And if the aggressors wanted to “win” the war? Your solution basically means the defenders could just suicide run a bunch of cheapass T1 ships at it and grind it down. Not having any kind of repair or regen options guarantees the defender an eventual win if they put any effort whatsoever into this, while there’s no way for the aggressor to win the war.
The war mechanic can’t be solved by throwing a structure at it. As we’ve covered many times already, the defenders ain’t going to put up the proper fight it’d take to destroy it anyway, and even if they did that’d play right into the aggressors’ hands anyway.
The solution most likely lies within getting granularity into the wardec system. Different types of wardecs, to start with. Introduce war goals for the aggressor, which in turn affects the defensive wargoals and the costs involved. This is just very quick and dirty, and blatantly open to abuse, but it’s a start:
Declare War, be given the choice of War Goals: Certain specific structures destroyed/Taken down perhaps? Or just a certain amount of them. A certain amount of kills or isk destroyed. X amount of loot gained from defenders’ ships and structures perhaps. Sliders setting the various goals to X, Y and Z values. This affects a few things: The cost of the war, the length/timeframe of it, and the defenders’ War Goals.
Depending on the variables the attacker set up, the defender gets its own war goals, like War Target Structure not reinforced for two weeks? Victory. X amount of Aggressor Ships destroyed (or isk value, etc etc), victory. Trade for X amount of ISK in two or more tradehubs? Victory (although this one is blatantly unbalanced and needs work). Mine Y amount of Ore in Z amount of days under the wardec? Victory! Etc.
Basically, let the bears have a chance to “win” the war by doing what they do anyway. If they successfully do the things they do anyway, while dodging or destroying aggressors, they can ‘win’ and the war can end for so and so long. They won’t have to ‘fight’ directly, but they do have to be active. Rewards activity as they’re under the dec.
A war goal system with goals for both attackers and defenders, achievable by activity in space (and with a maximum amount of kills etc per side before one side wins) combined with a campaign to promote hardier bears through the NPE preparing them better for it, mentally more than skillwise, is the only thing I can see that could help in this particular regard.
More importantly, by far, is the quite clear implication that the wars on their own are not the main issue. If they were, people would come back after wars. That they stay away can only be explained by them not really missing the game, which kind of implies there’s a gameplay dullardry issue in highsec to begin with. I don’t think this can be fixed by tweaking the gameplay. The only real fix is to somehow promote the rest of the sandbox to these bears, and get them engaged in that.
It’s the only thing I know that makes for longevity in Eve players: Interaction with other Eve players. No one came back from a break from Eve and said “I just missed doing L4s so much” or “I missed mining in a Retriever.”