I was thinking about how realistic it is to deploy a citadel will full intention of letting it die. The only limiting factor is ISK, but in reality (Ya I know…) you would have to bring people on board that structure to make it work. Non-capsuleer personnel to keep the lights on as it were. With every structure getting blown up literally millions of civilian lives are erased and somehow instantly replaced! Manpower should be a limited, but renewable resource, and we can use this to shape the economy and introduce strategy in structure deployments.
Structure personnel could be bought at NPC stations for a fee which would introduce an ISK sink into the game. These people would be limited in quantity and can be sold out. The mechanics of this can involve many possibilities:
High sec only civilians - Only settle in high security space structures are cheaper to buy.
Low sec only civilians - Only settle in low sec structures. Higher cost.
Null/Wormhole civilians - 0.0/WH only structures and cost the most.
Scarcity can be adjusted based on how much proliferation of structures CCP feels is appropriate for the health of the game.
Hording civs - They would have to have some form of expiry date on them. They have lives too and will desert the cause if not deployed in a certain amount of time.
Availability/scarcity - Could be region wide to save flying from station to station. Could be a new mechanic where you ‘place an order’ for recruits to man your stations and X hours later they all are gathered in Y station for pickup and cost whatever they cost which would be based on a capped supply. Could introduce a highest bidder system also.
Number of citizens could affect structure bonuses? Less than ideal personnel might reduce defensive stats, but lower fuel consumption or more people could boost manufacturing efficiency and refining yield as an example.
Farming population using PI structures? That could be a thing.
This could give CCP some more levers to pull when they want to tighten up the economy, limit structure deployments, and give incentive to use other parts of the game to gain their advantage. Looking at the ISK sinks and faucets in the game made me think we need more sinks! This is not sustainable.
Camp market refresh, buy instantly. No one else gets any.
Better would he to put an escalating cost on all structures in a system or even a constellation past a certain level, to reflect increased difficulty of manpower in the region. This incentivises people to go to war to remove other corps structures, be they low power or live corps without any gamble or hard cap on the system.
Would probably have to introduce a time delayed buying feature with quotas. Kind of like a permit system. You need to have the structure in stock (corp asset hangar) before you are issued your purchase permit. After purchase you have X amount of time to deploy it. If you don’t the population gets reseeded into the pool for someone else to buy and you are out the money, effectively sinking the ISK out of the economy.
Population pool could be regulated by number of structures in the system/region/game and would be kind of a self correcting system?
Escalating cost, yes. You can’t really change the price of the minerals to build it, or the fuel to run it, but you could use a system similar to this to make it too expensive OR at a certain point, just not allowed. If you don’t have a way to bring it to a halt every system will be like every system in Delve eventually.
If you have to introduce as many features as you are suggesting to make buying ‘workers’ functional, then you are proposing a bad idea. It won’t be simple, it won’t be understandable and it will be abusable.
They just need to go back to the old way of POS locations, or a variation of that.
For instance;
A medium or large structure takes a moon, and x-large structure takes a planet.
If that is the standard to which any feature gets development time then we would never have stuff like PI or industry above T1 ship building. Requiring additional ‘materials’ to anchor a structure is not overly complex for a game like Eve. The only reason for introducing new features is to make it NOT abusable. The current market mechanics do not allow for any form of restriction and the whole point of the system is for CCP to be able to artificially restrict structure spam for the health of the game. Allowing it to continue IMO is not healthy for the game especially when war decs will be much more limited in the future.
There is merit there, but we already have unrestricted structures everywhere. What do you do with those? What % of structures now deployed do not follow the old rules? Too many I wager.
Many systems would already be capped out after the change and any competing structures would not be deployable to establish a beach head. The new structures coming out could ignore this I suppose, but they are quite restricted compared to a citadel.
I don’t understand why people are opposed to lots of Citadels. They consume large quantities of minerals, PI, salvage and ice products - providing a substantial boost to the game economy. You don’t need to look at them if you don’t want to - give them their own overview tab or just create bookmarks for the ones you use.
I would like to see charters required in Empire space - they’re already part of POS gameplay so it shouldn’t be too hard to add them to Upwell structures. That would allow the NPC sovereign to declare any non-chartered structure in their space “persona non grata” and it isn’t hard to think of gameplay options CCP could develop to encourage their destruction: exemption from CONCORD protection, bounties, etc…
The problem isn’t too many structures being built but not enough being destroyed.
Moons being limited didn’t result in POS getting eagerly fought over for positions regularly.
It led to filling all your slots and making attackers grind them before they could even think of dropping their own giving you warning when an attack was coming. With hull timers at a known day & time this means that you know the window the attacker has to drop beach head structures on any given week, because if they don’t you fill it up again with another cheap structure.
It’s not a good idea.
Before low power mode we saw vast swaths of structures used to oppress the other side (like in faction warfare). During huge block level wars when everyone is focused on killing one structure there is little to stop a handful of players to anchor 2 or 3 replacements for what is about to die. The only limit is money and these guys have all of it. Structure spam is generally considered to be a bad thing, and a system along these lines could help curb that if the need is there.
I suspect CCP figured there would only be so many citadels deployed at any given time because the amount of ice required to fuel them would end up with a runaway cost. This does not limit big organizations as they have more money than they know what to do with. Do they need some form of limitation? If you say no then nothing changes. If you think they should be required to sacrifice a little of column B to shore up column A then you need some form of system to make a resource finite. If CCP feels that 75 citadels in a region is enough then no more permits issued and you’ll just have to kill off the others in the area or take down one of your own to advance your interests in the region.
In highsec, structure spam is little more than overview clutter. I do believe low power citadels should be easier to get rid of - in all regions of space - it makes sense to me that all services should shut down if a structure runs out of fuel - shields, armor, weapons, tethering should not function in low power mode. Hull hitpoints only!
The tactical use of structures in warfare is something CCP needs to address if there is no reasonable counterplay. In sovereign nullsec there are anchoring penalties if you deploy a structure in a system you don’t own. Something like that might be practical for FW.
Other than the mess created by structures on my overview when I enter systems like Perimeter, I really don’t get the concern about structure proliferation. There were far more towers back in the day, it’s just that in the days of the POS you had to scan them down to see them and be on grid with them.
The easy fix is this, give us the choice whether our structures are visible on the overview. Put a switch in the structure that broadcasts the location if we so choose. And make the default position for the beacon be in the off position.
There’s nothing stopping the curious or the hunters from scanning down non-transmitting facilities, but our overviews would be far less cluttered than they are right now.
Here’s a new vision. The Trigs are pissed about capsuleers entering their space. They send a fleet armed with a brand new Entropic Doomsday Device and one shot a citadel. Now that’s power.
The problem in hisec is there is no point to remove them. What could happen here is that low power structures decay automatically - when the structure is left unfueled, it starts losing 1% hull HP/day until it gets destroyed, so at least those structures would be gone from space.
Nothing happening with active structures though.
EDIT: deleted that “too long to remove” part as it was wrong. It takes about 15 minutes of bashing at max DPS, which isn’t too excessive (though it could be smaller).
I’m not sure this is true anymore, at least for a medium structure. Sure you need a fleet that can reach the 5000DPS damage cap, but that is only a handful of people in Battleships or ABCs. And then with next week’s changes, it is only 12 minutes to reinforce an Astrahus, and 24 minutes to explode the hull over one week. The other structures are even faster.
If there is any problem, there is just so little reason to as you say. You still need a wardec, which has a cost that will just be covered by the drop leaving very little profit to share among the fleet unless the structure was fit unusually well and the loot fairy kind, and there is no chance of a jackpot drop like there was with POSes. And there is also the issue of TZ tanking meaning many are set in inconvenient time zones.
Still, I think this latest nerf of low-powered structures is a good step, and might be enough to inspire some groups to take up janitorial duties in highsec.
