All identical cookie cutter structures are becoming a bit tedious. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love structures and I’d love to see way more variety of them. There are several relatively easy ways of improving the scenery and making all structures more iconic looking. In a perfect world these minor additions would have in-game benefits (or even minor drawbacks?) and cost a token amount of money. The standard upgrades to the design of structures, citadels, etc would be to skin them, and to add player choice holograms, but additionally freefloating structures could be surrounded by …
- floating docking/repair facilities where you can see key ships in a repair mode. Say, you see a hauler that’s part open, in a gridwork assembly factory structure.
- Extending from the main structure is a gridwork of containers and cargo facilities, with animated cranes and irregular container docking arrays extending kilometers into space radially from the citadel.
- telemetry/science structures with rotating dishes, cuppolas, observation equipment.
- Industrial extension struts radiating from the main citadel set with smoke belching towers, freefloating piles of ore in container cages, industrial cranes, yellow-black warning stripes, refinery bays.
- Hong Kong style port composed of endless inhabited vessels, wrecks, platforms and habitats
- A giant external port area set with loads and loads of smaller ships, say dozens of Iterons, many with iconic skin sets, ships we dont even know.
- A wrecking area where you see a shipbreaking yard with half dismantled ships.
- Massive brutalist tenement structures for people habitation.
- Rotating Cylinders a la Gerald K O Neil with populations living inside
- the obligatory military style defensive arrays with sexy looking missile batteries, cannons, bla pew stuff for the testosterone challenged among us.
- Statues, political statements, ornaments, brutalist decorations, giant holograms warning to stay away or else, insults to the goons, etc.
… Each of these structures could have their own unique rolling sound pack indictive of the graphics.
… Each of these structures (or skins) could serve to give citadels a more lived in “ethnic” look - a keepstar with rust skin and minmatar extending peripheral structures would look uniquely different from an Amarr one.
These structures would be identifical (albeit hopefully a bit better designed) structures a la free floating mission structures.
The best scenario would be that these structures can be suspended modular, connecting to the existing citadels with umbilicals. The smallest Citadels would have only 4 such adjacent structures, a keepstair maybe as many as 12. In a perfect world players would thereby be able to make their real estate property look unique, customized and more interesting.
An option would be that certain blueprints would allow for the construction of very scarce, very unique ‘adjacents’ structures. A very rare sight would be a Keepstar modified with Triglavian styling, with several ‘adjacents’ in ominous red glow. Very rare "adjacents’ would grant therefor considerable benefits to the citadels in question.