To be honest I would rather like to see it get harder and harder to take more space. Maybe even exponentially harder. Each district should represent something and none should feel entirely irrelevant. People new and small should feel like they are earning and single organizations shouldn't hold large swaths of space. That being said at every chance we get I want us to show who owns what. If someone owns a planet, or all the planets in a solar system, or all the systems in a constellation I want their logo EVERYWHERE. The corporations are so vitally important to the social nature of this game.

Few random thoughts....

Would love if you elaborated. :)

I always thought taking a planet was going to be like playing Risk. We look over a map ahead of time in the war barge.

a guy sits in the mcc overlooking all the districts like a world map and distributes the needed equipment into strategic locations. Just like risk but instead of a roll of the dice the soldiers on the ground determine the outcome.

This would give rise to some grand master tactians calling the larger picture, but the individual batles by district are handled by the core of 24 mercs on the ground with there leaders by squad platoon etc.

So if 14 districts are needed to hold the planet a batlle could start in any of the 14 depending on location resources to nab, or other strategic needs, then a battle unfolds to the next district that it touches like we see when we zoom out on the maps( Game play similar to the original map in the first build.) After all the null cannons are flipped and helled simultaneously for a certain amount of time or clones depleted the battle moves to the next district.

Now the null cannons are out of the way the mcc can move up keeping us supplied. If not drop ships will need to be used to get troops further in with up links until the mcc can drop more crus and turret defenses, etc.

These battles become wars of attrition

As I understand it they don't want to make it zerg and alienate the smaller corps.

But I still don't understand how it will work, if larger corps do just attack over and over, I don't see that being an advantage if it is still only 24 vs 24 battles I'll put my 24 up against those corps all day the outcome won't change until we have to eat or go to bed. Matter of fact the more people keep coming at us the better we will get at holding our maps, what people keep forgetting is this is an fps first, you have to win your individual gun fights, and if the mechanic only allows 24 vs 24 numbers don't mean much per individual battle. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out

It depends on if actually holding territory is more profitable than attacking. As the dev was saying it makes more sense to pay more to attack than to defend. I think that is what this thread is trying to define. The real problem is making an fps game dependant on strictly numbers to win. I can only Imagine long waits in the merc quarters for battles to be sorted out and squads to be made, I thought the MAG lobbies were long and loud imagine the prep work to get 1000 mercs fighting simultaneously in the same evening good luck with that.

There is no way defending territory will be a 24/7 job
Reinforcement timers will have to be involved so still zergin is limited

depends on how complicated CCP makes FW
either way the majority of fps corps will be small and i think we all can agree pure zerg tactics will not make this game last
numbers has to play a part but not a decisive reason as to why u win a district/planet.

Strategy and skill should be #1

Null needs to get the devblog out tbh, speculating on stuff makes me more impatient

Will the defenders be able to place defensive structures (walls, turrets, shields, CRU's, etc) in their Districts? If so, you technically don't need to show up en-masse to defend if your defense is good enough.

Example: Me and 23 buddies take a nice lucrative District on Planet X. We invest a billion ISK into putting in AA Turrets, Blaster Turrets, high reinforced walls, multiple Skyfire batteries and a host of other fun defensive structures throughout the District. It is an attacker's nightmare (The Crown from Planetside 2). So when an enemy lands 24 guys to come take it we only need a few guys to defend it - our automated turrets and walls do most of the dirty work.

What's more fun is that, if we lose our District, the attacker now holds it. Some Districts will become well known for being difficult to take.

Wait what? Sorry, I think I missed your point.

If I am in a Corp of 24 guys and we own 2-3 Districts (which we make into bastion fortresses) why wouldn't we show up to defend them if they are attacked (8 defenders per District if all three were attacked simultaneously)? I know in your examples your talking about a 24 man corp holding 100 Districts, which I think is grossly unrealistic. 24 guys can hold a handful, especially with defenses, but not 100.

A small focused corp should be a pain to a large corp. It's like the Battle of Thermopylae where 300 Spartans held off thousands of Persians because they were forced to fight on a battlefield that eliminated their numerical superiority. 24 focused, supplied, and skilled players should be able to hold a District against a 3000 player Corp because every battle will be 24 vs 24.

Also, there's a very good chance that those 300 spartans did nothing to stop the invasion and just got shot by a ton of arrows. A story was made up about how heroic they were because... their side won =]

Interesting, I like it. But I was going for more the spirit of these historical events, not the defacto letter. A small focused force can repel a larger force if the larger forces numerical superiority cannot be fielded. Realistically a 3000 player corp should be able to deploy all of their players at once to overwhelm a smaller defense. But, due to game mechanics our matches only allowing 24 vs 24 then a small corp can repel a larger force for a prolonged time.

Either way you have a system where a single, or small amount, of Districts can be defended by a small corp. Which, in my opinion, is a good thing. A small focused corp should be able to take and defend single Districts from larger, more spread out, corps.


Doomsdays are only usable by Titans which cannot be used in Lowsec (where DUST sov is happening). So this will apply to Nullsec and the solution will be for Nullsec corps to not allow an enemy Titan to get in orbit above their planets. Also, once a Titan fires it's Doomsday it's unable to warp for 10+ minutes, it's essentially stuck there, so it's a very risky thing to do. So a Titan may decimate a District, but then get destroyed because it couldn't warp out. I think most people would trade a District loss for a Titan kill any day.

As for the MCC's Warbarges and such... yah. You got me there. The game limits it to 24 vs 24 due to the PS3's processing power. But it could be explained in game with bandwidth limits (like drones) or somesuch that restrict the maximum amount DUST mercs being fielded to 24 on a side..? Either way, we can't field all 3000 players at once to take a District. Only 24 per match.

If those 24 players can win the majority of their matches why shouldn't they be allowed to keep their district? Possibly even expand? One of the problems EVE has is that we don't limit (aside from server performance) the number if people allowed in a fight or how often the fights happen. The only thing we do is use reinforcement timers to help offset losing stuff when not online.

DUST on the other hand strictly limits the number of people allowed in a match. I will never be able to say this enough, dear god I can't say it enough, but this is just discussion, nothing done or decided. If the winners of a match won more than they lost through things like loot, ISK, and other things, and the small corporation won more matches than they lost, I think they should hold onto their piece of land.

I hope we can find a nice balance when we do this type of gameplay to get us there, not sure we will on the first try, but iteration is good. :D

Thing is if you got something akin to reinforcement timers (scheduled matches), you only need to adjust the number of battles per-district needed to conquer it.

If a 24-man corp has 100 planets, with total of 1000 districts, and defending a district is 20 matches over a week (I'd go for a more dynamic value where the more you lose in a row the quicker the thing is taken), then they'd be fighting 20,000 battles over a week.

Not going to happen.

If they fight 10 battles per day, then they can keep fighting for control over 4 or so districts, where matches are (mostly) in their timezones. Some penalty would obviously be applied to their performance when they have less than 24/7 coverage, however that could be compensated by being very good at shooting people in the face.