Spazzle
GoonFleet
GoonSwarm
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Posted - 2007.11.14 00:10:00 -
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Edited by: Spazzle on 14/11/2007 00:14:12
One thing I've been discussing for a while is how to make smaller gangs or alliances more relevant. Right now there are a number of super large alliances/coalitions that have what amounts to a very large shield around each of their posssesions. The developers have made those shields attackable (by hitting poses and attacking station services). But because of the number of people a single group can pull together, the defense of those breakable objects is very high. For example, it typically takes hours with a lmoderately sized gang of battleships to do appreciable damage to station services, and those services can just be repped back up by a few carriers when the gang leaves. This presents a couple of problems, Namely:
1) There is no incentive for a defender to actually engage, since they can basically wait it out.
2) Only large gangs are relevant due to the hitpoint buffers of the structures involved.
This reduces the bulk of meaningful alliance warfare to a series of superpowerful strikes into enemy territory to raid the infrastructure, with a number of skirmish gangs about to wear down enemy morale and moneymaking. What I'd like to see to begin to deal with this is to create more levels of targets, targets that people are able to defend (ie not some pointless marker that you have to toss up in every obscure solar system). Here is one suggestion that addresses this issue:
Make there be a much larger number of shootable station services. Currently there are something like 6 types with varying number of hit point. I propose that there be something like 10 types, with on the order of 4-6 "levels" each. Basically every aspect of an outpost should be damagable, to various stages. The levels would become progressively more difficult to damage, but with increasing effects. Level 1 would be shootable in 5 minutes by a small cruiser gang, with increasing difficulty to where the highest dificulty would take an hour of dread siegeing. The flipside of this plan is that defenders should have an incentive to engage these fleets instead of sitting it out. One way to do this is to give each level the same amount of hitpoints to repair, but to have them take various amounts of damage. If it took an hour to repair each stage, but only a few minutes to damage the first few, the defenders would have to come out and play to prevent this. This could be achiecved if each level had 1M (or some other large amount) hp, but various amounts of negative resists. The Negative resists could get lower with each progressive level so the ability to repair remains the same (but difficult), but the ability to do damage goes down. To clarify, negative resists would mean the amount of damage done is amplified, rather than reduced. As for the effect of the levels, it might be something like this:
Possible levels for a shootable docking service
1) Add an additional 5 seconds to docking
2) Add an additional 10 seconds to docking
3) Add an additional 15 seconds to docking
4) Add an additional 20 seconds to docking
5) Docking is not restricted (anyone can dock despite station settings) + 30 seconds to docking time
Have gradations like this for every possible function a starbase has, from cloning, market, refining, docking, repair, fitting, production and more. Make there be gradations, and make them be meainingful. The all or nothing station shooting should be removed. This same philosophy could probably be applied to poses and pos structures.
I bring this up in a sovreignty thread because I feel this is an important part of the whole sovreignty process. Making harassment be a viable way to drive people from space, and preventing the typical method of just turtling up and ignoring a threat. If you want to pull away from blob warfare you simply need more targets that are much softer than they are now. Anything else *requires* blobs.
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