It seems like it would make much more sense for Warbarges to be a corp owned asset and have these personal bonuses be something that applies to your merc quarters. When you join a corporation you then can move your merc quarters aboard the corp-owned barge.

While I agree that a metric to measure actual activity would be very useful for removing, at least somewhat , blatant alt corporations and related shenanigans from planetary conquest, for what it's worth. I would entreat you to not confuse the current loyalty rank system with such a metric. Implementing a minimum required activity level for a corporation to enter PC will fail massively as a way to say, stop people from creating alt corporations to lock districts with, if the mechanic can be easily spoofed by just spending a handful of aurum... Particularly when, with the implementation of simple trading, any AUR spent on items on even a completely throw away alt isn't even wasted.

While I would love to see War Barges be something that EVE players can interact with, I think it is unnecessary at this point in the design phase. We need War Barges to work properly before we let people blow them up, you know?

A few quicks thoughts. Sorry if it has been mentioned before as this is a pretty long thread.

Outside of ideological reasons I think a lot of wars are fought over resources i.e you lack something you need or want something somebody else has.

Now to avoid nap fests going on too long you can limit the amount of resources that can be derived from a given district by gradually reducing the amount of it available until you hit a minimum baseline. This would result in a weakness that others can exploit, particularly if you link resource consumption to battles. The more fights in your district, even if you win, will result in repairs needing to be made and disruption to production. This could allow small corps or even individuals into Sovereign wars as they could be used for hit and run tactics, smash and grabs, and espionage to test out or even create instability into the system.

Also resource reduction will result in these static corps moving onto greener pastures. Once this district has changed hands the new corp could use new "methods" to gradually increase production to where it was before it gradually declines again.

With large corps employing small, deniable asset, corps in a low intensity war with sovereign nations will eventually lead to all out large scale conflicts because those nations will only see their resources being depleted through equipment loss etc. These small corps could also use low cost militia gear attacks with the intent to damage production and equipment with little Isk cost to them. This way the small corps can stay profitable because their costs are very limited and the big corp/nation can employ lots of them to attack districts etc.

Within district attacks you could even reduce it to attacking specific building e.g the building where the corp stores some or a lot of their tanks which could then be destroyed or even stolen, though more likely to steal dropsuits, weapons , modules or even the resource being produced.

I think it would be interesting to have specific skills available that would allow a player to increase resources that could be derived from that district making them particulary valuable to corps who want to hold districts even to the point of hiring them away from their current corps or skills like sabotage/high explosives to allow players to create a disproportionate amount of damage in sneak or hit and run campaigns.

Hopefully these possibilities would result in a more fluid battle environment.

I don't believe active bonuses would be the way to go. I'd rather see things like:

VR simulation and mnemonic enhancement area. Adds a bonus to active/passive SP.

Contract filtering computers: higher ISK/LP payouts.

Limited manufacturing: build x fit dropsuits per day or X vehicles.

Salvage drone deployment: better EOM salvage.

Things like this can enhance gameplay without breaking the in game battles and gunplay.