007.11.13 20:11:00 -
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Why have a mechanic like Sovereignty in the first place? Soverignty should depend on who controls a system and not who can put the most POSs there, but since there's no good way to keep track of this why even bother?
Sovereignty is only a mechanism to a) protect your station / outpost investment, b) give a 25% fuel reduction (very minor and inconsequential). Why not then make sovereignty directly related to outposts and station in the first place then?
Make sovereignty be contested by outpost ownership, allow more then one outpost / station in a system, and allow for a limited form of "reinforced timer" on stations, as well as several more "services" to help in the defense department. Introduce a "Reinforcement Modifier" service that adds 20% to shield resists (uniformly), or maybe even 50M more skillpoints, but make them conflict with the existing services (so you can't have an uber outpost that does everything and is a tough nut to *****), thus "core" outposts would have all services but are much easier to kill (If you're using this outpost all the time, then you should be able to provide a defense), but strong outposts would have limited services. However, sovereignty would only be a namesake, you get no bonus but the minor POS fuel bonus, and that's fine. Outposts should additionally have a "strontium timer," as somebody mentioned you should be able to control how long the station is in a reinforced mode (nothing but docking / market works), depending on how much strontium you've loaded up in it (like POSs you can't extend this timer by dumping more in, you work with what you have).
To make it more interesting, let outposts be destructible, I have an interesting gameplay proposal for this one, but it might be extreme. Outposts should not be free, infinitely running stations, they should require fuel to operate (Heavy Water, anyone?). Once fuel is put into a station (make a separate hangar accessible by owning corporation) it can not be taken out, and there is a 14-day fuel capacity on the thing. If an outpost is unfueled nothing within the station works, you can't even dock (but you can put in fuel from the outside and bring it online). Thus, under the worst case scenario, the conquering corporation will have to wait 14 days before the outpost completely runs out of fuel and is destroyable.
I believe this focuses the attention from "destroy the towers so we could get the outpost" to "fight for the outpost," obviously some overall changes to health, resists, etc, will need to be made so that outposts could stand up to a concentration attack without falling instant victim, but at the same time it makes the fight that much more immediate, and not the whole "Oh they attacked us, so we have a month before our outpost is even threatened," situation. Threats should be very immediate and present, if you can't defend your outpost you will lose it, you don't need a one month grace period.
I have more ideas on how to make the entire situation more interesting, please consider them as being separate from the above as I don't want those ideas to get ignored for this. But I think that introducing full-blown stations would be an extremely interesting idea, I don't like the idea of having requirements to prop them up (really, goes against the spirit of EVE), but they should be extremely expensive. I'm talking about 50-80M here, more facilities, more defense, etc.
Oh, and I want to reiterate that specific requirements like sovereignty to deploy an outpost, or immunity when sovereignty is present is absolutely horrible when it comes to gameplay. Lore wise, there should be no reason that you should have the sovereignty flag in Concord's database to deploy something in null-security space where Concord has no power or oversight. Although I would support an idea for POSs to augment an outposts defense (remote, really remote shield transfer, etc), but not to a point of making outposts invulnerable to any sort of attack.
Oh, 2K Chars.
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