Give citadels baseline fuel cost and a small invulnerability fuel bay that must be refilled every day or two. Nerf void bombs dramatically, buff missiles, damage bombs, and fighters. No fuel, invulnerability turns off.
Allow attackers to anchor Citadel Invulnerability Destabilizers (CID’s) anywhere in the system, which disallow refuelling of target Citadels in the system. CID’s can target multiple Citadels, require some fuel, and can be scanned down with combat probes. If they run out of fuel, they can be scooped.
Everything else stays more or less the same as before. You can still attack the Citadel directly during its window, but you also have the option to take time to weaken it beforehand and force a fight at a time of your choosing.
Defenders can take down the CID’s, difficulty if the attackers are securing their CID’s, or easily if they aren’t.
If the Citadel is weakened and defeated by this method, let the attackers capture the Citadel instead of only blowing it up. This turns a significant percentage of the Citadel’s assets over to the capturers, similar to wormhole drops.
The idea smells like troll. If it’s sincere, sorry but it’s a terrible idea all around.
What I’d rather see is the dps cap only be in place if there’s someone sitting in the chair. Would make burning through abandoned structures easy (drop 30 dreads on it and go home in a couple minutes), whilst giving defenders who want to keep their infrastructure plenty of choices on maintaining that dps cap.
That first timer might be a bit of a bitch given that the defenders need to react, but you’ve got 2 other timers at your disposal.
Just imagine being owner/manager of citadel and doing it for a month or longer? Will you enjoy it?
Can this CID be killed while fueled? Or it is invulnerable?
If it can be killed then attackers would need to protect it every moment for the whole “day or two” (because they might not know when managers of each targeted citadel will need to refuel their invulnerability bays and would attack given CID).
If it cannot be killed then it is worse than vulnerability timers of citadels.
Capturing of citadel i would support but using somehow different mechanics.
How, from a immersion / technology / handwavium point of view do you explain how a CID anchored waaaaaay over the other side of a system can stop a pilot/ship from delivering fuel and topping-up-the-tank on their Citadel.
Seriously, within the games tech lore and established (admittedly fairly weird) ‘laws of physics/nature’, please describe how this works.
If there really needs to be a fuel mechanic on citadels , maybe just have the dps cap powered by surplus energy from any single service running in the station. No need for fuel bays, no additional logistics for an actively used citadel. No dps limit on unused citadels.
Which is where things get tricky, if you force multiple TZ vulneranility windows you effectively shut out smaller groups from holding citadels. If you have a mechanic whereby citadels are vulnerable the whole time then they need to have auto defences available as POS used to.
If all sizes of corp are supposed to be able to hold citadels (as originally staed by CCP), then all sizes of corp must be able to effectively defend them one way or another
So like i said force them to have just a single service running. There are services cheaper than small faction towers were to upkeep and those were common even among solo players.
People will build and operate Citadels if and only if the risk/reward balance is in their favor. No rational player will make that investment unless the expected return on that investment is positive.
Structure owners are perfectly happy with the current state of affairs. The harder they are to kill, the more profitable the investment is likely to be.
I agree with those who call for a baseline cost to “keep the lights on”. My own idea is optional charters to maintain connection to the Upwell network. No charters and your structure is basically the same as a Blood Raider shipyard - 1 timer and no hull bonuses.
LP grinding for those who enjoy it - others can simply purchase from the market. We’ve been using charters with POS in empire space for over a decade - nothing “new” required.
Charters have the advantage of being optional - structure, service modules and rigs will work fine if you choose not to use them. Only impact for connection to Upwell network in my scenario would be hull bonuses, vulnerability and 2nd reinforcement timers. Charters are small .1 M3, cheap, and anyone who has run a POS in empire space probably has a few thousand of them lying around. CCP will either need to reimburse or repurpose them when POS are retired.
it’s far more simple to just tie some part of the vulnerabilty mechanics to having at least one service onlined. No additional stuff required to run a citadel, no impact on anyone in any space who are actively using their citadel.
So throw some ewar modules on it. ECM, webs, etc, on citadels all have a very high strength and a very significant range.
Again, a single pilot is not an onerous thing. If one pilot is making or breaking your fight over your infrastructure, get more friends - Eve is massively multiplayer.
So if you forget or cannot fuel a structure because you’re being hell-camped, then what?
“Fueling the structure” is not “active gameplay”. “Sitting in the seat and using the thing” is as active a gameplay as active gameplay gets.
There are most definitely merits to your argument, I’d honestly love to see the vulnerability window be maintained only by fueled services. But the DPS cap should be the result of an active defense.