I feel like I’m the only one who remembers what it was like living out of a POS pre-citadels as a small industrial nerd in a highsec corp of just a handful of people. For comparison sake a large POS tower could have anchored on it guns(of multiple sizes), EWAR, Shield hardeners, Scramblers, Neuts. And manufacturing arrays, research arrays, ore processing and ship arrays. All in all it cost several billion isk to setup, more than an Astrahaus - less than a Fortizar. You made choices about what you onlined as a group vs what you were doing at the time or who you were fighting.
The POS could be manned and you could choose what thing you(or multiple of you if you had the skills trained between friends) were gunning. If you weren’t there, the damn thing attempted to gun itself based on standings/wars, albeit using RNG as to what modules were firing but one dude in a stealth bomber or coercer was going to get nuked eventually. I probably have 30 corp killmails from the fly zapper we had setup in a wormhole of just t1 exploration frigates that got nosey and warped to the POS, and it did it unmanned.
Get wardec’d by some random highsec trade route campers looking for easy kills and they try to shoot your POS? Well you’ve gotta be there but with 1 or 2 people manning the POS guns VS their 3 or 4 sniping battleships and 2 logi they typically don’t hang around when even a medium sized POS guns(large ammo), and ewar or neuts get trained on them. A POS had the ability to deter the lazy kill farming trolls. No amount of being active in the gunner seat of a Raitaru or Athanor will have the same effect, regardless of its fit.
While I appreciate that a group of FCs have opinions about how boring and unrewarding fighting against citadels is I still don’t agree that they should be made weaker, no need to link it again. From the perspective of a small group of nerds who has played this game for a decade and a half - citadels have been an underwhelming replacement for what I feel like we’ve lost. Citadels are underpowered to deal with threats of similar size compared to what our options are in the citadel world we live.
Their inability to defend themselves from even a small group of active players or 3 AFK nerds at zero in leshaks and 2 guardians is tragic. Getting a Medium sized citadel that can do 1/10th of what you could do previously with a single POS for nearly the same Isk outlay is the opposite of thoughtful, immersive or engaging gameplay. There is nothing aspirational feeling left after you slowly watch your Raitaru/Athanor get killed by 4 dudes in RR cruisers after experiencing Eve pre-citadels.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things I think should be changed about Citadels, but making them weaker is not going to help anybody except the lazy folk who want to be able to kill them with even less risk/stuff on grid. Nullsec blocks don’t need this, they already have an overwhelming number of people to sit and press F1 while being completely unconcerned about the structures ability to defend itself, who only wake up when an opposing fleet is on grid. Nobody is concerned about the structure effecting the outcome of that fight(with the exception of the untethered capitals wanting the PDS to clear the bubbles so they can run away).
POS’s used more fuel, and required starbase charters(an isk and LP sink)
You could only have a limited number of them in a system(one per moon)
Asset Safety wasn’t a thing, everything you put in it was at risk
Singular reinforcement timer(meaning less time farting around if you actually wanted the thing to die)
Change that stuff - don’t make them weaker - Make them cost 3x-4x what they cost now, fix the proliferation problem(where, what size and how many can be anchored), the forever asset safety problem but make them bloody the nose of the trolls, people looking for an uncontested bash and the lazy just looking for an easy killmail and core drop. Because being cheap to make or run and easy AFK killmails for the bottom feeders/trolls doesn’t have to be part of the design/path.
Sorry this is already too long - Brisc and the FCs who signed that citadel reddit post - while I appreciate you and the work you do in nullsec I disagree with these solutions to the proposed problems.
Make people buy asset safety insurance, 10% the value of their docked assets per month to get a 50/50 shot at asset safety, the other 50% of their stuff drops when it explodes. They go AFK, let it be an auto-paid bill like the other stuff you can setup to autopay itself. It goes into Asset Safety? The station that receives it charges them for holding it every month, another thing that you can set to autopay… You go AFK for long enough you run out of money? The NPC station auctions your stuff off a % at a time, per month till it’s gone.
Sorry again for the length, been playing since the late 2000’s and have a lot of feelings/thoughts.