Yeah, this could be an issue. Also how about extended downtimes too?

Extended down times hopefully will fit into the 2 hours they have blocked out for. Their words, too lazy to find it in this monster 30+ page thread. :)

If it goes over 2 hours... who knows.

So just to be sure, the table/ map on the war room will still do nothing on the next build??

I don't think there's a problem here at all. I see a trade-off, which is exactly what we want from the game.

As I understand the argument, large corps have to decide between alt corp (high admin, fast expansion, weak defense) or single corp (low admin, slow expansion, stronger defense once established) strategy. Smaller corps don't really have this problem.

That's wonderful isn't it?

No right answer, and bigger isn't entirely better.

Good morning! New day, new effort. All in good spirit :)

Since I haven't really gotten answers to the core issue I think I see with this split corps thing, I'll further elaborate by posting what I feel is an issue. I'll start with two analogies to explain what I feel is wrong or possibly just bad design. The core issue is capping the usage of manpower through an artificial limit that can be bypassed. Possibly this only applies to the first month of the game, I haven't run any simulations on clone numbers. If it's a negligible thing, then excellent, but I want to be sure this is not the inevitable short cut to dominance of a few planets. I want to be sure it won't be that when nullsec planets are opened for PC.

They want this game to cater to relatively small corps (first and foremost). If they allow big corps to take as many districts as they possibly can on day one, the small corps won't have a chance.

Splitting up into smaller corps and you're no longer a single corp but an alliance of small corps (even though 90% of your members are still in the same corp). There's no problem with an alliance of small corps, they encourage that I believe.

This idea of splitting the corp and trying to get all the districts taken on day one into the mother corp requires you to not be attacked from the get go, which just won't happen. If you take a lot of districts, and there's others doing the same, there's a lot of corps left without a district at all, and they'll come for yours from day one.

It can also succeed if you're a supercorp that only loses 40 clones or less (or 60 clones if you have a Production Facility) every battle no matter the opponent. That's unlikely though.

Edit: And for being worried about 90% of the players in a big corp to never get to play, that's in my opinion entirely your own fault for not having good enough players all around. They can also always play FW battles, which will be in the Mercenary tab in the Battle finder.

Thanks for the response.

1) My issue with catering to small corps, leading to alternate corps etc. is just that every big corp that wants to play big needs to do it to stay in pace.

2) I don't get the getting attacked part. Of course you will, and that's where you can use your merc numbers. That's the whole point: to not have 16 mercs fighting a 700 merc's battle, but instead have multiple fights going to expand quicker. The main corp can eventually tip off the districts from the placeholder expansions you managed to secure after the initial struggle, without clone loss to main corp doing so.

3) I must be missing a mechanic that's in place. Defender gets to choose timeframe, and you get the empty district you land on. Spam corps, get districts, put timeframe to when you will defend them. Instead of using 16 players at a time, you can use multiple times that if your corp's numbers allow.

4) EDIT: the day one into mother corp part doesnt exist. You play multiple corps normally, and eventually give over to mother corp so that it wont lose clones on expansions. You play multiple corps, because your size allows it and it's the reasonable thing to do with the mechanics.

On the other points. If you're a big corp (splitting into smaller corps), and you take 25 districts on day one. How many of those do you think you have on day 2 / 3 / 4 when they're being attacked and you have to use all of your mercs in your corp to defend them? With a lot of work in doing so as well, since you have 25 different corps and have to manage them all, get ringers into all the battles using people in the subcorps, dealing with disconnections where you have to get new guys into the battle.

You should take into consideration the influx of isk that'll come in when dust economy will be linked with the eve one.
The idea isn't bad per se, but the price tag should be closer to the 5 billion isk mark, imho.

Trolls, anything you do to cater to the size of big corps will just make them instantly dominate as one instead of dominating as separate smaller corps that are vulnerable because you can't share clones between them.

If you want to go through the hassle and expense of splitting into many smaller corps to try to gain an advantage, that's fine. You're definitely going to lose a lot of isk and not necessarily going to be able to expand or consolidate as fast as you can. Let's say on day 1 you split into 10 corps and claim 10 districts without conflict. Day 2 every single one of your districts is attacked. You manage to successfully defend all 10 of them but lose 60 clones on each. Not only can none of your districts move clones (each could possibly recover to 100 but you need more than that to launch an attack), people will see that they're vulnerable and have low merc numbers in their corps and you will definitely be attacked again the next day, whether by the same attackers or new ones with another bunch of 100 clones. Unless you're doing well enough in every battle to lose less than 60 clones (40 without the prod SI), you won't be able to expand at all and your empire of small corps will slowly wittle away.

In fact this scenario is true in the case of single corps too. Every corp, no matter of size or splitting will find it difficult to maintain clones enough to be able to expand because it will be constant war.

As for your analogy - CCP Fox Four earlier said that you can only buy 100 mercs because you have nowhere to store more without a district. This makes sense. It's like the hotel owner telling you, sorry we've only got one room and due to insurance purposes only 4 people can stay in there tonight (this actually happened to me and my friends roadtripping the southern states a few years back and we had 10 people!).

Having alt corps doesn't detach from making a corp bigger. In fact, you can make all of them big and see which survives to be your main.

On top of that, you can defend all the corps that you play as you would play one corp up to a point. When the time is right, you can choose NOT TO DEFEND from the main corp so that the main corp can expand without losing any clones to attack.

Analogy from imaginary RL:
You take your 30 friends on a trip to a strange country. The legislation of the hotels there says, that you can rent one room for one group signing in for the first week, two rooms beginning from the second week and four rooms after the first month. This feels very bad and you rent a room for the 30 people group, allowing eight of them to sleep inside while the rest have to get drunk and sleep in toilet or hallway. One day, a friend of yours gets an idea, though. Let's just sign in as multiple groups to get a room for everyone from the first day. Will you do it, or will you force the others to sleep in the hallway while you make sweet love to your A-girlfriend?

Analogy from EVE Online:
CCP decides to put in place a limit on ships a corp can undock in nullsec. They figure, the more POS'es you set up, the more command structure points you generate to use ships. In order to further limit this, there will be a 24h cooldown after installing POS, and the POS will start to generate command points for which you can undock ships. Now your corp of 400 newly gathered pod pilots has an issue. They want ships, but the rules dictate your corp can only undock in 40 ships and 10 ships for each POS in system. Then, one day, a corp member comes up with an idea. Let's bypass this by splitting the corp into 10 corps so that everyone can fly a ship in your nullsec system. Will you consider it, or just tell him to HTFU and go set more POS up, or go back to highsec?

You can choose not to defend and automatically lose 100 clones and a district's worth of clone production per attack you ignore, you mean?

If someone attacks, you HAVE to be there to defend, or they get an empty battlefield to play with, and they kill your MCC. Because you lost, you lose 100 clones. And because you lost by MCC destruction, that also shuts down clone production for the next cycle.

And did you even read my comment that RF Gyro was replying to? Because that details pretty clearly why, while this "tactic" might work, it's not an "exploit" and has significant enough drawbacks to be totally fair play.

Except that the hotel also has regular VIP customers who come along, and groups are bumped off the list on a "smallest group first" basis and thrown out of their rooms on a regular basis, so you're actually playing a balancing act between being the too-big-for-our-room group or being the too-small-and-thrown-out group.

And this comparison would only work if, when your POS is attacked, the defending fleet - even though it can include other members of your Alliance as well as the Corp being attacked, is limited to the numbers the POS under attack is capable of launching. That limiting mechanic (which doesn't exist in EVE, but which is alive and well in DUST, balances the advantage with a significant drawback.

Situation in Dust514
A corporation can have up to 100 NPC clones from day one, restockable to that limit. You have corporations with 700 mercs. The only way for such a big corp to put those mercs into play is to split into corps so that you have more NPC clones to play with, gaining multiple districts and fighting on multiple fronts - because that is the only thing that you can do with the 700 players when fights are 16vs16. In order to have fun for the players, uncapped by artificial clone limit, the corp needs to split into fighting for alternate corps made just to remove the clone cap.

And this doesn't detach from the main corporation at all. In fact, you are just multiplying what you do in the beginning, because it is otherwise hugely capped to what you could potentially be doing. The corporations you make don't need members of their own, since you just bring members from the main corp. All of the corporations can expand at the speed of the main corp, given you have enough mercs for it. You are taking a short cut into controlling all the space your player number allows you to, be it 3-10 districts.

Let's say you can control 6 districts. You put 3 corps in to take 2 districts each, defend the spots, and eventually give them over to the main corp by a timeframe play. This way you make sure you won't need to fight an attacking battle for them. The main corp gets a clone advantage, since it won't lose any to capturing the districts from sister corps.

Let's say you can control a bottlenecked constellation with 20 districts in the endgame, if you get a superior clone production going there. Do the same: expand with sister corps, hold the bottleneck with main, defend with sister clones from the NPC clone attacks and let one corp slowly flip it over without losing clones to attack in the process.

The RL analogy applies to the game because you have nowhere to store more than 100 clones without a district.

Honestly, I'm not quite sure I entirely follow your outposts idea - are you saying you could just spend some isk and create a new district to own? If so, this is just allowing anyone with enough isk to create their own empire from scratch without anyone being able to stop them.

Everyone starts with only 100 clones. Yes making many corps will give you the best chance of getting one of the lucky district with the prod SI but you're always going to struggle to expand because you'll be under constant attack.

There really is nothing wrong with your splitting idea if you want to do it - I'm sure many of the big corps will try because they have enough isk to throw away but no one will be able to expand enough to dominate early on because of what I've already said about being under constant attack on all fronts. If you really want to throw away hundreds of millions of isk, be my guest, it won't guarantee you the expansion you're predicting.

I suppose what you could do is anytime you're attacked you just hide and don't lose any clones, except for the 20% that are turned over to the attackers for winning. However, losing stops you being able to produce any new clones and after a few days your district becomes virtually indefensible and unreinforcable.

Yes. You are looking at wrong circumstances:

When you defend FROM YOUR MAIN CORP on your alt corp, you can choose not to show up - in which case main corp wins, and gets district which is the whole point. You can even push all the clones out from there to attack a rival just before you do that, in order to quicken the flip.

So, you can:
1) get some districts on alt corps
2) defend them normally
3) give them over to main corp when the time comes. Main corp wont lose clones to attack, making it stronger. You make sure nobody builds up a defense at the districts by having placeholders there.

I suppose what you could do is anytime you're attacked you just hide and don't lose any clones, except for the 20% that are turned over to the attackers for winning. However, losing stops you being able to produce any new clones and after a few days your district becomes virtually indefensible and unreinforcable.

The idea is: you defend normally when attacked. You just have the clones to defend individually each expansion, just like you get them for the main base. You just multiply your bases. This requires mercenary numbers, which is what being in 1 corp wont allow to put in usage.

The big problem suggested here is that you guys think that one corp (split into many smaller corps) will become invulnerable because they can claim large areas of space and then outproduce any other corp in terms of clones.

The big rebuttal is that you will be under constant attack on all fronts from day one. Even if you make a circle of self-attacks/district sacrifices against your own sub-corps to keep your districts locked, you'll never be able to produce any extra clones to be able to expand from your initial positions.

As previously stated many times now - you will struggle to even produce enough clones to attack a 2nd district from any of your sub-corps, when under constant attack from external corps.