Promoting police roleplay - separating Police and Military identity?

[Lord Caedus]

I've been thinking on this for a while now, and I think you've found the problem correctly, but you're looking at it from the opposite perspective of how it should be handled.

House militaries are a primarily defensive force, with offensive capability when in active war against another house or a large enough threat that isn't necessarily a house. Militaries should be focused on the security of two things. First of all is that they should be focused on border control and the prevention of smuggling through active interception, militaries should be proactively trying to keep smugglers out by setting up checkpoints in heavy traffic areas. Secondly, security around Jump Gates and along trade lanes should primarily be handled by the militaries. They're meant to keep powerful hostile forces away from civilian installations, and as such they should be actively attempting to do that. This is why they have access to their respective houses heaviest warships.

House police on the other hand should be played around other objectives, some of which have overlap with the militaries, and others being entirely their own focus. Police should be focused on patrolling around the large population centers, so near settled planets and major trade installations. They should also be actively focused on using their access to tlagsnet to scan for smugglers actively using trade lanes and gates from a distance, which the militaries can't do. Because of this they should be more focused on the interception of smugglers, going after the ones that would logically have snuck past the military border control. Finally they should be focused on hunting down known criminals, using their ability to know where the criminals are at against them.

From my perspective the best way to achieve this is to give the police groups tools that make them both capable of independent action, but also capable of supporting their military forces. Police groups need more tools than they currently have to stop smugglers, for a start I'd suggest opening the nodock command up to indie police, since there's no OFs to use it right now, having it restricted to them is fairly pointless. I'd also suggest a command that would disable a ship's cruise engines for a longer duration (somewhere in the several minute area) if it's possible, though from what I recall in discussing these things it would be tricky to implement at best. If it were possible for there to be a command that can remotely disable trade lanes that would also be interesting. Possibly a "Police Scanner" that works as an improved cargo scanner that can only be used with Police IDs. To balance these advantages out, and to make the police more distinct from their military counterparts, I'd suggest removing their ability to fly cruisers from their ID lines, restricting them to only being able to fly gunboats would make their interaction more interesting, while also making more sense from a lore/roleplay perspective.

Police don't need too much to make them an alternative to military IDs, and they would benefit heavily from some general overall changes to the way ZoI with capital ships works. Police should be seeing a fair bit of benefit from the new factory modules that will make smuggling more viable. The other way to give them an indirect buff would be to put more limits on where unlawful capitals can operate. Not having to worry about a Corsair/RH/Outcast battleship chasing you down on your police gunboat is going to make them a lot more enjoyable to play.

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