Stations vs Starbases ; Combine the two

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I miss Starbases because they could be defended while you were not around. You didn’t need some vulnerability window, you would have a chance once it was attacked that would give it 24 hours of invulnerability. You could equip any type of weapon, be it missiles, ballistic, lasers, ewar.

Player Stations, that being Refineries, Engineering Complexes, Citadels, can only use one weapon. Missiles. Slow, easy to outrun, low DPS. Try fitting a Refinery to be defend-able, the lowest quality one. Can’t be done. It can be killed by a single battleship and costs more than the largest starbase including all of that starbase’s fittings.

A starbase on the other hand, you had to be prepared to take it on. You needed a proper fleet. Not just a “Oh I’m bored, I think I’ll war dec that guy and blow up his station today”… You could also warp in to repair your starbase, to try and defend it. Instead, your station can be blown up by a dedicated team of people focused on your station and ignoring you because you can’t kill their ships fast enough. I remember a time when I went to repair a starbase with some friends in null while a PVP defense team held up the enemy in the next system over. It was highly risky for me, but it also involved fair PVP where the players were defending the starbase one system over while their logistics teams worked.

Now lets imagine for a sec, we combine these two together. Stations that can fit starbase weapons, and can be repaired by players. How would that work? How would it be balanced out?

So how do we manage guns?
Well, starbase guns, take CPU and powergrid, and must be loaded with ammunition manually by flying to each one. So, that would be the same with station guns. You take the starbase module and mount it somewhere within a specific range of the station. Perhaps 10KM? Or maybe even 50KM? Or a different KM per station quality level? Then you fly to your guns to load their ammo, or add a module to the game that takes up more powergrid and station, slightly more fuel too, that loads your guns for you from the ammo hold.

Now these guns can be offlined before the station, so if you attack, you can ignore the guns and tank them, or you can shoot the guns and take them down first. They are outside of the station force field after all.

I’ve never used ewar weapons on a starbase, so I would assume that if these had charges great but if they did not, we should include ewar charges of some kind that they use up, sort of like a capacitor battery that it uses when it fires.

You can take control of these guns the same way you did in a Starbase, with the access roles. Dock with the station, and choose take control, or control guns. Control guns gives you control of up to 5 like starbases (though I don’t recall how this worked, I never needed to do it). You can’t control the station at the same time so you might need more people docked to control everything.

You could also make each gun take some more fuel to run, using fuel faster to manage more online guns. Guns don’t self repair either, can be only be brought back online after they are repaired. Can be destroyed after their 24 hour invulnerability period which only happens after shield and armor are lost. Hull carries a resistance that makes it take more firepower or more time to destroy preventing it from being quickly destroyed. Once destroyed it drops its cargo into a jetcan that the war targets can take. Free ammo! Perhaps also a turret wreck that can be salvaged.

How would repairing work?
Well, we have a damage cap. Why not a repair cap too? Make repair modules work only 10% as efficient on a station as they do ships. After all, the thing you’re feeding is massive. It should take a lot more to repair the station.

Now, you can’t repair during invulnerability mode. You have to wait for the station to come out of lock-down from when it was hit. Then you can begin your hull, armor, shield repairs. Station can not enter invulnerability mode again till the shield is returned back to max, or the armor is brought down to zero. If you are on the armor invulnerability mode, station can not enter invulnerability mode again till the armor has been fully repaired.

Repairing your station, or another person’s station in a war makes you become a free target for 12 hours. The attackers can then attack anyone who tries to repair a station that they are trying to take out. Using clever tactics, you can find a way to repair your station, or if the enemy uses clever tactics, they can destroy your station and your defense and logistics fleets.

Modules, Upgrades and other thoughts
Starbases had modules for resistances, we could increase the shield resistance to make it harder to destroy. Why not have those modules for stations too? For Hull, Armor, and Shield. You of course have to choose what you want to reinforce because obviously you can’t do all of them. One of the three layers of defense will be reinforced making it harder to destroy. Personally I’d choose shield but, Armor would probably be a better choice as it would allow you the chance to set up a defense fleet with a station that would be able to protect the station and make it harder for people to ignore your defense fleet and hit the station, aka suicide runs.

For the above, the damage cap is still in place, resistances won’t change that. You’ll have to get more ships to meet that damage cap though. If you have 50% resist and each ship is doing 1000 damage and the cap is 5000 DPS, you need 10 ships. Raise your resistances to 75% and you need 20 ships. Just an example to make sure people understand what I mean.

A starbase could compress ore without docking. We could add a button to any station that has such services available to you on it next to the cargo button that lets you compress the ore in your cargo/ore hold. Or just allow you to compress ore while outside the station and tethered to it. Essentially people don’t want to dock and face a session change each and every single time they do something.

I can come up with more input and ideas towards this, I just need constructive criticism, not “your idea sucks we are pvpers who only want easy to kill stations”. So if you’re going to come here with that, go away. I will report posts that are not constructive as I am getting sick of the trolls and hate.

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This sounds like an idea from someone who has never actually engaged in attacking structures.

They’re not supposed to be able defend themselves on their own. You’re misunderstanding a basic issue. Either you make a structure so powerful that it can make a fight absolutely zero fun for the attackers (i.e. the old structure guided void bomb), or so weak that whatever offensive capabilities it has is negligible with a small number of Logi.

The better option here is to make structures NOT broken and just treat it as a force multiplier while on grid when supported by an actual defensive force. You have mid slots for Webs, Paints, Scrams, Jams, etc. use them.

Also, allowing ships to repair a structure would be a nightmare in Highsec, making structures like the TTT near impossible to kill since you can just flood it with a bunch of neutral logi that can’t be shot at. Add in the additional resistances and you now require 10-15x the number of people to attack it.

You try to “balance” the logi by just saying “make it only 10% as effective”, but then also say you want to give it resistances, making each point of hp more valuable because of the resists. The kind of weird contradictory suggestion just tells me that this idea isn’t really well thought out.

On top of that, structures already come with weapons in their highslots. I’m not sure why we need additional weapons, especially given how cheap and easily spammed they can be, just making it even more difficult to attack a structure. This just only reinforces my initial thought that you haven’t really participated in many structure bashes.

Beyond those, the rest of the ideas just come across as, “I’m too lazy, so please make the game easier for me.”

This is just coward talk for “If you don’t agree with my idea, I’m going to take it as a personal attack, and ignore you.” Which you probably will.

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I’ve run starbases in lowsec, 0.1 system. They had guns but couldn’t fit too many cause of all the modules inside. I made them tough enough that it would take more than 3 players to attack it.

Your right though, I have never attacked a structure, because I don’t blow people’s stuff up for shits and giggles.

Sounds like those things PVPers say when they want to blow people stuff up when thy are offline.

You did read my topic, right? I mention that anyone who tries to repair the structure, becomes a war target for a large duration of time.

10 to 15 times 2 people? I’m fine with that.

I was trying to think of solutions to some of the problems. Resistances are nice to have, but take up module space. With having 7 million hitpoints, a resistance may not be as good as having more webs or jammers to aid in defense.

Right now stations can only be fit one way and one way only. There’s no point in offering people fittings, because there’s only one reasonable fitting. Stations may as well just come with this fit to begin with. At least for Refineries. There may be some slight alterations for higher tier and other station types but it comes down to roughly the same fit each and every time. No variety, no variation. People know exactly what fit they need to take out a station each and every time they hit one.

They come with a single to three missile slots that you need to equip. Missiles suck, they are slow, you can outrun them if not being webbed, painted, and jammed. They don’t have enough DPS to take out a single well tanked battleship. 1300 DPS was the highest I could get, my Abaddon for Lv4s can tank far more than that. If I were so inclined, I could tank someone’s station indefinitely sitting there in my Abaddon. A single ship. And the station can’t tank me. It has no resistances, no shield repair rate. I heals at 0HP/s.

How… do you spam a weapon…? The refinery comes with a single high slot for a missile. One missile. Two energy neuts. A Keepstar, 4 missile slots. The Faction Keepstar, 5 missile slots.

Missiles are the only highsec weapon for any station. No, I don’t count an energy neutralizer as a weapon because it does zero damage.

I’m asking CCP to give us stations that take more than 2-3 bored people to blow it up. I want stations to be able to withstand random trolls. A station should take an actual fleet to destroy. 20 to 30 people. Not two.

No, I’ve had multiple people come to my threads and ■■■■ post on them rather than be constructive. You, were constructive. You didn’t just come “lol your idea sucks you suck go **** yourself”. So you know, you aren’t attacking me.

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Friend had a Raitaru and when there was a fob in system a bunch of frigates took out the shields, when he was around to defend the ec he spent 15mins shooting a frigate and gave up because a Raitaru can’t even do that. On a pos it would defend itself without you being online, you got to choose the balance between services and defence. No one complained that a pos was too hard to kill. If cits didn’t have asset safety, I would never use one as they are not defendable unless you have a fleet of ships at your beck and call. An ec is about manufacturing, not about having to be able to PVP!

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the OP is completely missing the point. his ignorance is obvious, but can be corrected by a visit to singularity where the mechanics are still there for him to test.
problem is he isn’t really exposed to the type of warfare that existed before upwells were a thing, and i’m afraid he’s betraying a total lack of understanding of the way it was…even though he claims to “miss it”

i evemailed you my understanding of things, which i can’t post here because silly censorship removed the quotes that were most germaine.

look, go onto sisi and experience the strontium cathrate (always screw up the spelling on that. lol) reinforcement management for timers.
then go onto sisi and test trying to do the same manipulation vs a hardcoded RF timer you can’t screw with.

basically, the TL;DR is: back then some dimwit corp could plunk down whatever and ignore it, hoping any attacker would be incompetent; nowadays the new upwell system favors the defender because even if the attacker is competent they still have to form up at the time the defender chooses at each stage of the RF timer system (and you can’t ‘incapacitate’ any of the modules while they’re sleeping)

and then there’s the damage cap, the tethering, and a whole buttload of things i can do without needing a level 5 skill that’s insane to train up (starbase management i think it’s called)…gods, i can control ALL the modules on an upwell? lol yes please.

plus the idiot ranges on the damned POS modules if the enemy warped in on the far side…etc, et al.

…
for example: there’s the war HQ, right? oh sure, find a time when the owning corp with the gunner rights are asleep and popgun the astrahus with polarized torpedo bombers. just need 5 of them. takes just an hour. easy. right?
problem is i have NO ability to dictate what hour that sucker will RF…the defenders will always get their damned upwell coming out of RF within a 2 hour window. argh.
So no matter how sneaky i am, all it takes is one gunner and that entire astrahus’ defenses become not only active (but if they have a clone bay service - INSTANTLY active) but ALL the modules can be controlled by a single player. scary.

you add that with a competent FC knowing there’s a convenient timer for him to ping on discord…well, you have a massive offensive problem on the timezone of the defender’s choice.

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yeah, sure. diamond rats RF’d his structure, then took it to hull timer. riiiight. i keep hearing that boogeyman story.
always gets me everytime when some forum poster dooms and glooms, yet the only problem i ever get with multiple FOBs in a system is that damned annoying notification spam.

as for “not having to be able to pvp!”…the entire game is pvp. if you mine veldspar in a 1.0 security system, without bothering anyone, you’re still engaging in economic warfare with the next person trying to sell to market the same stuff…and boy, veldspar is king right now. lol

as for “no one complained that a pos was too hard to kill” …??? lol??? don’t opine on things u know nothing about. speculation helps noone.

but you do bring up another cool point: asset safety. those maintenance arrays…talk about loot pinatas. (well, corp assets do drop, but no personal ones in upwells now. that’s kinda nice for inactive players)

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sure, back in the “day” high sec structures were awesome. you just plunked down a research pos with a buttload of ecm and noone in their right mind would bother. you’d just use some silly 1 man corp to plant them and go about your business with your main’s corp.

in low sec it was ALOT different.

i like the new wardec + upwell system. it forces people to be smart, not moronic dipsydoodles with no business “owning” structures. upwells are now a single killmail - realllllly attractive to the wardec spammers. they now have leshaks…REALLY attractive to single players with multibox accounts running those ships…

look, it comes down to risk-aversion. (a) risk averse griefers (b) risk averse carebears.

(a) love low power upwells with blinged out service rigs, and incompetent carebear defenders who probably didn’t even look twice at the default RF timer
(b) veldspar is king…why are you even bothering with upwells? veldspar actually rivals icicle byproducts these days. go afk with orcas on someone else’s fields?

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You did look at my account age. Right? I played in nullsec, I played in lowsec, I was in highsec wars. I’ve run Starbases, I’ve helped keep them alive while a PVP defense fleet kept the enemy at bay.

It favors a defender experienced in PVP. Also assumes that the defender is awake in time to choose the next time the vulnerability window happens. Also assumes the defender can get on every single day. Also assumes the defender isn’t a small 5 man corporation.

There’s hardly any modules anyway. For the Refinery, 1 missile launcher, 2 neuts, 3 ECMs at most. The biggest and baddest most expensive citadel, 4 launchers and a bunch of other module slots that I can’t remember or check cause server is down right now but that citadel is worth like 1 trillion I think and it could probably be taken down easily enough too.

Again. You assume 100% only that we all use our stations with massive corporations. Do small corps deserve to have the ability to manufacture things? To mine moons that belong to them?

True, I believe that mining is a form of PVP. However I encourage people to be able to declare proper wars, which can’t be done because of how broken the war dec system is right now. See my topic linked below this paragraph. I also think that mining faster than the other guys is another form of battle. To drain the pocket/belt faster than them and claim the greater bulk means you have won the battle.

So what I see is that, you don’t want anyone to own a structure unless they are a big corporation. You favor teaching people how much they suck at the game by blowing up their stuff and laughing at them for having something nice and wanting to work in a small team of friends only. This is the tone I see coming from you.

I don’t use alts, I have one, singular character. I will never have alts. I like to work with people, not work with myself. It seems the game is evolved to support multiboxers more than anything. Hell, why doesn’t CCP just make it official and let you control 10 ships on one character already, skip the multiple clients issue!

I always wanted the game to have fair mechanics to it, some way to enjoy the game without constant grief. It seems like thats impossible. I’ve taken multiple breaks from the game due to the drama and grief of the game. It seems like CCP have no intention of coming up with solutions to balance things and like the players themselves don’t want it either.

I’ve had multiple people say they like my ideas in chats in game, but no one comes to the forums to say so or support my ideas, because of he ridicule and grief they will get in return. Perhaps CCP should consider that fact, that people are afraid to speak out anymore.

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what? you just cherrypicked quotes with no rhyme nor reason, replying with “i’m so old i’ve been done there that then blah”, and i’m like…you’re just trolling now.
you evemailed me with the most ridiculous loot pinata of an athanor i’ve ever seen, and i ask myself, what kind of pampered carebear are you. seriously.
okay, fine. your original fit that you thought was, and i quote, “spot on” costing 3.7b isk is sure…spot on. go for it. we’re all super wonderful happy for you. have fun for 9 minutes till your cap runs out and you come back screaming on the forums how unfair eve is and ccp should change the game to the way YOU want us to play it. yay

besides, spamming amarr local with misleading questions purely designed for people to reply to your forum thread, without any actual want or apparently any NEED on your part for actual help, is the only reason i wandered over here. …you know, to ‘help’ you.
so yeah, if you misrepresent yourself for the sole purpose of garnering attention you’re bloody right you’ll get “ridicule and grief”

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To keep the post small, so I can reply directly to specific areas.

I’ve been away from the game for 2 years. Before I left, Starbases were the structures. I haven’t figured out how to fit stations yet, so of course I’m bad at fitting it. I couldn’t figure out how to fit one well, been practicing simulator fits trying to find something good.

This is exactly why people don’t like talking on the forums, its nothing but ridicule. Instead of being a professional who is courteous, you burst out laughing at people who fit something they never used before badly. Good on you.

I have not set up a station yet, and will not, till I find a good fitting that looks right. I used the advice you gave to refit the station’s fitting.

Just because I’ve played for 10 years doesn’t mean I understand every single aspect of the game perfectly. I’ve been around, I have understanding in a lot of area, and there are things I don’t understand. I took a break for 2 years, came back and found that these new stations are the only way to do things now because starbases are basically disabled for all of that stuff.

Also, Spamming local? Discussion is spam? And now you’re saying I’m attention seeking?

I like to work with players, to communicate with players. I’m not some guy who loads up 10 alts and mines with himself all day. The only person spamming local was that guy who kept sending that 15 billion enyo scam every 5 minutes.

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Structures are designed such that they are somewhat vulnerable alone. They are meant to be defended by fleets of ships rather than wtfpwning everything that comes in range.

You aren’t meant to fight off 20 people alone in your structure. You are meant to form a fleet.

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1 vs many… the many should win unless the 1 manages to seriously out-play them.

Skill being equal, if they come at you with 5 dudes, and you come at them with 4 dudes and a gunner, you’ll probably win. If they come at you with 20 dudes, and you come at them with 19 dudes and a gunner, you’ll probably win.

If they come at you with 5 dudes and you come at them with a gunner, expect to lose. 5v1 is a foregone conclusion in virtually any pvp engagement. If they come at you with 5 dudes and you don’t come at all, expect to lose. AFK gameplay is always a bad thing.

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Here’s a tissue.

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OP wants to play solo and do everything teams do.

Entitled?

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I didn’t say defend against 20 people solo. I said structures should be able to fend off one or two people alone, then have greater ability when you login to defend them solo. Who in their right mind would build a station, fill it with people, but not let anyone have the controls to the defense system while they sleep? These stations obviously have non-player NPCs wandering around inside them doing the work that you tell them to. And even if you assume that these massive super structures are empty and its all automated and controlled by no one but a capsulier. Who in their right mind would build a station without an automated defense to stop a single pirate from blowing it up? Did we become morons in the last 20,000 years or something according to EVE Lore?

Automated defenses should be able to handle up to 3 people based on how well you fit your station and what size station it is. Bigger the station, the better the automated response should be.

Logging in and controlling your station, should give you improved odds of defending it by picking your targets rather than letting it auto fire, like starbases did.

This brings the requirement up to 10 people to safely kill a decently fit small refinery when a single player is logged in to defend it. I say safely, as in a zero loss attack.

After you see that you have 10 people attacking your station, obviously you know its not some random troll party flying by blowing up stations for fun, and you have to call in your defense fleet. Obviously you’d probably call them before that. But stations would no longer fall to 1 or 2 people just waltzing past.

Another thing I’d like to see is a killmail that shows the status of a station, if it was in low power mode, aka out of fuel. That would give us a clearer picture of stations that were just being cleaned up.

Going to sleep for the night is a bad thing? I have a revolving sleep schedule, and can’t exactly adjust a station’s vulnerability window every other day.

Its just like suicide gankings, the game seems to favor pvp over anything, and offers no incentive to not suicide gank because you can always kill something worth 2-5 times more than your ship. I’ve heard you can kill an Orca no matter how well tanked it is with less than 200 mill, an Orca being 800 mill plus fittings bringing it closer to 900 mill possibly. I’d have to go check the prices again to confirm. Small refinery, well thats 1.1 billion, plus modules, 1.6 billion for decently fit. Killed by 200 million ISK or so all because the player went out with family one weekend, logs back in to see his stuff gone. Whoops. That poor small corp owner who had a family corp and went out with family for the weekend. Oh well, thats eve life for you huh? I know these scenarios for why someone couldn’t respond are, unlikely, but it is a possibility.

Starbases could be killed, maybe they were too powerful, but they could be killed if someone was dedicated enough. Trust me, we had a war dec way back that was and they hit the starbases and they were dedicated enough to take them down.

What I’m asking for is that stations not be so easy to kill, not something one or two players can do, unless of course the station is offline because its out of fuel. There are lots of ways we can balance having automated defenses. Increased fuel cost to run the modules. A station service that allows x amount of POS weapons to be deployed in space around it costing fuel, CPU, Powergrid. Making POS weapons just cost powergrid and CPU. These exterior weapons can always be taken down first when attacking. Just like on Starbases. I’m not saying give us the ability to place 20-30 ewar guns all around the station. Just some defense that can handle small time attackers.

You do realize there’s an edit button right? You can edit a post instead of double posting.

Also I don’t think you read. I don’t use alts. I like to play with other people, I just don’t like to play with people I don’t know or trust due to the fact that the game is full of deception and lies and bad people. This game brings the worst out in people. You can see it in the forums, in people’s replies. Even yours.

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We got a live one!! :rofl:

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I’m trying to follow your argument, and have taken the quote out of context; but, it reads (to me) like you think these small refineries can be killed literally in a weekend/over a weekend.

Is that your assertion? Am I correct in understanding what you are trying to convey? Or are you exaggerating?

Because, so far as I know this can only happen in a wormhole. Everywhere else any citadel must go through two timers (if the structure is in low power) bare minimum, and three timers, if fully powered.

I was under the impression the timers were there to provide the defenders/owners the opportunity to either assemble or make arrangements for the defense of the citadel. In highsec, if the aggressor(s) time their war dec poorly, this would allow the defender over a week to coordinate and mount a defense for the final timer.

Given this, that an assault party must show up at least twice, and potentially three times, I…this is my opinion only…don’t find it unreasonable to allow one or two players (who may spend hours, in total, in the assault) to kill an undefended citadel.

As to worm holes, where this scenario could possibly happen, according to my understanding, worm hole space is a very high risk/high reward setting.

If I have misunderstood your argument, my apologies; but, this is my response, to my understanding, of what you have written.

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You can do this. Just not npc’s.

This isn’t npc’s online. Players defend structures and you can set timers to when your free to play. If you can’t do that you don’t deserve the structure.

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And I said AFK gameplay is bad. If you want to defend your structure, defend it. It is already a 100% immutable ewar platform that you can use to support your defense with, and defenders are able to tether up as soon as they haven’t got timers.

As for your mindless dithering about being logged off, here’s an idea. Don’t schedule your vulnerability window for when you’re asleep?

They’re not easy to kill if you show up to defend them. If you’re anchoring your structures when you’re planning on being asleep, then you deserve to have them killed while you’re asleep.

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I believe that war timers for highsec have a 24 hour pre-war, then each invulnerability mode lasts 24 hours, I think. So war. 1 day. Stage 1, 1 day. Stage 2, 3. 1 day each. 4 days total to defeat a citadel or refinery or other station.

In lowsec, nullsec, wormhole, I believe it simply takes one day off because you don’t need war. A weekend basically starts on Friday, and you get back Monday. With luck, you get back when your station is on its final timer. Without luck, you were on vacation and every station you owned is gone.

Admittedly I’m operating on stories told to me when I returned to people who have had stations and such and I’m considering the mechanics and how they work. 2 invulnerability windows, 24 hours each, a war dec, 24 hours, that gives me 4 days to respond. If I don’t, a guy could blow up my station without any effort at all, not needing a fleet or anything.

That assumes you know how to PVP or have ships capable of defending it. That also assumes the fight will be fair, one versus one. Two versus two. Fights are never fair in EVE. Its Five Versus One. Ten versus two. So on so forth. You can’t defend against someone who wants to kill your stuff because war mechanics allow 500 man corps to war dec 5 man corps. As mentioned in my War Mechanics thread. Stations would probably be fine if the war dec mechanics changed allowing fair PVP.