If siphons are restricted to the amount of fuel they suck [say 1 every 15 minutes] and the amount around a citadel that can suck, say 5 and also the fact they can be killed for a tasty killmail by ANYONE, there is certainly reasonable counter-play to it. And as a matter of fact eve is not supposed to be easy, there are ways around and if some random corp cannot be bothered to check their fuel, then they deserve to lose their citadel if that is what the result is.
You don’t leave a citadel running without checking it occasionally and if you don’t then it is your loss. You don’t even need to constantly check it, just every so often.
That is the point of siphoning them, in the hope that the defender is not prepared and that their cloning goes offline, nothing stopping anyone from physically traveling to it. Eve is hard, it is NOT meant to be easy.
Do not conflate difficulty with time commitment. Never forget that the average Eve player is in their 30s, with their own lives in full swing.
I’m not saying that the tactic is bad, I’m not saying that the tactic shouldn’t be a good way to mess with groups.
But it should not be something where they wake up in the morning and wonder why their butts are sore. It should be something where they’re kicking and screaming the whole way through. Then not only is it “hard” for the people getting their fuel siphoned, but it’s also hard for the people trying to siphon the fuel.
You know what… this actually gives me an interesting idea.
An anchored structure (they’re already talking about adding small modules) intended for siege. The futuristic version of a battering ram.
It has an anchor period on par with other citadels, it has reinforcement and vulnerability mechanics the same as other citadels (a permanently low-power mode), and it is capable of siphoning a structure down after 2 days anchored. Doesn’t siphon while reinforced. Could be anchored outside of the range of citadel guns.
Has all the advantages of a deployable siphon, whilst giving the “defenders” a chance to force their attackers to defend the siege infrastructure.
Why would you bother responding with a fleet when you can just shoot it from your citadel? Hop into the chair, pewpew, lol done.
I agree with what you’re saying (it should be affectable) but in order to combat player laziness efficiency it would be best to require pilots to undock. Much as the players affecting the targeted citadel must undock to anchor their siphon against an already-established structure.
A large group has infrastructure all over the place. If I anchor 50 of them, you must respond to 50 of them or end up going low-power on ones you don’t respond to.
If I only have 5 citadels because I’m in a small group, I will only ever have to respond to 5 of them.
Doesn’t sound that bad to me, for the simple reason that it’s a nice door knocker. “hi, you can come fight us here or we’ll take away one of your reinforcement timers and all of your fueled services”.
I’d say that those particular groups are undeserving of infrastructure. While I fully believe that autistic levels of time commitment is a bad thing, some time commitment should be needed. If an entire corp isn’t logging in for a week at a time, that’s a good time to belong to an NPC corp.
Fair to say. Like I initially said, just a rough idea for something to give the defenders a reason to sally forth and proactively defend their infrastructure, instead of just blueballing their attackers.
On the contrary, it’s a way to increase the dynamics.
Yes the defenders will show up for their hull timer, if they intend to keep the structure. And yes, the attackers will show up to the timers if they intend to kill the structure.
But now the attackers have an opportunity to further accelerate things by placing isk on the table. And the defenders can choose to take that from them.
Cost isnt a prohibitive factor to something that people want to spam. Citadels prove this already. If you want to take sov or just make a defenders life hell, these things could cost 1b each, and people would still spam them as long as it helped achieve their goals.
Very much this. As many are fond of saying, cost is not a factor (in balance). I’d say that particular statement tends to favor large groups (a concern you mentioned) but there are a LOT of rich fucks in small/personal corps.
A billion isk would be trivial for any dedicated group.
There was exactly the same discussion about siphons when they were introduced years ago. The end of moon mining for all alliances without 24 / 7 player attendance… And then nobody used them.
Regarding the “you can just anchor 50 of them” argument: The old ones allready had a stacking penalty. Using more than 2-3 of them was pretty much a waste. So it should be pretty easy to balance this thing on a reasonable level.
