Let's talk about player bases. We've had them around for a few major version releases now and I think it's time to reanalyze what we as a server community want to come out of them. Keep in mind, the ideas I'm going to discuss aren't really a sales pitch – they're some ideas I've had that I'm merely suggesting. I would surely give up whatever foothold these ideas gain if another fellow player conjured stronger suggestions.
In other words, I don't want to argue – I want to reach an understanding. Put forth a few ideas. Find out what kind of additional fun we can have with bases.
Player bases are, mechanically speaking, a money sink. They have rewards, of course. It's a big solid bank for your faction, ample storage for cool guns, not to mention the production modules that let you produce cool toys for your ships. Despite the server being much smaller in player population from the period during which PoBs were introduced, we still seem to have a strong array of player bases scattered across the many systems of Sirius.
However, I wonder if there are ways we could squeeze more out of this feature, or if it could be repurposed as a sort of prototyping system (one of a handful of suggestions). Most of all, I think the rules pose a problem in both the effort required to enforce them and the limitations they place on the players.
Now, there are sensible rules for player base construction. Don't stick them directly in the avenues of travel – between lane rings, in front of jump gates. After all, a player base plopped squarely in the middle of the Manhattan-Fort Bush lane would cause many, many explosions a day. Keeping them out of other objects (e.g. planets) is sensible as well.
However, more specific details with regard to base placement incorrectly distribute game mechanic operations to player factions. Of note, bases built in house space are subject to house laws and fees. While I think registration forms and location management (“Why yes, you can build your base in F3. You'll find ample space there, we think.”) are fine, I am opposed to the fees being paid to the player faction.
Permitting factions (really, conglomerations of factions, being houses) to accept a fee that otherwise would be a money sink (an endpoint in the game's economy) to feed back into the hands of other players is a curious choice. House governments are (I feel) inconsistently represented as not only lore and background entities driven by the story team and the developers on the whole, but also as the sum of all the non-corporate factions in a given house. In this case, the entities which can serve prospecting builders with fees are composed of players.
I think instead that constructing a base ought to have a cost associated with it (in addition to the requisite ship and resources), but not levied by other groups of players. As a part of the base construction plugin, I think a lookup table of real-estate costs for each given system should be used to automatically tap the credit balance of the character.
This could be done system-by-system, where perhaps building a base in New York costs $500,000,000, but putting up an outpost in Omicron Lost would only incur a meager $25,000,000 fee, or in a more granular way by making certain sectors (F8, G5, etc.) more or less valuable than others for a given system (this would be more time-consuming, but also contains more potential for “realism” if that's meaningful to anybody). Systems which economically have more value and convenience to players would cost more to build in, while out-of-the-way systems are easier to set up shop in, but harder to supply.
Surely this is already somewhat the case, but I feel that paying other players for a plot of space is fairly nonsensical when just about every commodity, piece of equipment, and ship in the game is a sink which leads out of the economy – the money is absorbed by the game.
Of course, I will admit that this stems from my opinion that player factions – particularly (lawful) house governments – are too powerful, especially with the ZOIs they have, but that is largely out-of-scope for this discussion.
Beyond fees and player factions playing real-estate brokers, I think the rules regarding base progression are largely unnecessary. Any schmuck can build a Core One base, sure, but the fact that we limit bases Core Two seems symptomatic of deeper problems to me.
Needing to register a player base and state intention seems unnecessary. The administrators shouldn't be concerning themselves with further paperwork (there are enough forms to fill out around here as it is) and the statement of intent is nonsensical. You can take a pretty good guess at what most bases are built for – cloaking devices, jump drives, carrier bays, ore hubs – some form of production or profiteering is usually the goal.
Maliciously-placed bases will already be visible from their initial placement. Puppy-guarding jump holes with unreasonably close weapons platforms is already well-understood to be a no-no and we have ways of dealing with the people who haven't been made aware of that precedent. There's no ill omen that a Core Two statement of intent will reveal that won't already be obvious from the base's instantiation.
We should leave that to reports and deal with the bases that cross lines rather than having to put every effort through a paperwork hoop. Bad bases will be dealt with and the good ones will be left alone. As a consequence, I think blueprints should be R&D-able by the players operating the base, rather than requiring the admins to reach down and hand them off.
As for dealing with bases from a roleplay perspective, I have mixed feelings about the necessity of attack declarations. From the standpoint of an aggressor (someone seeking to destroy a base), it seems ridiculous to need to deliver an ultimatum to a base which is intruding upon your territory or belongs to a faction that shows up as red on your rep sheet. On the other hand, this is only a game and most of us have to go to work or class or walk the dog and we can't stand vigilantly in a spacesuit atop our base watching out for nasty folk who want to blow us up.
So I won't critique the attack declaration requirements. Maybe if we could tweak shield capacity or hull integrity of bases to the point where they did take days to take down anyway we could remove the attack declaration requirements, but if they were too hardy they'd never go down.
I definitely don't want to be the person to balance that. Testing it would be impossibly time-consuming. Maybe we should do some statistical modeling for this in R or Python or something. I don't have any interest in writing FLHook, but I could come up with a model and we could play with the numbers.
All of that aside, though, I see player bases as indications of “holes” in the mod's content. Look to Inverness – four bases and two of them are PoBs. The Junkyard floats aloft behind one of the system's major planets and another base sits askance of the asteroid field with the Cortez jump hole in it. You have the presence of the Junkers and the Order there with Invergordon and the Atum. In rather bare systems such as Inverness, I think long-standing player bases ought to be made permanent in some way, especially if their use in roleplay and commerce is frequently documented in forum stories and records.
As we know, guard systems are going away and many factions are retaining one of their guard stations, moved into one of the normal systems in their ZOI. Guard systems were often designed (at least, on paper) by the faction which commissioned them. In the interests of furthering the function of player bases and retaining some aspect of the old guard system feature, I think it would be reasonable for factions to construct bases with the intention of eventually having them transformed into an NPC base.
This would be something of a freeform process, I think. Players can build the base anywhere (save for the systems which are already so full of objects that any more would nuke the game) and if the base remains alive for a long enough period of time, is used by players not affiliated with its founders or maintainers for roleplay (commercial or otherwise), and has some amount of backstory written for it, it could be introduced into the mod as an NPC base.
Or perhaps still as player bases, but set to be invulnerable and lacking a shield module which prevents docking. There are perhaps issues that would arise with who maintains control of the station internals, prices, commodities, cash-on-hand, etc, though nevertheless I feel that the possibility for NPC station candidacy would allow players to prototype new station positions for the developers and also allow them to leave their mark on Discovery's spacescape, at least for one mod version.
A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay,
brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.