So:
Corp A holds a district
Corp B attacks it
Corp B is "invading" the district and depleting Corp A's loyalty
Corp A has to kick them out

How does Corp A do that? How do we schedule a match between the two and ensure players are online and able to compete in the match?

"Perhaps you think you're being treated unfairly? Good. You know it would be unfortunate if I had to leave a garrison here."

Corp B's loyalty would increase while depleting Corp A's loyalty.
Corp A would schedule an attack on the district (after the 8 hour cooling off period when corp B took district)
Corp B has X hour notice (say 4 hours for simplicity- I agree there needs to be a a warning a head of time)
Corp B chooses to fight and fields a team. (
Corp A wins battle and takes back district
Corp A's Loyalty would increase while depleting Corp B's loyalty ( As long as corp A's loyaltiy is above 50 they are in control not just occupying it)

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.

The attacking corporation gets it's foothold for free (meaning no fight) but has to fight to keep it and the fights that do happen are still behind timers, 4 hour timers instead of 24 but still timers.

clearly i am not allowed to sleep or i miss Fox posts

^ This is the point exactly. +1.

It's the underlying resource politics that need to inform the discussion of mechanics. This is how you build a system for longevity and playability. These systems need to be built fron the bottom up if they are to have any kind of coherent structure to them.

If you make the design error of trying to paste an arbitrary set of mechanics onto an underlying set of resource mechanics what I'd expecty you to end up with is a system with inherent pathologies.

Done right, player actions are driven and connected to real politics and hence other players, and not merely driven by max/min-ing a ruleset.

So:
Corp A holds a district
Corp B attacks it
Corp B is "invading" the district and depleting Corp A's loyalty
Corp A has to kick them out

How does Corp A do that? How do we schedule a match between the two and ensure players are online and able to compete in the match?

How to sell district via sandbox without built in tools UI.

In this example I assume the attackers are from the UK and attacked my district while I was sleeping. So yeah they won without a fight from us.

Districts and planets need to be battled for not just flipped over night like the old FW system. At the same time it can't be a grind like nullsec sov

Taking a district when the defender doesn't put up a fight needs to have much less reward nor loot.

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.

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.

Losing anything while you are asleep and there was nothing you could do kind of really sucks. Why have scheduling for the second battle but not the first?



Could not agree more, but they also can't become a huge grind. If it takes you 3 weeks to grind down a single district that would kind of suck.



Agreed. We also need to incentivise defending corporations to show up to fights and fight even when they know they are going to lose.

I didn't really answer much or respond to much in this post, sorry. It is going to be hard for me to be convinced against having the defender set a time when districts can be attacked, like POCOs in EVE.

don't they already have PI without us mercs?

ssooooo.......

mercs with PI, without eve capsuleers.....

It is a decent sized post with several points. Are you +1ing the whole thing or something specific?

Ill write up a the Pros and Cons as I see on this and give you a novel to read when you get in tomorrow

I'm really +1ing something general but important when trying to design for complex systems.

A'Real Fury's post is a perfect illustration of how if one implements a resource model that supports the kind of player dynamics you're looking for re: District conquest/ownership, mechanics naturally evolve out of that resource model.

We can see from the ideas developed in his post how naturally they flow once his resource model is set, and how fertile having a model is in terms of content development.

Now imagine trying to design the same kind of rich player behavior from a top-down Ruleset for District/Planet conquest and development. It's the back-engineering project from hell. And if anything needs to be changed later, god help you. Whereas a change to the resouce model propogates changes organically through your whole system.

And apologies if this is perfectly obvious to all concerned - i was getting worried with all the discussion about mechanics not grounded to anything. Maybe it's assumed in the discussion and I'm just not seeing it. Better safe than sorry, though, so i'm making a point out of it.

This is good stuff to keep in mind. :)

Just as a heads up guys I will be heading home and calling it an early night tonight. I stayed up way to late watching House of Cards last night. REALLY good show.

Please keep this discussion going though, really good stuff here. I will come back and give it a read tomorrow. :)

We love seeing you around and answering posts Fox but aren't you up past your bedtime?

Got home, started painting Warhammer, waiting for a download to finish, couldn't stay away. :(

Got home, started painting Warhammer, waiting for a download to finish, couldn't stay away. :(

What faction do you play?

I love my Necrons and Dark Eldar. I also play Gray Knights because I love my inquisitor 28 models and Chaos SM.

So many cool models, so little time :(

While I would love to discuss this, I would rather keep (and it is tough to say this) keep this thread on topic. :)