Sieges and their effect to PvP

[LauriFB]

PvP is an ongoing hot topic, so I'll open my thoughts here a bit. I'm not expecting this to alleviate all of the fears, and that is fair: We need to deliver before it's reasonable to hope for such. However, please don't turn this thread to yet another shouting match, there's 1000 already existing threads for that

Reasons for Sieges to happen

A cheap argument for sieges to happen would be simply that people like to destroy stuff, but let's not go there, as that would mean just griefing of small stations, and that's not nearly as fun as the real siege wars could be.

What we need, and what we will provide, is enough reasons to build, operate and defend very large stations (think about Origin size or larger). And for that, we have a bunch of upcoming features:

Passive resource generation

Atmo pumps will produce gas, which can be turned into ore. This can be done fully passively, i.e. it doesn't require player presence. Similarly, solar also works passively. If passive generation beats the risks then people will go for it. Atmo pumps can't be installed on capital ships. Furthermore, civilian capital ships are unable to enter atmo pump regions without an expensive station to host them, and even then it's very limited where they can go.

Resource refinement

All alloys will require huge amounts of energy on a capital ship scale, so passive solar collecting is the most sane way to produce this. Furthermore, some alloys will require the presence of certain belt/atmo compositions to operate, which means they can only be produced at certain locations.

Factories

While factories can also exist on capital ships, establishing factories near the resource production may help logistics and speed up the overall production.

Ship and capital ship port

Stations will have their own ship design halls, repair halls and ship storages. A station with a capital ship dock can host capital ships, which for example makes refueling capital ships much more convenient than heading out with a miner to the belt. Combine that with atmo pumps at your station and you can just sit back and relax while cruising with your luxury capital ship all around the universe.

Taxation zones

Large stations can have very large public safe zones and they can tax mining/trade inside that (AH tax/trade fees). Public safe zone with cheap tax will draw miners, as long as the station operator can keep them safe.

Player trading

Large hubs draw people and can setup their own trading systems. Large amounts of players draw wealth, and wealth makes the opposing side want to crash the party.


Sieges and small-scale PvP

Sieges will have an in-game list where all the major upcoming sieges will be listed (once they have been initiated and the countdown has started, and they are big enough to warrant the 'major' status, which will be decided/balanced later during development). Furthermore, with small sieges, either side can choose to publish the siege time and location on said list. This is usually effective when a small station is being attacked by a big capital ship, as the publishing may attract random people who will cause additional damage to the capital ship.

Since major sieges are public knowledge beforehand, anyone can show up to do whatever they like in the warzone. Some will just shoot everyone, some will try to salvage the wrecks, some will just enjoy the chaos and excitement of the war.

It's likely that there will be a fair amount of sieges happening, thus allowing PvP happy people finding their thrills each day. And if there's holes in the siege calendar they can create a siege of their own.


Notes on capital ship docks

Capital ships entering the belt may seem like it destroys all chances for PvP, but I see it as a great alternative risk option: Instead of risking a single miner flying from outside the belt, now the player risks the entire station for the resource collecting. Capital ship docks capable of hosting returning capital ships will require quite an expensive station. Once a siege starts, stations can't be disassembled and hauled away, so the risk to lose a valuable station is there. This adds incentive to defend it rather than simply escape.


Parting words

Starbase as of right now lacks a lot of great features. As such, the uproar is understable. However, we have been working on these major features for almost a year now, and they are closing in. We believe these features will be game changers. Any balances we do before them may seem minor or like bandaids, as they are. Our sole focus is bringing the intended features to the game and not to try to make game work without them.

We know that it seems like a stretch to talk about these grand features when the the game has so many bugs even with smaller player stations right now. We are committed to fixing those bugs, and in fact we are soon getting a rather large station and factory area fix done. With less bugs and more features added every month the game is getting closer to what we want it to be. We'll get there!

 

[Greebo]

We know that it seems like a stretch to talk about these grand features when the the game has so many bugs even with smaller player stations right now. We are committed to fixing those bugs, and in fact we are soon getting a rather large station and factory area fix done. With less bugs and more features added every month the game is getting closer to what we want it to be. We'll get there!

I'm so glad to hear this, i'm not super into mining so i've been sad that there hasnt been much to do with stations to support my miner friends

 

[Halfblood]

Nothing on radiation detecting ? Can we still expect this feature in the game ? Is siege PVP the main source of PVP we can expect from the game ? If not, why does it feel like that ?

 

[Oobfiche]

Nothing on radiation detecting ? Can we still expect this feature in the game ? Is siege PVP the main source of PVP we can expect from the game ? If not, why does it feel like that ?

expect the feature to be in the game soon when it has started and completed. this topic is mainly about the territorial parts of pvp

 

[J.D.]

Can another group who enters the siege aside from the defender, or attacker take the station for themselves by clearing out the other two parties?

 

[LauriFB]

Can another group who enters the siege aside from the defender, or attacker take the station for themselves by clearing out the other two parties?

Yes, and each station or capital ship area can have it's own party holding it. Safe zone can only start charging back when enough time has passed and one group is holding all the areas of one structure.

 

[J.D.]

Yes, and each station or capital ship area can have it's own party holding it. Safe zone can only start charging back when enough time has passed and one group is holding all the areas of one structure.

Does the size of the station require a certain amount of people to control it? As in, is it possible for a larger group, with a large station to be taken over by a smaller group because maybe the smaller had better tactics, and/or skill? OH and one more, Lauri, lol what about smaller stations that dont look like the way we had station designing in the beginning? the freeform way we build now doesnt seem to fit the idea of the siege mechanics we have. I remember you saying that the old way will come back, as well as this extra free form stuff we can do, but how does one of these bases get sieged? I hope that made sense.

 

[Aha]

Real ships, real logistics, actual space battles! - Safe-field disruptor and warp drives -
Let's go already in the right direction. Too many game design mistakes already. Please, starbase could be truly epic!

 

[Rhade]

PvP is an ongoing hot topic, so I'll open my thoughts here a bit.

It is. Thank you for talking about it.

I'm not expecting this to alleviate all of the fears, and that is fair: We need to deliver before it's reasonable to hope for such. However, please don't turn this thread to yet another shouting match, there's 1000 already existing threads for that

As long as it's a two sided conversation, I think it's fair. To that end, I'm going to keep my replies to myself, but I wanted to share some perspective. I'll leave it after that.

Resource refinement

All alloys will require huge amounts of energy on a capital ship scale, so passive solar collecting is the most sane way to produce this. Furthermore, some alloys will require the presence of certain belt/atmo compositions to operate, which means they can only be produced at certain locations.

Dope. This is the scarcity that promotes fighting. The questions that brings up:

A) Are these going to be easily detectable?
B) Are these going be common?

Because if A is false, then it's more bumbling around in space, hoping to find them, meaning it's not a very effective point of conflict. If B is true, then there's really no use fighting over this one when you can cruise 20km that way and take the other one and no one will ever find you.

Factories

While factories can also exist on capital ships, establishing factories near the resource production may help logistics and speed up the overall production.

Cool. Don't think CCAPs should have the ability to self sustain like that, but I'm sure you don't agree.

Taxation zones

Large stations can have very large public safe zones and they can tax mining/trade inside that (AH tax/trade fees). Public safe zone with cheap tax will draw miners, as long as the station operator can keep them safe.

This is one of the worrying parts. You guys are dropping a huge amount of safe zones. I see the need for safe zones around Origin to allow for new players / players who want to never have to PvP. I understand the need to be able to dock places and conduct some kind of business. But Origin stations have a 50 km radius into the belt of safe space, meaning a volume of 523598.776 km3 *per station* that is 100% safe. But now, the moon gate, Markka, even the "PvP station", player owned stations -- and now you're saying large stations are going to have "very large" safe zones? The best $/hr right now is already mining in the Origin safe zones, so I'm not sure how "as long as the station owner can keep them safe" really applies here. We've seen with Markka, as well as the new "PvP station," that it is quite difficult to get people to leave the safe zone, even with incentives -- why? Because there's no reason to. I can't imagine that miners would go to these new stations and need any kind of "protection" if there are "very large safe zones." It really is more and more starting to feel like you guys want the game to be safe 99% of the time, and everything should be opt in at all points. That's the message that the PvP community is getting from you guys, and it's a pretty big turn off. We're kind of starting to feel like this is a PvE game with some station sieges thrown in. If that's the case, that's okay, but it seemed like PvP was intended to be a larger part of the game and not a cheap thrill mini-game. I keep thinking there's going to be a point where the game is allowed to become savage, where developers stop holding people's hands. Do we need to get 4, 5, 6, 7 moons out? Is that point ever coming at all, in your mind? Because if not, that saves a lot of angst and we can know now instead of waiting around.

Player trading

Large hubs draw people and can setup their own trading systems. Large amounts of players draw wealth, and wealth makes the opposing side want to crash the party.

Agree.

Sieges and small-scale PvP

Sieges will have an in-game list where all the major upcoming sieges will be listed (once they have been initiated and the countdown has started, and they are big enough to warrant the 'major' status, which will be decided/balanced later during development). Furthermore, with small sieges, either side can choose to publish the siege time and location on said list. This is usually effective when a small station is being attacked by a big capital ship, as the publishing may attract random people who will cause additional damage to the capital ship.

Since major sieges are public knowledge beforehand, anyone can show up to do whatever they like in the warzone. Some will just shoot everyone, some will try to salvage the wrecks, some will just enjoy the chaos and excitement of the war.

It's likely that there will be a fair amount of sieges happening, thus allowing PvP happy people finding their thrills each day. And if there's holes in the siege calendar they can create a siege of their own.

The listing function is interesting. I do think you guys are going to run into situations where it really just turns into a mechanism for roaching / third partying to basically dictate the outcomes more than anything else. I think it's going to lead to a lot of zerging. But what jumps out at me the most here is that it seems like sieges are somehow intended to be the way "PvP happy people .... find their thrills," and that if there's a hole they can make their own siege. Sieging for the sake of PvP is what we did in Darkfall when the population was dwindling, because there was no organic PvP left to find. We'd siege for content because we were bored. Small scale PvP needing people to drop sieges to "find thrills" is a little worrying. In a world full of safe zones that it seems is being built, with CCAPs being 100% invincible, it does kind of seem like the only way to go find fights is by, in essence, signing up for a WoW battleground off a list. Hope I'm wrong, and radiation tracking / salvaging can save small scale.

Notes on capital ship docks

Capital ships entering the belt may seem like it destroys all chances for PvP, but I see it as a great alternative risk option: Instead of risking a single miner flying from outside the belt, now the player risks the entire station for the resource collecting. Capital ship docks capable of hosting returning capital ships will require quite an expensive station. Once a siege starts, stations can't be disassembled and hauled away, so the risk to lose a valuable station is there. This adds incentive to defend it rather than simply escape.

Out of the whole post, this is what I just can't agree with whatsoever. You talk about a situation that *may* happen, at the expense of a situation that *will* happen: CCAPs will lose a drawback, and a siege may or may not be feasible in the situation you're describing. CCAPs shouldn't even exist, all capital ships should be vulnerable to be the "sink" that they've been talked about as. But, since it seems like you guys are intent on taking that route, this situation really just means that CCAPs lose even more of what their drawbacks were supposed to be. Because a station is expensive does not mean it is prohibitive. I also think you're downplaying the situation a bit: It wouldn't have been a "single miner" flying from outside the belt. To be worth the fuel it took to get there, you'd need to justify the fuel expense and have a legit mining operation, most likely complete with escorts. This would be the organic PvP that happens because of logistic line hits, this would be fights happening out in space attacking the backbone of the financial side of an enemy, and something that isn't just another siege. The CCAP leaving is easily solvable by making all capital ships... not invincible. I think you are erring way too far towards the safe side of the pendulum with all of these safe zones, and with deciding that a capital ship can be a "civilian" model that makes it 100% safe, and now you're removing the limitations that made it an even remotely defensible design choice in favor of the possibility of more sieges? Can't agree. CCAPs are not going to play out the way you guys are thinking, and MCAPs will be seen incredibly rarely.

Past that detour, you're making a gameplay decision that all roads lead to Rome. You're deciding that PvP should culminate in sieges, while in the same breath, removing CCAP limitations because of a situation that *may* work out the way you're thinking. It wouldn't have been a miner we were hitting, it would have been ~20, their resource efforts for the war. It would have been a way to hamstring logistics. But, instead, it's going to be a 100% invincible ship flying into a "very large" safe zone where they can actually just mine in peace. The picture being painted here doesn't really leave a lot of room for interpretation.

Parting words

Starbase as of right now lacks a lot of great features. As such, the uproar is understable. However, we have been working on these major features for almost a year now, and they are closing in. We believe these features will be game changers. Any balances we do before them may seem minor or like bandaids, as they are. Our sole focus is bringing the intended features to the game and not to try to make game work without them.

We know that it seems like a stretch to talk about these grand features when the the game has so many bugs even with smaller player stations right now. We are committed to fixing those bugs, and in fact we are soon getting a rather large station and factory area fix done. With less bugs and more features added every month the game is getting closer to what we want it to be. We'll get there!

You guys have a great game. I also like your transparency, even though I don't agree with you on everything. From my view, the frustrations stem from a rigid perspective. Small scale and medium scale PvP should feel like they matter, but all I see is concern for ship design / sieges / indestructible capital ships / safe zones. You say these sieges and capital ships are "game changers," but they aren't for small or medium scale organic PvP. Sure, sieges are cool climaxes, and an integral part of the system. But it's putting the cart before the horse when radiation detection / junk collection / salvaging (things that enable a basic PvP gameplay loop at a basic level) are wayyyy further down the roadmap. I don't think I'm going to be able to be like "Hey guys let's jump on Starbase" if there isn't a siege happening. What worries me is that you guys don't seem to think that's a hole in the gameplay loop. PvP *is* in a bad state and it seems like the choice is: for the next few months, arrange fake fights, and after that hope there's a siege going on once every so often. Not a lot of organic PvP opportunities coming up, judging off the roadmap. I hope I'm wrong about everything and everything is 100% great, I'd love that because it's good for you guys as well as groups like mine. But I think it's also a mistake not to listen to some of these points and consider them very strongly / keep them in mind.

 

[Tomasz]

This whole system sounds very promising, expt for a fact that attackers are putting in hudge risk and investment into attacking, without any reason do do so.
There is nothing mentioned here about any incentives to make those sieges happen.Scrap alone is not going to pay even for resource investment of fighters let alone being time efficient .
At first sieges will happen as novelty, but what is there to be gained by 300 people corp to attack another 300 people corp when they could just peacefully mine abundant resources besides eachother?
It is all high risk, high investment- Low reward.
This design shows same attidute towards pvp as this new "isolation moon station" that was supposed to be hotspot.You really made some serious effort to make sure noone has any reason to go there , besides "lets jsut randomly loose some ships by pew-pewing eachother for no benefit after spending 2 hours to travel".

 

[le_souriceau]

This whole system sounds very promising, expt for a fact that attackers are putting in hudge risk and investment into attacking, without any reason do do so.

Yes, this concerns me too, especialy considering siege (and most importantly -- attacking capital) will be open to 3rd parties.

It means, basicly, it will be more advantagous to not initiate siege, then but just do some backstabbbing action around for fun, risking nothing. Pretty much attacker will be more concerned with defending capital during siege (from all sorts of bored people), then actualy attacking station.

And I too share this feeling like FB somewhat dancing around to make sieges kinda... not that attactive. Giving all possible and impossible advantages to potential defenders and punishing potential agressors.

 

[Quevin]

With all information we have.

Excluding the most important;
we need to find those stations and get there Dev Coords somehow (currently unexplained).

Its still better to go top or bottom of the belt and place a Civ Cap Ship and camp the station 24/7 which is a max of 30 minutes of flying toward the middle of the belt.

However due to a bug player stations are only visible up to ~2 km which is supposed to be a 100km. so I will have to wait untill this is fixed, in order to estimate how decent station finding is going to be.

 

[Greebo]

With all information we have.

Excluding the most important;
we need to find those stations and get there Dev Coords somehow (currently unexplained).

Its still better to go top or bottom of the belt and place a Civ Cap Ship and camp the station 24/7 which is a max of 30 minutes of flying toward the middle of the belt.

However due to a bug player stations are only visible up to ~2 km which is supposed to be a 100km. so I will have to wait untill this is fixed, in order to estimate how decent station finding is going to be.

Even if we could see them 100km away, they wouldnt be big enough to have a visual, this will of course be different once we can make them bigger

 

[J.D.]

With all information we have.

Excluding the most important;
we need to find those stations and get there Dev Coords somehow (currently unexplained).

Its still better to go top or bottom of the belt and place a Civ Cap Ship and camp the station 24/7 which is a max of 30 minutes of flying toward the middle of the belt.

However due to a bug player stations are only visible up to ~2 km which is supposed to be a 100km. so I will have to wait untill this is fixed, in order to estimate how decent station finding is going to be.

This is a really good point. Rather than using a military capital ship to siege, I can take my civilian cap ship, and just camp, and kill everything I see leave over x amount of time. Completely drain them of resources. Unless he just gets pissed and logs for x amount for time. Then it’s just a waiting game. And with civilian cap, you lose nothing on the process. So you can just camp there for the next 6 months. Nothing to worry about. This is a much much much better option to smaller pvp groups who can’t afford as much as the larger. The civilian cap ships are a bigger nightmare than the military. Lol

 

[Throdnk]

First: Great post, thank you LauriFB.

Second:
Camping with capital ships seems to result in the question whether safezones do expand depending on the expansion of the station itself (we want to build megastations, after all). That would of course result in the need to integrate non-owned stations into friendly space by sieging them first. You could then lock the capital ship in space, i.e. it wouldn't be able to return to a space that near once warped away. Sounds fair if it really blocks expansion.

A second question is what happens to civil capital ships that where docked in a station after it is conquered?

 

[LauriFB]

Does the size of the station require a certain amount of people to control it? As in, is it possible for a larger group, with a large station to be taken over by a smaller group because maybe the smaller had better tactics, and/or skill?

There's no hard requirements for any number of people, and the soft requirement is pretty soft. The areas being taken over need to be next to each other (and capture starts from the edges). So while attacker can attack or destroy any area of the station at will, the actual capturing is in quasi-fixed order, which reduces greatly the number of people absolutely needed for the fight.

Because if A is false, then it's more bumbling around in space, hoping to find them, meaning it's not a very effective point of conflict. If B is true, then there's really no use fighting over this one when you can cruise 20km that way and take the other one and no one will ever find you.

The plan is to have stations itself to be interesting and worth of attacking. While some of the dust clouds may be very small (at least in terms of SB), majority of furnaces will be just adding value to the station itself. In a large scale prolonged war production and logistics wins, and furnaces are key part of production.

This is one of the worrying parts. You guys are dropping a huge amount of safe zones. I see the need for safe zones around Origin to allow for new players / players who want to never have to PvP. I understand the need to be able to dock places and conduct some kind of business.

Player station safe zones, after siege is in, are dynamic safe zones. This means that once siege starts, the safe zone just vanishes and everyone who did not escape the siege in time are there without any safety at all. A large dynamic safe zone may turn into a death trap for civilians not following the big picture or just staying too long, or not understanding that evacuation from a station may be actually a very long journey alone in the dangerous space. Imagine the chaos and despair when miners realize the last evacuation capital ship has already left and now they have a 500 km trip through not very friendly areas. So I see large dynamic safe zones more like a carnage waiting to happen.

Camping with capital ships seems to result in the question whether safezones do expand depending on the expansion of the station itself (we want to build megastations, after all). That would of course result in the need to integrate non-owned stations into friendly space by sieging them first. You could then lock the capital ship in space, i.e. it wouldn't be able to return to a space that near once warped away. Sounds fair if it really blocks expansion.

A second question is what happens to civil capital ships that where docked in a station after it is conquered?

Capital ships won't have effect on station expansion in general, but it's indeed interesting question that what happens if there's kind of inverse siege, ie. building a station near hostile military capital ship. I guess there's a lot of niche situations we need to figure out

Civilian capital ships may be partially trapped after a siege, which means they can't have ships fly in or out, but they can have people to respawn inside them and to fly the civilian capital ship away.

 

[J.D.]

There's no hard requirements for any number of people, and the soft requirement is pretty soft. The areas being taken over need to be next to each other (and capture starts from the edges). So while attacker can attack or destroy any area of the station at will, the actual capturing is in quasi-fixed order, which reduces greatly the number of people absolutely needed for the fight.

Cool, I like this.

 

[Vanidar]

T
Player station safe zones, after siege is in, are dynamic safe zones. This means that once siege starts, the safe zone just vanishes and everyone who did not escape the siege in time are there without any safety at all. A large dynamic safe zone may turn into a death trap for civilians not following the big picture or just staying too long, or not understanding that evacuation from a station may be actually a very long journey alone in the dangerous space. Imagine the chaos and despair when miners realize the last evacuation capital ship has already left and now they have a 500 km trip through not very friendly areas. So I see large dynamic safe zones more like a carnage waiting to happen.

I understand that this post is primarily about station siege and it's relation to the complaints about no motivation for pvp, but please indulge a slight detour. I think the point @Rhade was trying to make here was that with the proliferation of safe zones and with the limited info the public has and some of the quotes here, it feels like station sieging is intended to be the premiere and preferred option for pvp, with other smaller-scale or more regular and accessible forms worrying they're a bit "edged out". I acknowledge that it may just feel that way to us since this post is about station sieging specifically, but when you mention potentially larger safe zones on player stations, that does impact the game across the board. Large dynamic safe zones are still technically large safe zones as long as no one is willing/able to risk a military capital ship and siege the station outright, which may or may not be feasible at a regular frequency for plenty of reasons I'm sure I don't know. If these large safe zones support a large area of 100% safe mining like Origin, or even mining and hauling sufficiently close to the SZ border, the fear is that safe zone space will still be where ~90% of all activity is at any given moment (even far away from Origin). Please forgive the EVE comparison, but for example, they had somewhat of a gradient to their safe area, from 1.0 being the most safe down to 0.0 being essentially the wild west. Lots of people loved 1.0, but there were groups of pvpers that loved 0.0 and all the danger and profit and freedom that went with that. Lots of content, interaction, and decisive skirmishes that supported a war with no referees or chaperones or hand holding happened outside of attacking any fixed fortification or station specifically, and in my opinion, these were the more enjoyable and worthwhile moments anyway. Everyone was a consenting adult in these areas and there weren't many ways to abuse safety features and the feeling of making it out there provided such a feeling of accomplishment. I think that was what Rhade was getting at here, speaking up not necessarily as a "pvper", but as someone who enjoys an environment that is a little more "savage" as he puts it and allows for more organic motivations and opportunities to fight that don't depend on sieging to bring down one of the many large safe zones that we can be 100% sure will continue to pop up all over the place.

Will we ever be able to choose to live in an area of space that attempts to significantly neck down safe zone area or effectiveness for all parties in that area to the point where most people are not mining and operating inside of (or can be very near) a kind of safe zone so we don't have to rely as much on sieging for war efforts? Maybe experimenting with large player stations in these specific areas not having "very large" safe zones or making it expensive for civilian cap ships to travel there (if they stay invincible)? Perhaps on a further moon or cloud with rarer resources or densities to justify said risk, but so that it doesn't force anyone to be there that doesn't want to?

Lastly, I'd like to quickly say that we all appreciate you taking the time out to share your thoughts amidst your surely busy schedule. I think a lot of people may not be playing currently but really want SB to work and have respect for you guys at FB, even if we don't agree on everything. A big part of the concern from my side of the aisle, at least my flavor of the pvp community, has been the lack of reward for risk and incentives for conflict in open areas outside and far from SZs. I know you guys have your plans on how to address this in your view, and I fully appreciate that we may just have to wait and see what you guys have planned once it's implemented. Good luck and we'll check it out then. Until then, excuse our shouting discussions.

 

[LauriFB]

Will we ever be able to choose to live in an area of space that attempts to significantly neck down safe zone area or effectiveness for all parties in that area to the point where most people are not mining and operating inside of (or can be very near) a kind of safe zone so we don't have to rely as much on sieging for war efforts? Maybe experimenting with large player stations in these specific areas not having "very large" safe zones or making it expensive for civilian cap ships to travel there (if they stay invincible)? Perhaps on a further moon or cloud with rarer resources or densities to justify said risk, but so that it doesn't force anyone to be there that doesn't want to?

Thanks for explanation, I missed the point in the original question.

So my thinking is that there would be multiple sieges every day, thus all small-scale pvp'rs would get their daily guaranteed action from those. Regular pvp isn't going anywhere either, in fact radiation mechanics will make it much more a possibility. Better salvage and ownership changes also make piracy viable way to live.

Outside safe zones will get a plenty of hotspots which have enough rewards to compensate the risks. Eos has already over 10 moons, many with belts, and once those get better access they are all wild west (no planned permanent safe zones there). Players ride their capital ships to those moons, but they always need to exit the safety of the ship to get resources. Small stations or bases may offer temporary protection, but it's expensive, static and scarce protection at best. At worst I'm sure there will be a lot of people who for some reason enjoy burning down the stations and bases, so they won't fill the universe.

Finally, I realize my ideas either work out or they won't. When they don't work out, we'll change the direction. We are more focused on end experience than any certain method to achieve it, so if some feature doesn't prove to work as we'd like it to work, we'll change that feature. Healthy pvp is in the core of Starbase, we just need the features to support that. Some people are asking (in a demanding tone) that I should give them unhealthy pvp at once. Unfortunately that would just kill off the playerbase. There's great pvp coming, and we have our focus on that.

 

[ChaosRifle]

Are civilian capital ships truely invulnerable? Why wouldnt a company make fleets of them to keep their money perfectly safe with no way to be attacked?

Getting sieged with a fleet of civvies on siegerange border seems like a raw deal for the defenders every time. The inability to intercept and destroy a fleet because its inside a civvie cap fleet sounds pretty awful, as the attacker can just decide to take their ball and go home, instead of getting crushed when they bit off more than they can chew. It was previously stated this was intended mechanics, but it just sounds like someone saying their helmet of magic protection prevents them from loosing, and so do their boots of fire warding, etc, etc. It really doesnt sound like a fun system to deal with. (generally hard X happens or X cant happen systems feel awful in PVP games)