You know I am going to attack the district next to your home base just so we can be neighbors pinky promise

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

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

Corp A has 24 People
Corp B has 2400 people

Corp A has 100 Territories
Corp B wants them.

Corp A can only fight one battle a time, Corp B can simultaneously attack everything A has in one go.

If pure anti Zerg methoods where instated then 1 man corps would ruin most of dust. Numbers are going to help protect you player empire while you sleep, while you work, while you are logged off, and in more places than you can possibly be at any given time.

Now granted corp A can call in reinforcements and Corps C - Infinity could interfere with corp B's activities as well but who says they can't screw over corp A more. After all most corp gankbears are vultures they will pick at a wounded beast until it dies.

You're forgetting the simple fact that with more people a larger corp can cover far more ground, doesn't matter how small the battlefield is, you must know that there are MORE THAN ONE BATTLEFIELD to fight.

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

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

Reinforcement timers are not free, 100 star bases getting triggered could have a massive impact on a smaller corp's wallet. Disrupts their focus and makes it harder to predict which one is the actual target. Means Corp B gets the real pick of what toys they want to break on that district (for example if they feel corp's A overuse of tanks to save their split fights taking out the tank factory would hurt, but so would the mineral mines that fuel that same factory or the reactor power plant that powers both facilities or the fire base that over watches the factor and can shell all 6 faculties.

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.

Corp A has 24 People
Corp B has 2400 people

Corp A has 100 Territories
Corp B wants them.

Corp A can only fight one battle a time, Corp B can simultaneously attack everything A has in one go.

If pure anti Zerg methoods where instated then 1 man corps would ruin most of dust.

...

You may call this zerging
....

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.

Also, having randoms being part of the FW fights means the Player Owned Districts (POD from now on) can't be tied to FW as i, and many other people i talked with, suspect.

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 =]

You bring up something that has been really hard for us to figure out. There are so many factors that go into it and finding other examples to base ideas off is really hard because almost no one has done this before.

That something is how much will districts change hands once corporations can own them?

*twiddles thumbs and whistles*

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.

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.

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.

No, I meant that planets should be taken district by district until the entire planet is either owned or not. No income until the whole thing is owned.

When the planet is attacked its at one point ie a "landing" point. Ideally as the fight progresses across the surface multiple maps might open for a fight at the same time (2-3?)....

I go and play dust and of course IWS ruins the most epic awesome thread of the year by posting in it

Also no reinforcement timers will be here. CCP can give up dust if they do that and they wont they learned from nullsec already

As I said before it will have to be a persistant control model where by districts have a loyalty or alligiance factor the ticks up for whose in control of it. while ticking down for everyone else.

if not ccp is fail if they learned nothing from they way old fw was

My solution- Resource depletion and renewal. Make districts "play out" after awhile and require expensive retooling or an annoyingly long cool down period. That makes districts profitable, but only if you keep conquering fresh ones or are patient enough to wait for refreshment. The crummy districts would also make a good source of PVE- from Rogue Drones to scavenging materials. They are also less likely to be well defended, giving newer corps a shot at taking them.