POB Siege Idea

[LuckyOne]

There are only a few relatively small changes required to fix most of the issues people have with POBs.

As far as I know the first one is already in the works and it's related to the area denial abilities of Weapons Platforms, which should be severely reduced in the future, after the changes are implemented.

The second one exists as a proof of concept, and it's about time to build vs time to destroy. Currently it takes on average a lot more time to build a base than to destroy it. That is because the build rate is effectively capped by the amount of "ticks" available per day.

The destroy rate on the other hand is theoretically uncapped, but in practice limited by the amount of attackers available to siege, and the amount of defenders available to drive the attackers off.

I'd say the effort required is currently about the same, if we look at a case of a single POB - grinding cash for caps vs hauling stuff to the POB, with the caveat that once you get the caps you can effectively use them to siege an unlimited number of bases.

The current mechanics put the defending side at a noticeable disadvantage.

There are basically three ways to fix this disadvantage:

1. Make repair ships able to repair bases. The overall effort stays about the same, but bases can be brought up to full health more quickly by a sufficiently large group of players. The repair rate could be halved if the shield is up, thus allowing attackers to still maintain pressure.

This would balance out theoretically uncapped destruction rate with the capped construction rate by allowing the builders to increase the construction rate by active participation.

2. Cap the destruction rate artificially, by the plugin. Basically, this would make the base ignore an amount of DPS larger than X.

This balances out theoretically uncapped destruction rate with the capped construction rate by putting a hard limit to the sensible attacking force.

3. Make attacking each base require some additional effort from the attackers. Just like the defenders need to haul repair materials, the attackers could also need to haul destruction materials / munitions. The required amount would have to be adjusted so it is smaller than construction materials, seeing as it's much easier to destroy a battleship with a cargo hold full of ammo than the base.

This balances out theoretically uncapped destruction rate with the capped construction rate by removing AFK siege ability, so it would be hard to balance, as the defenders keep their AFK repair ability.