War Mechanics, Promote fair fight wars

So, I’ve thought some more on how to re-work highsec wars. I think this would provide the best balance for corporations both industrial and pvp. This idea came to me originally in a basic form while I was explaining an exploit in the game that corps use to stop wars.

I know of a corp of 500+ that PVPs but can’t be war decced because the use an alt to own structures under a name people can’t really find and won’t know what structures they actually own. Exploiting EVE to be safe from war while owning structures. I felt this to be unfair and make highsec too safe and exploitable. No, I will not mention who. I’m sure there are plenty of corporations that do this exploit.

For this change, we give corporations a size attribute and alliances a size attribute. This will help establish a fair framework for war where you aren’t 500 versus 5.

Any corporation that owns a station, can be war decced by a corporation of its size, if tiny, the next size.

  • A tiny corporation is 5 players or less, and can not be war decced.
  • A small corporation is up to 25 players, and can only be war decced by small corporations.
  • A medium corporation is up to 100 players, and can only be war decced by medium or small corporations.
  • A large corporation is up to 500 players, and can be war decced by small, medium, or large corporations.
  • Any corp above 500 players is considered a massive corporation, and can be war decced by anyone.

Alliances are the size of their total player count.

  • Two corps with 4 players each is 8 players, in an alliance that makes the alliance a Small Alliance which can be war decced, while the individual corps inside it can not be.
  • Five corps with 6 players each is 30 players, which makes it a Medium alliance and can be war decced by small and medium alliances or corporations while the individual corps inside are all Small and can only be war decced by a small corp.

Members of a corp or alliance that was war decced can leave at any time, this does not cancel the war if the count drops below the size threshold however. It only makes it so that the war can not be paid to be extended so the war will end naturally at the end of the paid cycle. Members that leave are considered war targets for 24 hours still.

Members of any corp in a war, can not have any members join till the war is over. Any applications that get approved will be put on a list of pending and will be approved once the war is over. This includes the 24 hour period before the war begins. This will prevent a corp of 25 players from recruiting 100 more people once the war is started to make the battle one sided.

The corporation that was on the defense can not be war decced again for two weeks. This protects them from multiple people trying to keep them from playing anymore, and allows them to recuperate. If a structure was lost during the war, the rest period is extended by the size of the structure. A medium structure (Astrahus, Raitaru, Athanor) will extend the rest period by 4 days. A large structure (Fortizar, Azbel, Tatara) will extend the rest period by 7 days. An XL structure (Keepstar, Sotiyo) will extend this rest period by 2 weeks. Multiple structures destroyed extend the rest period up to a maximum of 4 weeks giving a total maximum rest period of 6 weeks.

A war has a maximum duration of 1 month.
Wars cost 15 million ISK per day if paid day by day. This goes up 15% per day the further in advance you pay. AKA two days would be 34.5 million ISK. Seven days would be 185.7 million ISK where paying for seven days individually would cost 105 million. The price goes up, because it prevents a corp for leaving the war during that time by dropping their size. The maximum time payable would be 7 days up front and then you can renew for 7 more days on the final day if the corp’s size is still within your size group.

A corp that drops out of the size group of the attacker only gets a cooldown of 1 week unless a structure was lost during the war.

As you might expect, a corporation that owns a structure is immune to wars above its size class, that way you don’t have some 1000 man alliance declare war against a 6 man corp that just owns a refinery somewhere in highsec. This tries to balance out the ability to defend your stuff and have a fair fight.

A war can be ended early by the attackers, war charges are not refunded. This initiates a 24 hour cooldown period before the war finishes ending. During this period, the war can be paid for again to extend if the duration does not exceed the maximum duration of the war.

One more thing for the war mechanics. Structures can be transferred during a war only to people involved in the war, whether that is people you invite to defend you, or to the attackers.

Something I forgot to consider earlier. Corporations can invite people to defend them. We need to make sure that any corp that is war decced, can only invite people of equal size. A small corp can only invite small corps to defend them up to a maximum amount of participants. Its been years since I’ve dealt with war decs, so I forgot about this part.


I’m sure people will find some sort of exploit to this system, which is why you all have the chance to go ahead and discuss what you think of this re-balance of the war mechanics and give me ideas as to how you think someone could exploit this system. I also realize that this war mechanic would put me at risk for war because I have 6 people in my corp. The bonus at least is that the war might actually be close to fair as it wouldn’t be 6 versus 100.

There was a thing or two I did like from someone elses topic,

The thing I liked was that a corp that wants to be able to declare war requires a Command Office. But I didn’t like the multiple office types. Just one command office that lets you locate and destroy it to end the war early. This office will allow unlimited wars, cost 125 fuel per day, and can only be fitted on a citadel of any size or even come as its own special structure like the FLEX structures which must be anchored within 5000km of a citadel and do not appear in space as a warp to object except in structure browser or when you can visually see it. A corp may only have one command office. An alliance must have a Command Center, one office which is selected to be the command center and is the only office you must destroy to end that war. There’s no other chance other than the fact that it is basically renamed to Command Center in the event that an alliance declares war and has multiple offices.

This paragraph above can be ignored though, its just one more thing I thought about that could add a mechanic to wars that can allow a war to be ended early if the defenders can locate the enemy’s command office and blow it up. Putting the attackers on the defensive.

Or… Just watch what structures their members use and blow them up.

So what you’re saying is that if you put all of your structures into one-man holding corps you are 100% immune to war. No.

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Your holding corp is not immune, but you are. Your corp of 300 miners 50 pvpers 150 mission runners is safe from war, while your structure is at risk of destruction. Your miners, mission runners, can keep going while the war is going on, and you can just move stuff out of the structure while its under attack or before the attack begins and if it is destroyed oh well plop up a new one.

That is assuming the enemy can figure out which corp is yours that they have to war dec to get your structure, or even you could have multiple alts that each have their own structure just to take it a step further in protecting your assets.

And so your solution to the difficulty of war against structure holding corps is to make structure holding corps literally immune to war?

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Did you read the entire article there? Any corp holding a station, can be war decced by small corporations or small alliances. Thats up to 25 people.

I will add a notation in there that defenders must also be of the same size, so that you can’t invite a 500 man corp to defend you. Thank you for helping me remember that defending corps could be exploited like this.

But the miners always were war immune. Because they lived in an NPC Corp.
This is what you are missing.

And then they would be forced to go back to an NPC corp. To face 10% taxes or higher. CCP should probably raise NPC tax to 25% to compensate and encourage people out of NPC corps.

c o a l i t i o n

What mining tax.
And sure. CCP could change it in the future. But that’s not what the past was.
And also single man tax evasion corps.

The reality is these people in wardec immune corps were never at risk before either. Now they just sit in a big fat Corp which gives away their holding Corp assets by the fact they use them. Even if they are a different Corp.

So, simply because someone somewhere exploits the game in some way, means we should just let people exploit it instead of looking for ways to make it harder, or less worth it?

Well its not an exploit.

Maybe you should just shutup now and go learn how to play the Meta, cause that is what you are railing against…might I add going to lose against.

And when i say meta, im talking about the fact it does not matter if you are in an NPC corp, a gank corp, a nullsec corp, or what ever it is you want to calssify it as. Those people are connected as players by discord, Teamspeak, vent, jabber, etc…and have no care in the world about your failure to adapt because they can.

and btw your idea, all of it is complete shite
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The point is there have always been wardec immune people in EVE. And as long as there have been useful structures have been wardec immune people using that structure.

Your idea is not about closing any exploit, it’s about opening up more targets to you, right after CCP clearly said they want people to choose their element of risk separately from their social elements.

If someone wardec immune annoys you gank them and blow up any structure their Corp or alliance goes near, pretty simple. The more that hide in the immune Corp the fewer defenders you have to deal with.

Its about trying to find a way to bring fair wars to the game.

If you hide in NPC corps, you have increased taxes on everything you do and that ISK gets removed from the game. Now you have people hiding in war immune player corps where any and all taxes still go to players. So one ISK drain is now not used that much. You have 200 miners that would normally sit in an NPC corp and lose 10% of their income from most tasks, sitting in war immune corps not losing ISK to the game, feeding inflation.

The other advantage, as the other guy who was rude and nonconstructive pointed out, is that most players use discord and other services to connect and play together. So yes they could still use these methods, but they have distinct disadvantages and it increases the work load on the people who manage this assemblance of people. The corp I joined when I came back from break used a bot in their discord server that auto scanned people in their corp and added them to the allowed list in their server. They can no longer do this, if everyone has to stay in an NPC corp.

Back in my day, we didn’t hide in NPC corps to hide from wars. We hired people to defend us. Now that system is gone, because everyone is immune to wars. We had the guts to be ready for war to be a possibility. People would pay for wars against us, massive wars with big war deccing mercenaries. People who played unfairly with 5 versus 1 tactics. We survived. We paid people to come help and defend us.

Now you got people mining freely and safely, the only method of getting them is suicide ganking. I do not promote this kind of behavior. Suicide ganking should not be the only method of getting people in highsec. CCP should not be promoting this behavior either. War brought mechanics to the game that used to be popular and made industry harder at times and was profitable for highsec PVPers. Now all these PVPers are out of a job, they do station popping which is boring and a slow long task, or they do suicide ganking which I feel is a disgraceful act. Of course people will target me in game for saying so but, hey, I speak my mind.

What I’ve been proposing is to try and make it so that wars will be easier for those who wish to stay small, allow corporations to prepare themselves by having their own private PVP teams. Or perhaps we open up a new system of small mercenary, medium mercenary, large mercenary corporations. Each being payable to defend or attack someone. Giving PVPers something to do besides suicide ganking miners. Something to shoot at that likely isn’t just a mining ship that they must destroy within 10-30 seconds. Something that shoots back.

EDIT:
You know, I am trying to work the problem. I haven’t just accepted that its a total loss and leave the game as is. I want to provide solutions, workarounds, etc. Ways to make exploits harder to do.

EVE is not fair. The sooner you accept this the happier you will be, and the less time you have to spend on proposing terrible ideas.

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nobody’s hiding , just not playing the way you think they should … their choice .

so you hid behind mercs , never undocking during the war , 100% safe , your choice …

explain how npc taxes affect mining income .

another group of people not playing the game the way you think they should …

ccp has been trying to fix wardecs but there’s no way to make everyone happy , as you’ve found out trying -and failing - to come up with a better solution .

Since the dawn of human history, military strategists have written countless tomes on how to best win a war with ones enemies. I haven’t read them all obviously, but of the many I have read, not one speaks of “being fair”. Quite to the contrary, the whole point of military strategy is to find an advantage over your opponent and exploit it.

War isn’t, and never has been, about being fair. Honorable, or just? Maybe. But fair? Never.

You clearly look at EvE as a game, and games should be fair. I can’t question that. But EvE is not simply a game, it is a virtual war. And wars are not fair.

With that out of the way, I agree with you and some others here that the current state of wardec mechanics are somewhat…lacking. But no solution is going to make everyone happy, so for now I think it’s best to adapt to the current landscape and carry on.

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Stopped reading there.

EVE is not fair, the goal is not to be fair.

Enforced fairness is anti-sandbox.

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