POB Change Suggestions

[Grumblesaur]

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Critique
Suggestion Addressed: Sava's limited siege window idea

Problem Summary

• The intended behavior during a siege whose attackers and defenders have aligning schedules is not discussed; is this feature supposed to apply for all sieges, or only for the ones that have a temporal disparity between the attacking and defending parties?
  
• If this feature must be used in all scenarios, and the attack and defense phases overlap either partially or exactly, does the damage cap take precedence, or does the unlimited damage rule take precedence?
  
• If this feature is only used during scenarios where the time disparity is significant, it actively disadvantages players whose play times are off-peak.
  
• Damage cap on defender's phase diminishes the need of defenders to actually defend their base during their chosen phase.
  
• Assumes that only one siege on a base can be waged at once; that is, there is no consideration for separate, concurrent sieges against the same base.
  

Amendment

• Eliminate the damage cap rule.
  
• Describe rules for handling separate, but concurrently-declared sieges against a single base.
  

Further Discussion, regarding risk

Spoiler

If the defenders can repel the attackers during the attackers' phase, and the defenders can supply the base during the downtime phase(s) between the attack and defense phases, the base will net no damage, even if the attackers brought a larger force during the defense phase than during the attack phase. If the defenders and attackers choose the exact same time window for their phases, and the damage cap rule takes precedence, the base is nearly invincible due to the downtime period permitting repair materials to be supplied in an amount sufficient to regenerate all or nearly all of the damage sustained during the overlapped attack-defense phase.

Having a damage cap also means that large factions with lots of players effectively lose the advantage they earned by recruiting and outfitting additional members, while bases maintained by small groups get to enjoy the effective benefits of greater manpower and coordination without actually having to organize additional players. Base owners should be motivated to organize players for defense, either through recruitment, or by forging contracts/alliances with other groups; allowing off-hours POB supply traders to replace defense-phase combat ships subverts the intrinsic fleet-style PVP qualities of a siege.

Note: off-hours POB supply traders will naturally receive the benefits of the rules which prevent transports from being treated as combat targets without a demand, unless an additional rule is specified which permits the attacking party of a siege to destroy supply ships bound for the besieged installation. In this, and in the time windows themselves, the very idea of a siege (being a military operation to starve out a city, base, or other fortified target of interest) is eliminated. Supply lines cannot be cut off when downtime is always guaranteed to be allocated to them.

While I think eliminating the damage cap during the defense phase of the base would improve this idea, I think it weighs too heavily in favor of the defenders regardless. Siege is a PVP engagement, and defenders should still need to muster forces for that engagement, even if these limited-time phases are utilized.

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Further Discussion, regarding time

Spoiler

Temporal disparity was a major discussion point in other threads, and was usually assumed to be malicious scheduling on the part of the attackers. I think it does a severe disservice to the community at large to assume that people deliberately choose inconvenient times to siege; it is impossible for users to know every other user's personal routines and country of residence. Attackers are more likely to choose a time to siege based on its convenience for them, not its inconvenience for their adversary.

There is no misunderstanding here about the function of Sava's original suggestion, deliberate or otherwise; but it leaves questions unanswered about whether policy, programming, or both will determine the times of siege, and what should happen if the attacking players and defending players have schedules near enough to overlap.

What's 3AM for some players is 6PM for others, and it could hypothetically be any time assuming we have Discovery players in every populated time zone. Furthermore, there seems to be an underlying assumption that every POB encounter will be between attackers and defenders of disparate, incompatible schedules, which in practice is demonstrably not true, because we know that players in opposing factions exist in the same time zone. Likewise, we know that one faction can have members from multiple time zones.

Hence the concern regarding overlapping attack and defense phases. Sometimes there will not be a temporal disparity. Is this change optional in those cases, or should it be used in a special way? This is unclear.

Additionally, should ever two separate factions declare siege on a single base, without specifically forming an alliance to do so, would they be given simultaneous attack phases, or separate attack phases? Would the defenders have to pick two defense phases, or keep only one? The current, organic system of POB siege does not need to make this consideration because that kind of complexity is not currently necessary to account for.

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Final thoughts
The siege time window suggestion does not solve a balance problem intrinsic to POBs, but tries to solve a problem of incompatible time zones that applies in the general case to all online activity in only the domain of POBs. Lastly, it narrows the availability of interaction with a base considerably, such that for the many hours not alloted as part of the siege schedule, the base has a far longer OoRP protection than normal combat rules offer.

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