With the addition of athanors and tatarus, I believe that ccp should add new types of stations with similar concepts/ideas. Perhaps a gas mining station anchored around a gas giant, or an ice harvester that is anchored around an ice planet. The possibilities are endless with this ‘extraction’ idea beyond just mining. Perhaps a station that can be anchored around a star, and pulls up ‘plasma’ a combination of rare belt ores and rare gases. Or a station anchored near a shattered planet could pull up special ‘planet ores’, these ‘planet ores’ would be more valuable than more ores, but would need deep core mining lasers like mercoxit. Lately mining has been only about ores, and there are plenty of possibilities when it comes to celestial bodies.
I understand that these resources have their own gameplay for them, but things like ice are exactly like mining ore, so I don’t think it would be that bad to have an athanor type structure for ice.
We have belt/anomaly mining, moon mining, PI and gas huffing. Each has it’s own gameplay and risk/reward balance. You do not want the same gameplay for everything.
If CCP changes resource harvesting, and I doubt that is high on their priority list, they should be looking to increase player involvement. It should not be passive income and it should be more difficult to bot. Abyssal space is a good example - the resources and blueprints needed to build Triglavian tech are harvested in the abyss but it’s active gameplay.
CCP would have to either rewrite some code to allow more than one orbital facility around a planet, or else get rid of POCOs. Any of what you’re suggesting could probably be done with a slight change to PI anyway; new stations would be overkill.
and than empire belts can be phased out for “over exhaustion” and carebears that put up stations to mine their own belts would have to fight to keep others out or hire people to do the work.
if you’ve seen the world news following Onslaught. it seems Upwell is up to something regarding new tech for Refineries. this isnt confirmed but it points towards doing extractions over “Ice Giant” type planets. so yeah, as economy breaking as it sounds, we may be seeing Athanors and Tataras being used to also produce iceberg fields with the same tech used to extract moon chunks.
I like the idea. I think resource planets like that should be mined like moons, but you can still do pi, and temperate and barrens can have cities on them you can manage and stuff.
Would they really be overkill though? It’s not like they’d be OP or that they would clutter up highsec, people in highsec just steal other’s moon chunks/ores
There are 2600 wormholes - most are empty, most of the time. There is risk but wormholers seem to enjoy living on the edge and they also have unique resources used in hybrid reactions for T3 components plus the relics used for T3 invention. If wormholes were really dangerous, you wouldn’t be able to buy a tactical destroyer for the same price as an assault frigate - or a strategic cruiser for less than a heavy assault cruiser.
That said, there is always room for improvement. Personally, I hope CCP spends the next year or two renovating existing features rather than introducing new ones . There is a lot of legacy debt and paying it off could totally transform the game without adding anything new!
Wh have more going for them than basic industry, the fact that null-sec in just definitively more profitable is kind of an issue, but that’s for a different thread. Wh’s kinda need something going for them beyond just ‘you may be alone maybe not’ is kind of odd. Wh’s are just boring beyond sleepers, giving them their own variation of industry/methods of industry would make WH’s more appealing for players and at the same time, it would attract more danger because now people would be hunting for industrialists. It’s a two sided coin, wherever the industrialists go, so do the Gankers/PvPers.
For wormholes, I think that the planned player FOB will give industrialists a big incentive to day trip or stay a few days and come back to K-space, without putting at risk too much ISK at once.
I’m for more structure for the industry, but I don’t see the point of big ones, some small mobile compressor or tools for a more nomadic playstyle would be better for me.