But i can see large corps like PRO mounting wave attacks if they have to. So if you successfully defend a district they can instantly field a new team and basically repeat the process until they finally take control. part of me worries that taking districts will just end up as a game of attrition.

Just make sure you put in district transfer in dust ASAP.

-districts can be taken and sold off. Just like mercs can be paid to take a planet. There isn't 100% chance they will. Selling a district afterward is just another market for stuff. Dust needs this economy function

Except the problem is you have 0 people show up to defend a place, because your limited numbers are protecting what you think are the most important of all the targets.

And had the navy in the battle of thermoplae able to land those 300 spartans and 10,000 greek regulars would have been slaughtered. luckily unlike the movie, the greek navy was just as intelligent, stalemating the hostile navy in a narrow striaght and attacking near dusk limiting the engagement time. The second Persian navy was however like the movie and got smashed by a storm.

Another war you should look to in where numbers vs quality is end of ww2 with russia and the german's and possibly the rest of the allies had market garden not sucked all the fuel for patton's armor column.

...

A far more accurate war to portray the scenario of large vs small would be the romance of the three kingdoms in china where the infamous Sun Tzu wrote his manuscripts on warfighting, after all the kingdom he served was by far the smallest of the three and managed to hold out very well. Unluckily there were not convenient passes, choke-points, or magical shields (in eve's case) that would have stopped the larger enemy from crushing the smaller nation. It was a various sets of delaying tactics division and conquering and many other nice tricks that focused more on doing the most with the least amount.

What has changed between now and then?
We have MCCs, Warbarges and can nearly drop soldiers anywhere we have a CRU in control at.

Also there are talks about allowing eve players to eventually use the doomsday weapon to scorch a planet's districts of all facilities and soldiers. Get too dug in and well.... boom? Those fortresses become a tomb.

Well we can go back and forth all day though. Just do know that it is possible that a war may have more than 1 24vs24 match being timed up at the same time and that defenders that don't show are more likely to get punished for having a 0v24 match pitted against them. There may be mechanics that would bottle neck it out but over multiple month war I dont see a 24 man corp holding out against a force that large in maintain the same lands when the fight first started.

Also null sec is where aboslute player conquest mode will happen, low sec (FW) will be npc hand holding conquest. There will be a special wedge of low where players can still conquer but as to what level is uncertain.

I am however throwing my bet towards that there will be no shield timers but more of a sovereignty flip timer. That districts will be 'raidable' and can be ransacked and disabled thus making it very possible to go out of 'alphabetical' order in destroying a target corp's bases. IE taking out the power plant that's powering the shield generator protecting the tank factory that you oh so hate your opponents for.

Until the blog comes out however we wont know the full or even partial details on how its all going to go down.

I'm would hate to in a middle of a corp batle to find someone attacking my district and its undefended. I have no issue with scheduling a head of time to battle. Its fair to all parties to do that.

As the example I gave earlier what if a corp from the UK wakes up saturday morning at 8 am their time (3 am mine) and schedule an attack for my district even 4 hours later which is noon their time and 7 am my time.

so just having a delay of 4 hours would make little difference.

how about if it was an 8 hour delay. So the UK guys schedule it for 8 am their time on a monday morning. We find out sunday night that we have a corp battle to defend our district at 3 am. Again still the schedule delay does little to help the fact we aren't there to fight.

Trust me if thats they way we are going I will be able to grief corp after corp using shell corporations. You could just spam attack contracts and show up and take the districts where you have no resistance and get free districts/loot.

As I said to FoxFour I'll put up my indepth ideas with example later on (need to finish work for the day first )

Honestly I can't see how 1 match would take a district. Yes I am making an assumption there. The idea of just "scheduling" or a few hours notices is just broke idea to me.

No to the PI node Idea and having matches occuring every 2 hours. This would make taking 1 district impossible grind and not worth it financially. I understand what you were suggesting but it just wont work.

Ill be putting up my alliegiance model later on

So, in short this thread goes about
1) how to create an incentive to fight, and
2) how to organise the fights

Mostly, we have some good mechanics in place in Eve which grew over time. And in my opnion, most of these mechanics can be translated into dust.

1) Make every district generate a passive cop income. the lower the sec status of the solar system, the higher the income. If a corp owns an entire planet, multiply the income by a factor, is the entire constellation owned, an even bigger factor. You own a region? Well done, payday has arrived ;) I'm deliberately not suggesting specific amounts and factors, because this obviously would have to be tweaked.

2) How to set up fights? Now this is more challenging. In Eve we got a couple of really nice mechanics, which could be adopted for Dust. War Declaration, Bounties, Fleet Adverts and FW System Control.

So, you want to take over a district? First, you have to declare war on the owning corp. After 24 hours, fighting can legally occur, and you can order your war barges into orbit arround their planets. The more barges you got, the more planets you can assault simultaneously. The more MCC's you got, the more districts you can assault simmultaneously.

Now, how to make sure there are ppl willing to fight? Allow the owning corp to set up a Battle Advert for each district that is being attacked. They can decide who can join in on the battle based on standing and membership (no standing, light blue, blue, corp or alliance). Warring factions are automatically excluded from these Battle Adverts, negative standing is by default excluded, but can be allowed. These adverts could be set up in advance, and automatically activate once a war starts.

Any team eligible to act on the advert, can enter the battle. At that point, a match is set up which will start once both sides have a full team, or once a timer runs out. Depending on which side wins the battle, district control will shift. Once control has shifted completely to the agressing side, ownership will change. The beauty is, that timers are built into this system. Let's say you need 12 consecutive wins to flip the system. A match will start a 2 hour timer, so it will take a minimum of 24 hours to flip a system in the case noone shows up.

But what about pay-out?

Let both sides put up a contract pool on the district. Teams are payed out from this pool, based upon win/loss and value destroyed.

My 5 cents on the topic ;)