If you attack before the 1 hour Reinforcement Phase, the actual battle doesn't happen till 24 hours have passed and the next Reinforcement Phase happens. By attacking before the Reinforcement Phase you can battle the next day.

If you attack after the Reinforcement Phase the actual battle won't happen till 24 hours have passed and you come to the next Reinforcement Phase, so the actual battle could be nearly 2 days after the attack started.

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_Conquest


Attack Scenario 01:

Reinforcement timer set to 12:00 - 13:00
Attacker launches an attack at 11:00 on Monday
Defending district set as "under attack"
Battle happens in the 12:00 - 13:00 window on Tuesday

Attack Scenario 02:

Reinforcement timer set to 12:00 - 13:00
Attacker launches an attack at 14:00 on Monday
Defending district set as "under attack"
Battle happens in the 12:00 - 13:00 window on Wednesday

You don't set the time yourself. It's randomly chosen within the 1-hour window. And I think it can start in the last minute of the window.

How can you reinforce when you only have one district? Where are these reinforcements coming from? You can only buy one pack of clones before you have a district and can buy no more after.

If you have no district, you select where you want to go and then buy your 100 clones and they get sent there. If it's unoccupied, you instantly claim it and can set your defense window time. If it's occupied and no one else is already set to attack it, you lock it in for attack at its next window after the next 24 hours.

You can't move for an attack on the first day anyway because you need to move a minimum of 100 clones and if you moved 100 clones when that is all you have, you'd be abandoning your initial district anyway. This is the same whether you have 1 corp or many sub-corps and a mother corp. The mother corp would also have to wait until it had enough clones to launch an attack on a sub-corp, even if the sub-corp had abandoned it. Also since abandoning a district causes the reinforcement timer to be removed, any corp with no district could just swoop in and claim it straight away because the mother corp would have to wait until it's own timer had gone 24 hours to have more clones to move there.

Nobody will be able to claim a 2nd district within the first few days, especially since the lack of districts compared to the number of corps means that everyone will be under attack everyday for the first few days if not weeks. There will be no way to expand quickly.

Correct

Take a read through this, it should answer most those questions: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_Conquest

I will however try and answer them again here for you. As seen in the Reinforcement timers section (http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_Conquest#Reinforcement_Timers):

Specifically take a look at the attack scenarios. You seem to be mixing up the launch attack time and the time when attacks actually happen, the reinforcement time.

So in attack scenario 01:
Reinforcement timer set to 12:00 - 13:00
Attacker launches an attack at 11:00 on Monday
Defending district set as "under attack"
Battle happens in the 12:00 - 13:00 window on Tuesday

For arguments sake lets say the battle ends up being at 12:30. The attackers have from 12:30 until 13:30 to launch another attack on the district. If they choose to do so the battle will happen in the 12:00 - 13:00 window on Wednesday. Does that make sense?

The reinforcement timer can never go backwards. So RT set for 15:00. It is currently 01:00 on Monday. You change the RT to 02:00. The district is locked until 02:00 on Tuesday and you don't get clones until 02:00 Tuesday.

So, another question : We will be able to choose a district for his localisation, his default SI and a default RT ?

Or the RT will be randomly seeded after the capture ?

And I'll ask my last question in this post : after that, we'll be able to change the RT 1 hour by 1 hour every day, so the district is lock during the operation that could take 1 day to 23 ?

The question is for empty districts...

I think it all happens at the next RT. I don't know what difference this would make though, apart from the stats changing when someone checks on your districts.

It'd be good to get confirmation on this actually. If your reinforcements did arrive immediately, you could move them multiple times in 24 hours. I'm honestly not sure if this would ever be of use or a problem at all but it is a point nonetheless.

And also to answer your first question from that post - locked or unlocked doesn't affect production, only online/offline status.

Edit - CCP Fox Four answered as I typed! Wiley fox that one ;)

If your RT is set at, for example, 12:00, you could move clones to the district at 11:00, then do so again at 13:00. That's 2 hours apart. Not within the same 24-hour RT cycle, but still well within 24 hours.

The only problem is if any of the districts involved are attacked during that time, because the "under attack" state blocks them from reinforcing or being reinforced.

I was under the impression that it locks until the RT at least 24 hours later. No?

Sorry, I missed a line. I was SO wrong.

MINIMUM 24 hours, AND it unlocks in the reinforcement window. So if you had your RT set to that 12:00 time I specified, and reinforced it at 13:00, you'd end up waiting through 24 hours, just past your next RT, then have another 23 hours (total of 47) before the district unlocks. Ouch.

See this link: http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_Conquest#Reinforcement_Timers

Change Surface Infrastructure Scenario 01:

Reinforcement timer set to 12:00 - 13:00
Corporation changes SI at 11:00 on Monday
District state changed to locked
District unlocks at 12:00 on Tuesday


Change Surface Infrastructure Scenario 02:

Reinforcement timer set to 12:00 - 13:00
Corporation changes SI at 14:00 on Monday
District state changed to locked
District unlocks at 12:00 on Wednesday

http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Planetary_Conquest#District_States

The locking and unlocking of districts works the same yes.

We kind of wanted to give more value to the cargo hub, so no changes to maximum clone storage.

These larger numbers make it seem like smaller/newer corps are going to have a hell of a time trying to get involved in PC, at least until the number of districts becomes substantially more.

Imagine if you were a smaller corp of moderately skilled players. You can field 16... barely. For a corp like this, participating in PC will be very... expensive. First, most other corps will know your not the best, so you will be a target. And every time your attacked, you will lose a significant amount of isk, even if you win. Combine that with the significant cost of just getting started, and if your not a top 20 corp, forget about PC. And if your not one of their best 16 fighting in one of these corps, your pretty much just a isk farmer for your corp.

Sucks.

If they can't form an alliance then they shouldn't be thinking about sov.

Holding sov is going to take more money and manpower than many people are expecting.

I'm going to build an example using the following list of criteria:

1. Both teams are similarly equipped and have equal skill at killing other players. This means there should be approximately a 1:1 K/D during each battle.

2. The attacker holds their own district, thus allowing them to send only 150 clones (instead of the 200 you'd be sending in a Genolution pack).

3. The attacker's district isn't under attack, but they only hold one district.

4. The Defenders are holding a district with a Research Lab, meaning they get no bonuses that relate to defense of the district.

5. The attackers are on the same planet as the defenders, meaning no clone loss on their attack.

Using these criteria, it's obvious that a defender who is winning has all the advantages. I'm going to present two scenarios below, working with the above criteria, one where the attacker has a Cargo Hub, and one where they have a Production Facility. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume the defender is winning the battle by MCC destruction, but after killing 100 clones and losing 100 of their own.

Cargo Hub:

Day 1:
Attacker starts with 450 clones. Sends 150 to attack defender. Defender has 300 clones, and loses 100. Attacker loses 150 clones, 50 of which survive the battle. Of those 50 survivors, 20% are given to the defenders.

Day 2:
Attacker has only 300 clones left, meaning 150 left after launching the attack. Their 75 clone production means they have 225 left in the district post-battle. Defender recovered 10 clones from the enemy, and 75 clones are produced on-site. They have 285 clones remaining.

Day 3:
Attacker has 225 clones left. That leaves 75 after launching the attack, plus the 75 being produced that day. This means you only have 150 clones left. If you attack again on day 4, you will be abandoning your current district to do so. I wouldn't call that a viable strategy when you've been destroying the profitability of your own district to inflict minimal damage against the defenders.

Day 4: No attack happens, but a new one is scheduled for day 5. Now-stalled attacker has 225 clones again, but the defender has a full 300 based on only 45 of their 75 clones produced. That means they get PROFIT from the remaining 30 while the attacker is earning NOTHING because they're spending all their clones on attacks.

Production Facility:

Day 1: Attacker starts with 300 clones. Sends 150 to attack defender. Defender has 300 clones, and loses 100. Attacker loses 150 clones, 50 of which survive the battle. Of those 50 survivors, 20% are given to the defenders. Because there are only 15 clones left, launching an immediate follow-up attack will result in the attackers cloning themselves out of their own district before they produce enough clones to retain the territory.

Day 2: No attack happens, but a follow-up is scheduled for the following day. The defenders are only down 15 clones, and that means they make a profit from selling the other 60. Attacker has 225 clones after production.

Day 3: Attacker sends 150 clones from their district. After production, they only have 150 clones, meaning they lose the district if they follow up with another attack. Obviously, this means the attacker can lock down an enemy district on alternating days as long as they manage to go without any need to defend their territory.

Conclusion:

Attacking and NOT winning in Planetary Conquest will quickly become unsustainable, and achieves too little to be a cost-effective way to "grind" an enemy district down. I don't see this being much of an exploit, if at all.

EDIT: Just re-read the wiki page, and spotted something I forgot in the "notes" section of the combat resolution.


...oops.

So you're going to be wearing down the defending territory at a rate of 25 per attack if they win with 100 deaths each time.

An important question:

Defender positioning. Will defenders start with NULL cannon control? Will they start at a near location to bases as opposed to attackers who need to find a way in? Will defenders control all installations in the beginning of skirmish?

Anything else than the above scenario feels unintuitive and odd to me.

Those numbers are not surprising at all. For the sole fact that even when attacker and defender both win a game, attacker gets 2 clone reinforcement when defender only gets one (check my post above). And you're forgetting the fact that most fight wont play out on the same planet and that includes attrition. Also, what are the odds that this attacking corp isnt attacked at the same time while committing all those clones in the conquest of one district.

FInally, it only makes sense that a corp attacking over and over and over again a district ends up wearing out the defenders clones if they cant manage to win more games that their assailants. It's called a "siege" situation. And in most historical cases, it never ends well.

Now, i would like to suggest something for discussion. What if an attacker couldnt attack the same district for 24h when losing a fight ? Or could still attack it but not using the same base district to move the clones for 24h ? Adding some kind of cool down.

This doesnt de-incentive attacking. Some mechanic could just add a feelin of "set-back" just like losing as a defender gives you that feeling as you dont generate any clone.

You appear to have missed the edit on my post that you're referring: Here, I'll repost the quote that I got from the Wiki where this scenario doesn't play out quite how I said it would originally...



If you only send the minimum 150 clones into battle and you lose, any survivors are killed off instead of letting the winners sell off the excess.

Also, both of our examples were assuming, at best, attacking from a district on the same planet, and at worst, attacking from another planet in the same system, but with a Research Lab to negate the clone losses. If you want to have 150 soldiers on the ground a couple of systems away, you're going to be sending more than 200 clones. That's going to have a HUGE impact on how fights play out when this goes live.

Equal skill in DIRECT combat means that face-to-face on the battlefield, there's a 50/50 chance of either side winning the encounter. But in an objective-based game mode, the focus is no longer on direct combat, and because the suggested scenario I was working with had been a scenario where the attackers were LOSING EVERY TIME, I was presenting a defender's worst-case scenario in which this would actually logically happen.

think what will end up happening a lot though is that the attackers will have a couple of goes and either burn out or decide they probably need to save some clones for their own defense and then some other corp will jump in and finish the job, seeing that the defenders clone count has already been reduced somewhat. Ooooor even if the attacker manages to take the district, they'll have reduced clone numbers from hard fighting, leaving the district vulnerable to another attacker in the same manner.

That would be good logic, apart from the fact that this addresses a very specific scenario:


That says you're wrong. It's the same part I missed the first time I read it.

Which is why I was emphasising that I was working with the presented scenario where the defender always won the battle, but lost their district through attrition anyway. That was the scenario presented, and what I was providing is a situation by which that could happen in basically the worst possible way for the defenders. It's also why I specifically emphasised equal skill in DIRECT combat, not equal skill in all areas. That argument is a completely separate one to what I was actually addressing.

That's a VERY good question. But if you're wanting to grind down a defender's forces heavily, a 200 or even 250 clone attack would be a practical option if you can be sure of losing enough clones - and killing enough - to balance out the numbers in your favour. Unless you get totally dominated, the worst-case scenario is that the defenders see through the plan, retreat, and let you lock the district down with 150 clones killed.

And this MIGHT be countered by someone following your victory up with an immediate attack if they're watching for the battle results and set the attack before your corp can send those reinforcements.

Ah, I missed the very first line of Skihids post, which says the defender wins every battle. The more interesting question is why the defender loses the district every time even with the same skill level and number of victories (with in many cases relative-little clone loss by the attackers), which is what my long post in the previous page is about.

Let's say both district engage in the fight have a RT set between 12h00-13h00pm.And both have a cargo hub. Same planet. No attacks on district A.

District A (attackers) 450 clones
District B (defenders) 450 clones.
Regen rate 75 clones per RT.

Day 1
District A attacks District B at 9h00 am with 150 clones.
Come RT. No fight. Excess clone is sold for district B
District A is at 375 clones.

Day 2 12h00.
RT starts, both district generate clones
District A is at 450 clones
District B sells the excess of clones.
Fight happens. Attackers win through MCC destruction. Defenders lose 150 clones. Attackers lose 140 clones. 10 clones sold.

District A sets another attack with 150 clones at 12h45 once battle is over.

District A : 300 clones
District B : 300 Clones

Day 3 12h00

District B doesnt generate clones.
District A does.

District A : 375 clones
District B : 300 Clones

NO BATTLE happens as it's not been a full 24h since the first fight Don't know if you guys took that into account but it's important. Or at least that's the way i understood that part of the wiki

It would be nice to know if what matters is the overall RT or the beginning of the RT regarding that rule. If it has been answered before then my bad but i dont think so. Let's move on.

Nope, it has been said clone movement is done instantly. So when setting the attack, your 150 clones would 'leave" your district and idle in the targetted one. Unless it works differently for fights.

The whole point of this post was to raise questions.

given that the act of moving your clones into a district is what either claims a district or sets up an attack, I think we can safely say that the movement of clones is instant

I seem to remember a dev post earlier here (i am not searching 50 odd pages for it! lol) that stated that the "dibs" hour happens for an hour after the battle has finished.

I think you have to suspend lore a little bit here regarding the 24 hour delay, your district is invaded by the arrival of enemy forces, but the delay is forced on us because of real world considerations to allow players from all over the world to play this game without descending into timezone chaos. Clearly, within new eden a defence would be immediately mounted

Yeah well. Regarding lore and such. If you receive an attack notice and clones move at the last moment, why would your district be locked in a way that even stops you from getting reinforcements from another district for the next 24 hours ?

Just sayin, lore is to be forgottent atm.

Devs only need respond. Fanboys will not be acknowledged.

Just out of interest, where has this 75 clones generated at RT come from?

40 + 50% = 60?

1. Clone packs are inordinately expensive. At 43 mill isk a piece it's all but impossible for a corp to keep a steady stream of them coming.

2. 1:1 is almost never an issue. Most skirmish games, even the close ones right now are won by mcc destruction rather than clone count. Usually both sides have a little under half their original clones left. Also, defender gets twenty percent of the attackers clones upon a victory, so there's that.

3. If an attacker is winning consistently, even by just a few clones, then they should take the district.

After thinking about this a lot while I slept all day (because asleep is when I do my best thinking, apparently), I've realised that sending the attackers instantly is a GOOD thing for the game.

Why?

Because it forces the attackers to balance out the delays in attacking and the delay in their own reinforcements replacing the attacking clones. And because it gives the attackers some chance to attack while also having at least a chance at defending themselves against someone else - or a retaliatory attack from another district under the same (or allied/hired) ownership.

Lets say the attacker has their RT set to 06:00 and the defender has 12:00. If the attacker declares their attack at 11:30 to minimise the amount of warning their target is given, that means they're waiting for almost 18 hours with a 150 clone hole in their defenses. If they instead launch their attack at 5:30 to better line up with their reinforcements, then they give the enemy Corp an extra 6 hours' notice about the attack, which could potentially mean the difference between having your best player (or a high-tier squad from a friendly/mercenary Corp) and not getting to them in time.

Extra question : does buying an SI affects your district status in any way ?

Example : can you first buy a new SI and then change RT ? Does buying a New SI locks your district so you then cannot attack or move clones ?

Don't reckon there's any need to change the attacker's outcome Win or lose, just buff a winning defence so that people have to beat you because they're better than you not just bigger

"Game Of Clones"

Vaerana Myshtana had a good idea on skills to boost ISK in post #340. Skihids was right that this is a "peacock's tail" from back in post #738. They guy who doesn't want fanboys responding in post #1078 claims it will be 3 days for all land to be taken, not a 3hour land grab rush. Hmmm, I agree. My corp is top 150 for warpoints, so out of the 250 districts we're involved enough to earn a spot and when I talked to them they weren't interested much when I said we defend the same map everyday until we lose it. I talked with another corp (the EVE player in it said "we can benefit much from an alliance with each other"...typical) that is ranked close to us and they only had 2 people online.

if an attacker sends 200 clones (none lost on transport), and lose 100 in the battle and lose the battle itself through MCC destruction, does the 20% get taken away from the remaining 100 or only 50 because they have to lose 150 minimum? Number wise, would the defender get 10 or 20 clones in that case ?


When do the clones travel to the targeted district when declaring an attack ?
-Immediately after sending the notice
-When RT starts on battle day
-When fight starts


About how the "Dibs Hour" is set up

-The attack notice sent during the "Dibs Hour" is back dated to a moment before the RT so the attacker can attack on the next coming RT ?
-Dibs Hour starts right after the battle ends ?
-Can an attacker send another attack notice before the first fight happens or does he need to wait until Dibs Hour starts ?


Does the clone survival rate apply for the journey back after the battle is over?


About loot "being a percentage of the items lost in the battle such as vehicles, drop suits, and weapons. Including Aurum items."

-Does that include modules and equipment (so basically everything being used) or just vehicle hulls, suits and weapons -What is that percentage exactly ?


Planning on sending the mail tomorrow. And will obviously post every reply in that thread. Or FoxFour will do it himself.

About the status of the targeted district on battle day, what state is it in when:

-RT begins and before the battle starts
-During the battle
-During "Dibs Hour" and until attacker decides its next move