This is well thought out. Thanks for posting it. I will say its just really hard to properly evaluate it since the high level stuff is still unknown to us. I would hope CCP FoxFour or CCP Nullarbor would put up their dev blog regarding this ASAP. Once we see what they have for us then a lot of the detail you provided can be evaluated along with what ccp has designed.

+1

What I want clarification on, is how will this affect Planetary Interaction in EVE online. My character in EVE is very involved with PI, and CCP said that they have installed PI with DUST 514 directly in mind. So I can't imagine the current PI changing too much from what it is, though I'm sure it will change some as realities of these two games interfacing begin to come to light. But as an EVE player, I want to see my PI involvement also make a difference. Possibly a new career in EVE online. A planetary base designer that is paid for his expertise, proven in battle, of designing and placing facilities.

See, I like this because it contains several similar ideas to what I put forward in a thread of my own. +1 from me.

You've been quite busy Vaerana, +2! But I do have a question...

When you go on to talk about Infrastructure of Territory, and you talk about biological productions (Proteins-> Amino Acids, Biofuels, etc) do these types of Biological productions give an inherent bonus to clone supply should battle occur in the territory? Or even just in the general ward/rim? Or not at all?

So if I had Biomass Plant A in North Ward, would the whole territory have an inherent boost to clone supply, or just Northward, or not at all?

Although the Biomass plant has little to do with clones, wouldn't the resources it create supplement clone supply do to the nature of the production?

Good work though!

Ok I was thinking proteins as in Amino Acid productions.

Now I have another question,

In developing a ward/territory, would you add infrastructure via a simple fitting mechanic or would you actually get to choose the location that a said factory can be built?

For instance you have an open territory and want to place build it up. You want to place an Orbital Emplacement on a mountain to better defend it, would that be possible? Or would it be generically placed?

That would be amazing. Could consoles handle that though?

Sorry if tis was asked but how does this work with the reinforcement timers that they talked about in the Foxfour thread?

Yes, CCP would do the best table-top RP games if they ever do them, they create great setting, print a book and let you dream. When it comes to software it takes them years and years to shape things. But it's good and with no real alternative.

So I haven't seen this referenced yet, but have you guys seen the DUST 514 PS Home station video that looks like it is previewing the district conflict interface? It shows command nodes and a whole planet covered in hexagonal tiles. Its like a 5 second clip though...?

I love these ideas. They fit very well into an idea I posted in a thread a while back about getting rid of "game modes" and making the objectives of each battle vary with the installations present. For example:

An empty district would simply require winning an ambush battle (or series of ambush battles) to gain control of it.

But:

A refinery might require itself to be captured to flip a district. The refinery might have several stages of objectives a la Skirm 1.0 before victory is acheived.

However, this allows a alternate take on objectives; sabotage or hit and run missions.

The same refinery has an alternate set of objectives that if pursued instead of the capture objectives, would destroy the installation permanently, or at least damage it requiring a cooldown of a varyig amount of time before it is operational and productive again, depending on the amount of damage dealt to the facility.

This would allow dynamic campaigns. Tactics like actual raids on enemy territory to disable key infrastructure without taking and holding territory would become available, or scorched earth campaigns were defenders destroy their own installations before they leave.

And of course, installation based game modes would make it more variety with the game.

For instance imagine the possible objectives for a skyfire battery compared to a supply dump, or a surface command center compared to those of a war factory... The possibilities are endless.

The scale or importance of objectives would depend on installation size, with main objectives being the large installations, side objectives medium, and minor objecives small installations.

I must type up a thread on this.

Your proposed district systems would work seamlessly wiith my ideas, making a very real and organic connection between PI and DUST battles.

In total agrrement with you on the crux of the merc experience being driven by resource geopolitics + territory investment - there so much good that comes from working fro

I'm thinking the interplay of the right attack/defense mechanics with a resource/territorial conflict driver like yours is what will give us the richest experience gaming has ever seen.

As a working model to iterate on, A'RealFury/Free Beers attack/defense mechanics with Vaerana Myshtana resource/territory conflict drivers are well on the way to giving this merc the full-clonebody-nerdgasm that online gaming promised 20+ years ago.

This goes against many posts I've made on how I don't want to see "walking in stations" implemented anytime soon, but that's because I want other things to be fixed well before that occurs.

But...(WARNING)

What if for pure aesthetics, you could move your Mercenary Quarters planetside/moonside and have a window view of the district?

I'm sure people in EVE have barrels of ISK to throw, and I'm sure it would occur in real life if legal, but basically storm mansions so you can live there.

You got this beautiful view of a mighty fine planet, on occasion, you hold LAV races around the district for fun. You use your beautiful but resource devoid as a firing range and just for your occasional drug deal.

But then Richy Rich shows up and starts a heated battle over your killer vista.

Thoughts?

I'm thinking CCP should add a player-designed architecture module to DUST and allow publishing like Spore did - we could then sell our designs for ISK or trade them for officer weapons ^^

You're right of course - the intelligence of the New Eden playerbase not withstanding, time-to-*****(ttp) has a natural unit measured in minutes from the release of any player-controlled graphical tool, so to speak.

It would add a lot to the appeal of the game to a larger(i.e. the sims crowd) playerbase who would luv to $pend-to-create and personalize.

+ 1
Great idea man, and some great discussion in this thread, if CCP managed to implement the system you described, i could imagine a massive draw to this game because it would involve a good mix of strategy for the RTS guys to fawn over and the fast paced action of the FPS guys.

Personally i'd be interested to see the dynamic of the interaction between EVE and Dust if this became reality as the control of the districts that are heavily built upon would be of strategic importance to the power blocs in eve.

Thats where the we the mercs would come in as the "first strike" as it were, to take the planets while the capsuleers fight above to take the system, would be a great opening move in a sov war and make it more interesting too.

Also a idea just throwing it out there, to have the sov mechanic have both a space TCU and a planet TCU per system , would definitely shake things up if as an alternative to using SBU's a merc corp could hack the planet side one to allow the strike of the space counterpart.

Like you said the power blocs have way too much control ,with the OTEC agreement for the tech moons the isk flow is streaming towards the big blocs as it is. But i divert, keep it up :)

The biggest result of the rebalancing was that Tech became even moreso the be-all and end-all for moongoo. Hence the Goon/Test Pax Technia.

There are still other huge supercap fleets out there, but the stark reality is the Goons and TEST, because they're the primary Techholders, are really the only alliances that can recover quickly from large supercap losses.

I hear you re: the very real fear that the alliances will find a way to sew up planets.

We really need to keep hammering away at these terrestrial resource models and battle mechanics until we know we've got a system that's very resistant to planetary stagnation and domination through overwhelming wealth.

The complementary TCU's is an attractive idea for adding much-needed dynamics to SOV. Just as attractive, it separates land-holding from affecting SOV, and leads to more interesting dynamics. Taking districts/planets but not installing a terrestrial TCU might keep you off the mega-blob radar for a little while.

i feel like CCP reads all the terribad threads and skips the good ones.

One of the best, if not the very best post on these threads.

Keep your hopes high!

I hope we as a community keep this topic on top and I would hope that CCP could at lease acknowledged that they have seen this.

Here's my suggestion for the day:

With the destruction of EVE ships above the District, what if, and this might be server breaking, but what if they came down into Dust and crashed on the battlefield?

it would be space port to customs office. then into eve players holds who would then haul to market.

eve is not like dust for the market an item bought or sold in one station stays in that station until you move it. this is why we have trade hubs.

you may find thesse diagrams useful for renaming the products as they already exsits in eve and come from pi (planetery interaction) http://www.eve-online-fan.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Eve_PI_Diagrams_v1_4.pdf

a lot of the base products are not very useful to an eve pilot due to low value and size. it only really becomes worth moving them with the 2nd tier and even more so the third. some products as you can see on the diagrams are very complex to make requiring several planets to make.

CCP would have to kludge something since EVE's old celestial physics engine is pretty awful but hard to change.

In response to Original Post;

Can infrastructure be destroyed? In the sense of an MCC.

In response to Original Post;

Can infrastructure be destroyed? In the sense of an MCC.

Subcontractor - Three levels (Basic, Standard, Advanced) improving manufacturing speed and efficiency for Manufacturing PSIs. (NEW)

Could cease fire agreements be made? So say to very evenly matched Corps with lots of supplies and the battle is beginning to falter because people are logging off. Could Team leaders make an official cease fire agreeing to stop fight for an intermission then pick it up at an agreed date? Because that would be nice. It would add a nice intensity to playing.

"Man this battle is killer, been at it for four days now!"

But then wouldn't battle progression be lost if the game just ended? And so you are favoring replacing the tired with the fresh to keep battle more constant rather than consistent (which could definitely work).?

Is there going to be a way to sell districts?

OP makes me feel like the Dust beta should look more like this.

Our corp is huge.
+1

So I have a few questions about the Sov grinding that was mentioned in the dev blog/forums. CCP NULL said that attackers bring with them a certain amount of clones (as many as they want), and the defending district has whatevers on the district.

Soooooo heres a few questions about that....

1.) Can you redistribute clones from one district to another while its in its "seige" mode?? Thus making it impossible to out grind their clones simply because they make a whole planets worth per day?

1/b.) Can attackers see the clone count on each district before attacking?

2.) Can a corp launch mulitple attacks on every district at once if they want to? or do they need to own a district adjacent to whatever district they want to attack?

3.) if the answer is that they do, how does a corp go about attacking a district on a planet entirely owned by one corp?

4.) NULL only mentioned winning a district by out grinding the other teams clones, ok thats fine but what if the other team just doesn't show up? You cant grind out their clones if nobody is there to die...

5.) so that leads up to me asking if theres going to be some other method of taking a district.... like via objectives or something?? Do the defenders have to actaully..... defend an objective? like a massive console that just blows up their mcc if we capture it? or perhaps like the current skirmish?? (i hope not).

6.) also regarding the whole market/selling clones. Is the market regional? does it work like how eve does where you have to pick up the items bought at the station it was sold at? Or will it all be just one massive market? If it is a regional system then how will that work? what type of transport can dust players used? Personally i would like the regional system as it makes the market more complex, but i could understand if thats just not something we want to do with dust.

Indeed we should.

I love today's announcement, but I hope they implement a system similar to what you and I have put forward in the future.

yup most of that has been covered in the main announcement thread at this point.

Let's get down to Nitty Gritty

Economics, SP, and Eve

So given that infrastructure will be pricey so to keep it level on the Actions Vs. Consequences as well as to prevent everyone and their mother can't operate mining facilities and Space Cannons. But let's compare the income of Dust Vs Eve. ...

In the end, the ISK advantage Eve Corp had brought the hell down on Dust corp.

Did they say that they are not doing this in the dev blog?

What about upgrades that can only be built on held districts?

If you want a dueling arena, or a VR practice room, or a drving course, you can install these upgrades. Destroying an opponents training facilities is far more interesting than cut their profits by .05%. Also gives space a "home" aspect that you can't simply abandon certain districts willy nilly because a tough challenge came knocking on your doorstop.

Great job, OP! I would love to see the features you mentioned added to the game.

Edit: Sorry, I forgot that I already posted my support for this thread, but it's still great anyway.