Small strutures

The smaller structures that you speak of, could replace the Mobile Depot or at least enhance the Mobile Depots use.

The small structure could dock up to four ships, provide repair, if fuel is present, crush rocks, up to 100k m/3 mineral volume and provide advanced sensor / scan bonuses to ships in a fleet of no more than four.
Total time to drop the small structure, about two hours worth of DPS from four fully T2 fit , T1 battlecruisers.
Anchoring/Unanchoring : 10 minutes. Would have to be probed down.

i like the idea of the structure being small enough that it doesn’t need a quantum core, if that were the case making these structures easily deployable / removable and destructable
in this instance we’re discussing a structure which doesn’t have the ability to tether or repair in space.

my question would be
would you make any changes to the repair service or attempt to improve it?

so I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot recently, as i’ve mentioned before i think the opportunity for something like this could be quite benefical to game play.

considering this idea has helped inspire my Boarding Parties post
link here: Boarding Parties

I’d like to circle back to this and mix in some of my previous ideas:

such as refining over time.
as well as intergrated ship modules
link here: Intergrated Ship Modifications - #9

I’ve basically cooked up a list of small structures which could be anchored with benefits to players.

Observation Post: this structure is literally designed to be your eyes and ears, it will observe solar systems for specific players, should you be looking for a specific player and they fly into a system where this exisits it will ping some kind of notification. my thinking behind this was for bounty hunters to find individual capsuleers with bounties on them, its not intended to replace human interaction in the game for intel channels.

Refinery: this small structure (maybe using a repurposed silo model from the game with a sexy new skin) is simply a refinery. perhaps you put some mining crystals into the industry BPO/BPC’s for flavour allowing structures to be made to refine very specific types of ores.

as per my previous post on which had this idea, the idea of refining over time will give you ultimately a slightly higher yield. me thinking is that these structures can be designed for specific ores as previously mentioned. the way i see this in my head is that you fill up the structure with ore, it will then compress it, then begin refining the compressed block, this way you can start work on filling up the ore hold again.

R&D Lab: this one links into my Intergrated ship modules idea. the idea is that you take your ship or perhaps a BPC of intended ship and then add in something like data cores or perhaps just the t3 subsystem that’s intended (same racial subsystems for the same ships, so caldari → caldari you won’t find a minmitar ship with caldari sub systems for example) my thinking is by keeping the sub systems linked to the racial ship groupings you could then recieve a BPC which allows you to create a ship which will also accept this sub system.

the subsystems are already meant to be modifications, so i figured best just utilise this system, perhaps smaller ships can only fit defensive and offensive subsystems, this would save a lot of time and work on the code (I honestly don’t know much about how subsystems work atm)

my thinking behind this structure specifically would mean capsuleers (boarding parties or not) will actually then be interested in stealing the research work and technology of opposing alliances / corporations, effectively creating a form of arms race.

alternatively, you could only permit sub systems which support that ships intended role / function to be fitted.

Biodevelopment lab:
this was actually more targeted for when the intergration of FPS Mercs & EVE Online becomes a reality again. working under the assumption boarding parties were factored into the game, prior to having warclone mercenaries, the idea of a Biodevelopment lab would be to actually genetically improve and increase the survivability of warclones in combat with say faster healing, the idea would be to develop skill tree’s, genetic augementations and such things, meaning more successful warclones, buy and upgrade their clones for better combat, similar to how capsuleers had to upgrade your clones when you died, but in this case it would be “once bought, this becomes your new standard”

Barracks: so the idea of having your own barracks again is linked to my boarding parties idea. the idea behind it is that if you get passengers and small arms and feed them into the barracks, they will recieve training and become marines.

in the back of my mind i was hoping that marines would be able to have different levels (perhaps meta levels?) which represent how well trained they are, the better trained the higher the chance of success of a raid. or perhaps they will level up as they raid, similar to the old command and conquer games, when one of your units does really well it gets promoted.

I personally thinkg they should have a t2 varient, i personally just like the idea of having them for variety and improved capabilities, i saw a video from the scope a while ago which had “cloaked structures” across the bottom and thought it would be cool if there were T2 varient of small structures they would be cloaked and only visible for a few hours, similar to how a main structure has a vulnerability window.

all these small structures (as well as t2 if they went that far) would also then work as viable strike targets for marines in relation to the boarding parties idea.

even if that feature wasn’t implemented small structures which performed these functions would still be useful to capsuleers who wanted to explore different aspects of the game.
personally i still think the idea of small structures has merit and genuinely could be an interesting take on things in the game.

Small structures are the deployables. Your mtus, mobile depots, and the like.

However we have been promised something to replace the pos functionality of a quick and temporary staging point since the announcement of citadel.

Yet here we are years later with nothing.

that is true, these would simply be expansions on that.
the main issue has been the previous replacement of POS’s have had the majority of the exisiting utility encorporated into the current list of structures in the game. leaving very little utility to be implemented into small structures.

small structures don’t have to be insane to build, what they need is to have a singular specific use which is of benefit to capsuleers.

I’d like to think what I have suggested above would easily achieve this, take some of the models from old pos missile & gun batteries, silos, labs, give them a sexy new skin to simply look great
(effectively acting as an over lay over the model instead of re-designing the model itself)
do some tweeking about where you can anchor them. (saving and making them as a seperate item within the game)

and then just like an MTU / mobile depot make it so you can anchor them in appropriate places.
orbital defence batteries naturally can be anchored near POCO’s and such.

I like to think these ideas will benefit the players in game especially if ship boarding is taken seriously, instead of a 50% drop chance upon a structure destruction, you could simply raid and providing your squads are successful you’ll have the ability not only to steal minerals from a refinery, goods from corp hangers, but also different technology and ship designs for modifications, skill trees, ship fits and even genetic codes for upgraded clones which are tougher to kill.

“small structures, big action” (props if you get that joke/reference)

With the introduction of the citadels, it was said that small structures should exist. These were to replace the POS. Since the citadels have been around for years now, this was asked to the dev’s last year (I think at EVE Down Under). The answer was that the introduction of the small structures is not (anymore) on the timeline.

that is a shame, well as i mentioned before the POS’s and their functions were ultimately consumed and rolled into citadels, so I can understand that coming up with functions for small structures to perform would be tough as the citadels can already do those things.

naturally it would be quite difficult and perhaps just doesn’t seem like something worth doing.

however if you could make it so the small structures would have some pretty good benefits and make them worth raiding rather than destroying it could work out nicely as well as expand on the exisiting style of content we find in bank robbing mechanic recently added

thats just my view on it though, part of me does genuinely hope that a dev from CCP will look at this and see that in the games long term these ideas could be actually quite applicable as the quick, profitable and repeatable game play aspect it would present to new player bases who have been akin to “raid groups” in other games.
ISK, technology, resources are all things which we actively fight over, normal citizens can be a resource too (a literal human resource)

that was my thinking, perhaps these are not applicable at this very moment in time, however i feel with the right approach, for example Biodevelopment labs were also used for things like corpses and triglavian DNA (there is a mission where you have to get someones DNA which comes to mind) it would be an interesting concept.

smalls structures yield more opportunitys and in more regions of space. also stand the chance to have good rewards for daring and adverntous groups or new players looking to make a name for themselves, in my mind it diverts a lot of attention away from main citadel structures.

TLDR: if not today, I genuinely hope someday.

–EDIT–
just want to express this isn’t a defensive post to other users but just an additional after thought regarding play styles and relevence to player interactions.

its my understanding a big part of player retention is finding people to play the game with and with the bank robbing mechanic it requires small teams to work together, as i mentioned earlier it could be possible to expand on that mechanic in some way with small structures, wouldn’t such a thing ultimately then mean people need to explore, collaborate, compete and create.
alas though just an after thought i wanted to throw out there.

again though if not today, then I genuinely hope someday. <3

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