Quick and dirty idea that is probably really hard to implement and also totally ripping off Lusternia's villages:
Every once in a while there's an emergency at a cosmpiercer because it comes under attack by Ishvana - possibly some kind of advance warning as folks get a message "Ishvana were seen moving towards <whatever>" several ingame days in advance? When a piercer's under attack, its ownership resets and it's up to players to fight the invaders.
When there's an invasion, there's no guards but ishvana mobs and ships spawn around and in the cosmpiercer (no generators either). Killing mobs gives little points to your faction. Killing ships gives more. Hacking control points gives most. The players' goal is to amass enough points to reach a threshold and flip the cosmpiercer to their org's control. If nobody manages to do that in alotted time then it stays under ishvana control until it's ready to be flipped again.
When there's an invasion, the cosmpiercer counts as a safe zone which means people who die get reduced cloning costs like if they were on their org's turf. This includes the 3x3 space area around the piercer too. Ships that get blown up need their insurance renewed (but it costs peanuts so no one cares) but don't lose their cargo so no 5k+ worth of supplies lost per death. Also to speed up travel, Y'saari allow players to directly warp ships into attacked cosmpiercer territory from any voidgate at no/vastly reduced cost. Course there's no voidgate on the other side so their ship gets moved to a random place in the 3x3 area.
Lastly, when a piercer gets flipped it stays under the org's control until it's under attack again BUT other orgs can weaken it so ishvana invade it faster. Generators are back up but you can dock at the piercer even when they're around - if you survive the generators ripping you to shreds. Blowing up generators weakens the piercer most, otherwise it's killing guards and hacking control points as usual. Also the piercer counts as safe territory for the owner.
Bumping this thread because we could really use some sort of mechanic where owned cosmpiercers return to the Ishvana after x number of days. When there's a lapse in conflict, being able to go beat up an npc faction gives players *something* to do. I would lock the lost cosmpiercer(s) for 24h, and optionally allow the lock only to affect the previous owning org, so that other orgs who maybe aren't always equipped to deal with player defense (especially on higher-leveled cosmpiercers) have an opportunity to attack Ishvana-held ones.
Bumping this thread because we could really use some sort of mechanic where owned cosmpiercers return to the Ishvana after x number of days. When there's a lapse in conflict, being able to go beat up an npc faction gives players *something* to do. I would lock the lost cosmpiercer(s) for 24h, and optionally allow the lock only to affect the previous owning org, so that other orgs who maybe aren't always equipped to deal with player defense (especially on higher-leveled cosmpiercers) have an opportunity to attack Ishvana-held ones.
I disagree. Having Ishvana take it for free without the faction having an opportunity to defend would be a negative play experience. Cosmpiercers are very time-consuming and motivating a group to claim them can be hard. If there were some such mechanic, it should involve some opportunity for the defending faction to hold the Ishvana back. Such a mechanic should also take its sweet time unless Cosmpiercer rewards are adjusted... it can take a two weeks to a month for a Cosmpiercer to pay for itself just in terms of ammo costs!
But all of this I think would be beside the point. Cosmpiercers were billed as the the full interfactional PvE & PvP group conflict experience! Such a mechanic would diminish that possibility. Ishvana I'm sure can have a million other ways to provide the Sector with an existential threat without resetting our hard-earned Cosmpiercers and deterring interfactional conflict.
I'm not opposed to the idea of being able to stop the Ishvana (or any other NPC faction) from reclaiming cosmpiercers, and I'm fully aware of how they're difficult to organize for and expensive to take. The only real reward you get is from fighting other players, (INRs, junk they forgot to sell, ship cargo (even if you land on a cosmpiercer and never fight, if your side loses your ship gets ejected and the owning org's generators turn on the pilotless ships)), because as mentioned before, the income from cosmpiercers takes weeks to months to matter.
However, because of the potentially high cost in trying to take a high level cosmpiercer from another org (that were, in all cases right now, taken from the Ishvana with no player defenders), it's very unlikely to see those cosmpiercers change hands. The rewards already aren't worth it, and so we're essentially fighting for something to do. If no one is willing to fight over it, we have nothing to do.
Obviously, there are a multitude of underlying problems and they're not going to magically get fixed by having cosmpiercer control shaken up by PvE means, but when there is very little to no PvP to speak of, the system just exists and no one has anything to do.
Instead of having control automatically returned to Ishvana, make the rewards for capturing a cosmpiercer progressively get better as time progresses. An "attunement" factor, if you will, that starts at 1 when a cosmpiercer is first captured that progresses up to 10 with each level being a multiplier.
Doing this would require adjusting the rewards, but I think adding scaling rewards for capturing would encourage aggression.
I also think it's important that the holding faction should NOT gain any significant mechanical advantage for being fully attuned, at least not in a way that introduces a snowball effect. Win-more mechanics suck because they ultimately introduce situations that feel hopeless if power shifts too far in one direction (see beacons in Imperian).
That said, I think some sort of benefit is justified to discourage factions from waiting until full attunement to reap the biggest reward. Maybe introduce a border-influence mechanic where each point of cosmpiercer attunement allows a faction's borders to expand.
Well some acts can be done for the sake of RP rather then the material reward. Of course the material rewards should be adjusted slightly to make it more appealing but then it is realistical that if two factions are locked on a prolonged battle they both get damaged economically. Peace time is when you recover your losses from your holdings.
On the other hand I am not entirely sure about ammo costs taking weeks/months to repay. That would be the case if you only consider payment to the player if they did not join a majority of the conquest but there is also the payment to the faction which can be used to subsidize further operations. And when there is peace time, that allows building a buffer for potential future skirmishes.
That is true the high rank cosmpiercers would be costly to take from player defenders but then those piercers also take a decent amount of time and a motivated group to capture from Ishvana as well. That is natural it should be hard to take from another faction. If it was easier to capture or get captured by Ishvana suddenly, that would be displeasing to groups of people who captured them to begin with as part of a strategical maneuver.
And at the end of the day everyone has a different reason to take them. For a miner it could be the sensory advantages and they do not even have to join the skirmish at all to reap that reward. Those who consistently join the assaults get something extra and faction will get even more. In CA there is also incentivization system for captures on top of all those mentioned, things pile up. For my character it is worth because it practically says "Ascendancy is here!" on the map.
The only income of factions comes from cosmpiercers, and this is so minuscule that factions are essentially kept running from donations and the good will of a small fraction of its citizens. It's a recipe for burnout.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
The only income of factions comes from cosmpiercers, and this is so minuscule that factions are essentially kept running from donations and the good will of a small fraction of its citizens. It's a recipe for burnout.
Of course, some of us spent an inordinate amount of marks to bootstrap certain things. If a chemical example would be required, I would liken it to an exothermic reaction which nets released energy. But to start that reaction you have to put some energy first. The initial investments on factional level might seem like a loss when it is built from the donations of players. Yet it provides back in the long run. A RL month worth of cosmpiercer payment is not something negligible and can be used to subsidize further projects. There is an economical feedback at work over there. It should be improved upon yes, but it is not miniscule.
In future, factions potentially will have direct resources in form of credit bonuses from made purchases. They will have physical shops that can be taxed. And players can even impose certain taxes if they are willing to divert from the usual tax-heaven IRE organization management. They can employ money-borrowing schemes, issue bonds and whatever capitalist trick comes into mind over there if they are willing to put the effort forward.
Ultimately players generate mark via their activities and then support their factions where faction repays in some form of bonuses for their activities. Some of them are lacking right now, but it will not be the case forever.
The rewards already aren't worth it, and so we're essentially fighting for something to do. If no one is willing to fight over it, we have nothing to do.
It's a good point, yeah. That said, "fighting for something to do" is sort of my jam ... But I understand conflict RP isn't everyone's cup of tea. So yeah, I'd support some additional Cosmpiercer rewards to incentivize participation in group-based interfactional conflict (which isn't just station griefing).
Perhaps a solution would be to up the Cosmpiercer-related resource faucet. In that department, we currently have SURVEY (which could use some tuning up) and Cosmpiercer gas farms (a good example of emergent, player-driven gameplay which is already increasing Cosmpiercer incentives without any coded changes to the game!). Some additional things could be: limit the ability of opposing factions from harvesting in the Cosmpiercer's influence; increase the resource spawn rates; choose to attract certain resources to spawn in the area from a limited pool of available options; or increase the range on shield defenses to increase the radius of gas farms.
I'm still a fan of increasing cosmpiercer rewards, but it gets lessened according to faction station status!
We'd want it to be substantial enough that factions who upkeep their stations fully can end up profitable (as in, with enough cosmpiercers, the station missions can pay for themselves), but not too big a bonus that factions can divvy up the cosms three ways and have all of them profitable with regards to missions.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Fuck the cosmpiercers. Make us fight for voidgates ownership instead. Seems more worth fighting for than a bunch of stations that we can't even dock when there's no conflict. Plus, I imagine voidgates will have more substantial rewards. And some perks too. Like if a Scatterfolk uses a voidgate owned by Scatterhome, then they should have huge (I'd say 50%?) discount in usage of that voidgate. Not to mention, a stable-ish income that goes directly to faction accounts.
This was discussed a long time ago, but we really need a different system for handling ships that get stuck on cosmpiercers. Right now, if you don't have the ship bring artifact (or it's on cooldown), your ship is practically forfeit when generators come back up, even if you camp by an insurance office and try to towrequest (because it will be far too late in most cases). This puts a very high cost on failing offensive raids because you need to have cargo on board to take generators. Defense is potentially less punishing if you have the presence of mind to dump your cargo before you go to defend. Regardless, all pilotless ships that get ejected should just automatically go to the nearest station, rather than floating near hostile territory to get blown up.
Solution: form a gentleman's agreement between the players so they won't steal cargo. Most players aren't assholes and understand how much it costs, so they'd be receptive to agree especially with a guarantee that their own cargo will be safe in exchange.
Solution: form a gentleman's agreement between the players so they won't steal cargo. Most players aren't assholes and understand how much it costs, so they'd be receptive to agree especially with a guarantee that their own cargo will be safe in exchange.
That would work, but it only takes one bad actor to ruin it, and while SM has a great community, it's still an IRE game. Bad actors exist.
This was discussed a long time ago, but we really need a different system for handling ships that get stuck on cosmpiercers. Right now, if you don't have the ship bring artifact (or it's on cooldown), your ship is practically forfeit when generators come back up, even if you camp by an insurance office and try to towrequest (because it will be far too late in most cases). This puts a very high cost on failing offensive raids because you need to have cargo on board to take generators. Defense is potentially less punishing if you have the presence of mind to dump your cargo before you go to defend. Regardless, all pilotless ships that get ejected should just automatically go to the nearest station, rather than floating near hostile territory to get blown up.
To be honest that is part of the strategy to be able to provide naval blockade. If defenders come cargo-less then they are essentially toast and lose a good deal of clone costs if you hit their transport ship.
Furthermore, you do this very act yourself and I find it very interesting you complain just now after you are on the receiving end it seems.
Personally, it should stay as it is because wars mean to be costly for all sides involved. Furthermore how much and what kinds of cargo your ships carry is part of the logistics decisions and part of the battle. Attacking historically is always more dangerous then defending and the game reflects that. If your ships crashed on the shores of Troy, spoils to the victor and we are definitely going to burn that suspicious looking wooden horse monument.
I'm still skeptical of the dominance of PVE is cosmpiercers (both guards and generators). It's highly reminiscent of Imperian caravans (and they were my least favourite!).
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Personally, it should stay as it is because wars mean to be costly for all sides involved.
Dude it's a game lol. Games are supposed to be fun, you might as well be saying here "if you die in a war that's it, you're dead - so starmourn should have permadeath". A more immersive experience maybe but hardly an enjoyable one.
Furthermore,
you do this very act yourself and I find it very interesting you
complain just now after you are on the receiving end it seems.
But also this. I know Song scavenges ships destroyed after cosmpiercer raids. Hell everyone does it. Celestine does it. Scatterhome does it or rather did it back when it still had a pvp presence. Funny how it started being a problem only when Song ships are the ones getting scavenged.
@Cubey No need to spiral my example out of control!
What I was saying is that it is fun and works into the gears of economy. When your side loses 81 repairkits and 36 thermal batteries on an offense it is a minor setback. An incentive for the defending side. Next battle you take it back. Somewhere down the line as battle is not going to end any soon.
Factions will have more instruments to cover such losses for their dedicated fleet officers as well. We should remember credit purchases still do not bring anything to the faction and I still expect a retro-active assignment of them. There could be a myriad of other incentives in the future. So what I say is that we should not be hasty in speaking against a certain mechanic.
And if you bring disheets and nanoplastic cargo to a cosmpiercer battle, that is a bad decision. Or you bring resources more then you need, that is a bad decision as well.
@Matlkael The PvE element gives defending side some time to form a defense. Otherwise high numbers will be hard to repel all the time. Due to timezone mismatches and strategical decisions, in most games I saw such conquest clashes generally happen on inequal footing. I believe ship PvP plays a greater role in the cases where dangerous PvE elements still exists. On lower rank cosmpiercers PvE elements mean not much since rooms are easy to clear and clashes happen more PvP-centric. Higher ranks has more PvE considerations but then they are kind of real fortresses, it would be demoralizing if they were easily snatched.
I mean, as long as it exists I will continue to do it, but that doesn't make it not a bad system. Moving on to yet another issue with cosmpiercers.
Cosmpiercer guards in their current state are a very exploitable obstacle, and if you have even one defender able to get to the guards, depending on how much progress the attacking party has made, you can stall them momentarily or indefinitely depending on what skills the defender has. More than one? It very quickly becomes an exercise in hilarity. That said, there are also offensive exploits for clearing guard stacks that you probably wouldn't be able to otherwise. So we're going to explore the ones I know about!
Offense
Right now, you can use nanoseer's interdict to completely turn off damage in a room. This means that you can entirely sidestep the difficulty that guards are meant to present while the rest of your group uses subsys damage to level guards one by one. It's an interruptible skill, and it takes a while, but it still strikes me as an exploit the same way that engineer's pull was way back when.
Defense
Engineer's pull: You can stand in a guard clot and pull adjacent people into the room with you. You can counter this, but it's still a pain.
Fury's outburst: You can walk into a room and channel outburst, pushing everyone in the room into random directions. It's interruptible, sure, but if the defenders happen to have more than one person pulling shenanigans (or god forbid another fury doing the same thing), it's a little more difficult to counter.
Scoundrel's IED: This one as far as I know requires no in-room setup but does the exact same thing as fury's outburst. Walk into the room, drop it, explode people out of the room, and laugh at the deathsights.
BEAST's smash: This one is hilarious. You can smash your own guards into random directions without aggroing them. You might put them in the wrong room, but if the attackers are occupied elsewhere you can just keep at it until you get them in the right room! This method can easily end up with the cosmpiercer dock full of, say, 8 guards, where the limit for that particular cosmpiercer is usually 4 per room. The great thing about this is that, for the other three methods, you can take preventative measures and try to clear rooms around the dock and terminals, though this gets harder to do in higher ranked cosmpiercers. For this one, it doesn't really matter if you clear the immediate area, because they can just punt guards right up to your safe zone.
So What?
Basically, the issue here is that there's generally very little PvP happening on cosmpiercers because of how guards work. It's become a game of 'what can we do to avoid guards/make them do our job', which while it's been useful in highlighting exploits and generally fiddly stuff, it's ultimately not that fun for those involved who'd rather just fight other players.
What I'd want instead, if we're keeping guards as a level barrier, is a wave system where they slowly spawn in for players to attack over x duration, while maybe having a limit per room (per rank, if you'd like) so that they don't just stack up ridiculously to replicate our current issue. If you successfully survive the waves, then you get to hack or something. I'm not 100% sure how else to mitigate the player influence on the PvE stuff, so I'll leave that to cleverer minds, but I'm really just exhausted with the current guard system.
And to re-iterate: Yes, I've participated in the things I detest. That's how I know they're terrible. That doesn't mean that they're fine as-is. As far as me waiting until now to say something, I don't usually have the energy to organize my thoughts and write dissertations about a text-based game.
The problem of "PVE gives us time to form a defense" has so many better solutions.
Simple: just slap a "preparation" period to taking cosmpiercers. Let's take a level 1 cosmpiercer. An assaulting faction (Song) lands on the cosmpiercer, sets off a bomb or whatever to initiate an attack, which triggers a call on the defending faction (Celestine) channel. Now there's a 5-minute period where Song waits around at the dock (they can't move from there) and Celestine can muster a defending army. Bonus: a temporary transport pod appears on Celestine Crossings which defenders can enter, and at the 4-minute mark, it'll leave and dump all the defenders on a random room in the cosmpiercer (that's not the dock).
At the 5-minute mark, battle royale!
Pros: no PVE shenanigans. More actual PVP.
Cons: not much in the way of space combat
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
Aside from pushing guards to stack them to high numbers the rest are about paying attention to the action. IED could be tweaked though if it does not have a prep-time like outburst. It should not be hard to place a cosmpiercer guard limit on rooms depending on the rank of the cosmpiercer.
Interdict and subsys kill takes long enough time and it is currently a bandaid at the absence of an engineer to keep resurrecting people. And it can fail as well at times.
Using environmental things is part of PvP in a sense. And if one is worried about guards, one can attempt a naval blockade just in case. Usually attackers has that number advantage that defenders does not possess.
Either way one will not get a decent PvP fight if one side is attacking in superior numbers already. We see that on rank 2 cosmpiercers generally. But we also got decent fights too lately more or less on equal numbers.
a few days ago, I (just me) was able to hold off 4 CA players from our level 1 (or was it 2?) cosmpiercer solo for like 30 mins.
I should not have been able to do that.
The current incarnation of PVE cosmpiercers favours the defenders too heavily.
On the contrary, you should be able to do so. You are the archer on top of a watchtower in a sense. But there could be also other tactical problems attackers experienced that you managed that much delay.
Also those kinds of defensive stop-gaps make the battles costly enough that people take additional care and we are not going back to the times of one faction sweeping through massive swathes of the cosmpiercers because they have the superior numbers at that particular time. Timers really would not cut for that job. This way at least we are motivated to defend our holdings albeit that might not be successful all the time.
Furthermore PvP-on demand options were mentioned in roadmap if I remember correctly. They might be the options where player vs player battles might gain the spotlight where cosmpiercers require a more thorough teamwork.
On the contrary, you should be able to do so. You are the archer on top of a watchtower in a sense. But there could be also other tactical problems attackers experienced that you managed that much delay.
I firmly disagree, because what this does is that attackers are even more encouraged to attack at off-peak or with even more overwhelming forces.
addendum:
To give concrete examples, in Imperian, city raiding is essentially a PVE affair because guards by themselves were enough of a challenge against players. Most raids happen when the defending cities are at 0 fighting population because even the presence of 1 B-tier defender is enough to thwart an entire raid.
That's where we are right now. In a 4v1 scenario, the only way that 1 should have won was if all the 4 of the opposing team were level 20 players, single-transed.
During my cosmpiercer defense, one of the 4 CA players was Ren, who alone should have obliterated me (I am, honest to goodness, barely even a B-tier. I just have an OP class ).
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
In timer scenario simply put, people tweak timers to their advantages all the time and they attack when they have the overwhelming forces again. The desire to win is far stronger in majority of the players.
Also it is not healthy to compare Cosmpiercers to Imperian raiding. Here presence of a defender can present problems but there are measures and cautionary actions that can be taken against them. Furthermore cosmpiercers have several distinct layers where you have to consider. In 4 vs 1 scenario, potentially they could simply prevent you on the space but the attackers must have thought their tactical superiority on the ground would be enough. So perhaps they made mistakes on ground approach too and did not execute the assault optimally in that situation. Also layout of the cosmpiercer changing also plays a significant role. They could have landed so close to adjacent three control rooms with one guard each and voila!
On CA side we do everything in our capability to make cosmpiercer activities as alluring as possible with rewards and personally I would not want anyone to join those battles if they do not enjoy the prospect. From my perspective it is a result of our RP activities regarding Inka Indomitable Industries. Cosmpiercers make me motivated to search for captains, hackers, fighters actively and promote/enable their activities. If it felt like a pure PvP sub-game mode I would not be this motivated at all. And I am personally not a fan of timer-ing and OOC scheduling for assaults.
Regardless, I enjoy cosmpiercers and think it has been a balanced success, despite there might be several things that can be tweaked. When I look at the map I see the shift in the cosmpiercers at a decent pace, not too fast, not extremely slow. And it also puts strain on economy which is great to see how your other policies perform.
Cosmpiercers already are drifting into the OOC scheduling arena precisely because you need an overwhelming force in order to be successful in taking cosmpiercers. This is due to the fact that you are required to deal with both player defenders as well as NPC guards.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
So far we did not have any such necessity to be honest to schedule for a massive force. Mostly it goes with the available people being aware and interested for the action or not.
And I am confident that developers will provide avenues for those who prefer pure player group PvP as well. Maybe ground combat siege points additional to current cosmpiercers.
Fair point. My question then becomes: is it safe, now, to assume that moving and clumping cosmpiercer guards is a design feature that we should all be employing? It was implied that this was not the case, months ago, but nothing concrete has come of it so I'd like to know whether we, too, can use the tactic on our own cosmpiercer defense.
Mereas Eyrlock "They're excited, but poor." - Ilyos (August 2019)
I think it is like a workaround akin to stacking more then five guards on a station spot. It should be dealt with honestly but then potential methods of resolution raise further questions. Because after all you can divide stacks as well with those abilities albeit with cost for the offensive team and by jumping through some hoops. Maybe a room guard limit depending on cosmpiercer rank? Total immunity of movement to them? Much things with differing consequences come to mind.
Comments
However, because of the potentially high cost in trying to take a high level cosmpiercer from another org (that were, in all cases right now, taken from the Ishvana with no player defenders), it's very unlikely to see those cosmpiercers change hands. The rewards already aren't worth it, and so we're essentially fighting for something to do. If no one is willing to fight over it, we have nothing to do.
Obviously, there are a multitude of underlying problems and they're not going to magically get fixed by having cosmpiercer control shaken up by PvE means, but when there is very little to no PvP to speak of, the system just exists and no one has anything to do.
Doing this would require adjusting the rewards, but I think adding scaling rewards for capturing would encourage aggression.
I also think it's important that the holding faction should NOT gain any significant mechanical advantage for being fully attuned, at least not in a way that introduces a snowball effect. Win-more mechanics suck because they ultimately introduce situations that feel hopeless if power shifts too far in one direction (see beacons in Imperian).
That said, I think some sort of benefit is justified to discourage factions from waiting until full attunement to reap the biggest reward. Maybe introduce a border-influence mechanic where each point of cosmpiercer attunement allows a faction's borders to expand.
On the other hand I am not entirely sure about ammo costs taking weeks/months to repay. That would be the case if you only consider payment to the player if they did not join a majority of the conquest but there is also the payment to the faction which can be used to subsidize further operations. And when there is peace time, that allows building a buffer for potential future skirmishes.
That is true the high rank cosmpiercers would be costly to take from player defenders but then those piercers also take a decent amount of time and a motivated group to capture from Ishvana as well. That is natural it should be hard to take from another faction. If it was easier to capture or get captured by Ishvana suddenly, that would be displeasing to groups of people who captured them to begin with as part of a strategical maneuver.
And at the end of the day everyone has a different reason to take them. For a miner it could be the sensory advantages and they do not even have to join the skirmish at all to reap that reward. Those who consistently join the assaults get something extra and faction will get even more. In CA there is also incentivization system for captures on top of all those mentioned, things pile up. For my character it is worth because it practically says "Ascendancy is here!" on the map.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
In future, factions potentially will have direct resources in form of credit bonuses from made purchases. They will have physical shops that can be taxed. And players can even impose certain taxes if they are willing to divert from the usual tax-heaven IRE organization management. They can employ money-borrowing schemes, issue bonds and whatever capitalist trick comes into mind over there if they are willing to put the effort forward.
Ultimately players generate mark via their activities and then support their factions where faction repays in some form of bonuses for their activities. Some of them are lacking right now, but it will not be the case forever.
We'd want it to be substantial enough that factions who upkeep their stations fully can end up profitable (as in, with enough cosmpiercers, the station missions can pay for themselves), but not too big a bonus that factions can divvy up the cosms three ways and have all of them profitable with regards to missions.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Furthermore, you do this very act yourself and I find it very interesting you complain just now after you are on the receiving end it seems.
Personally, it should stay as it is because wars mean to be costly for all sides involved. Furthermore how much and what kinds of cargo your ships carry is part of the logistics decisions and part of the battle. Attacking historically is always more dangerous then defending and the game reflects that. If your ships crashed on the shores of Troy, spoils to the victor and we are definitely going to burn that suspicious looking wooden horse monument.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
But it simply highlights the many issues with the cosmpiercer system: it's incredibly costly with very, very few uses.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
What I was saying is that it is fun and works into the gears of economy. When your side loses 81 repairkits and 36 thermal batteries on an offense it is a minor setback. An incentive for the defending side. Next battle you take it back. Somewhere down the line as battle is not going to end any soon.
Factions will have more instruments to cover such losses for their dedicated fleet officers as well. We should remember credit purchases still do not bring anything to the faction and I still expect a retro-active assignment of them. There could be a myriad of other incentives in the future. So what I say is that we should not be hasty in speaking against a certain mechanic.
And if you bring disheets and nanoplastic cargo to a cosmpiercer battle, that is a bad decision. Or you bring resources more then you need, that is a bad decision as well.
@Matlkael The PvE element gives defending side some time to form a defense. Otherwise high numbers will be hard to repel all the time. Due to timezone mismatches and strategical decisions, in most games I saw such conquest clashes generally happen on inequal footing. I believe ship PvP plays a greater role in the cases where dangerous PvE elements still exists. On lower rank cosmpiercers PvE elements mean not much since rooms are easy to clear and clashes happen more PvP-centric. Higher ranks has more PvE considerations but then they are kind of real fortresses, it would be demoralizing if they were easily snatched.
Cosmpiercer guards in their current state are a very exploitable obstacle, and if you have even one defender able to get to the guards, depending on how much progress the attacking party has made, you can stall them momentarily or indefinitely depending on what skills the defender has. More than one? It very quickly becomes an exercise in hilarity. That said, there are also offensive exploits for clearing guard stacks that you probably wouldn't be able to otherwise. So we're going to explore the ones I know about!
Offense
Right now, you can use nanoseer's interdict to completely turn off damage in a room. This means that you can entirely sidestep the difficulty that guards are meant to present while the rest of your group uses subsys damage to level guards one by one. It's an interruptible skill, and it takes a while, but it still strikes me as an exploit the same way that engineer's pull was way back when.Defense
Engineer's pull: You can stand in a guard clot and pull adjacent people into the room with you. You can counter this, but it's still a pain.Fury's outburst: You can walk into a room and channel outburst, pushing everyone in the room into random directions. It's interruptible, sure, but if the defenders happen to have more than one person pulling shenanigans (or god forbid another fury doing the same thing), it's a little more difficult to counter.
Scoundrel's IED: This one as far as I know requires no in-room setup but does the exact same thing as fury's outburst. Walk into the room, drop it, explode people out of the room, and laugh at the deathsights.
BEAST's smash: This one is hilarious. You can smash your own guards into random directions without aggroing them. You might put them in the wrong room, but if the attackers are occupied elsewhere you can just keep at it until you get them in the right room! This method can easily end up with the cosmpiercer dock full of, say, 8 guards, where the limit for that particular cosmpiercer is usually 4 per room. The great thing about this is that, for the other three methods, you can take preventative measures and try to clear rooms around the dock and terminals, though this gets harder to do in higher ranked cosmpiercers. For this one, it doesn't really matter if you clear the immediate area, because they can just punt guards right up to your safe zone.
So What?
Basically, the issue here is that there's generally very little PvP happening on cosmpiercers because of how guards work. It's become a game of 'what can we do to avoid guards/make them do our job', which while it's been useful in highlighting exploits and generally fiddly stuff, it's ultimately not that fun for those involved who'd rather just fight other players.What I'd want instead, if we're keeping guards as a level barrier, is a wave system where they slowly spawn in for players to attack over x duration, while maybe having a limit per room (per rank, if you'd like) so that they don't just stack up ridiculously to replicate our current issue. If you successfully survive the waves, then you get to hack or something. I'm not 100% sure how else to mitigate the player influence on the PvE stuff, so I'll leave that to cleverer minds, but I'm really just exhausted with the current guard system.
And to re-iterate: Yes, I've participated in the things I detest. That's how I know they're terrible. That doesn't mean that they're fine as-is. As far as me waiting until now to say something, I don't usually have the energy to organize my thoughts and write dissertations about a text-based game.
Simple: just slap a "preparation" period to taking cosmpiercers. Let's take a level 1 cosmpiercer. An assaulting faction (Song) lands on the cosmpiercer, sets off a bomb or whatever to initiate an attack, which triggers a call on the defending faction (Celestine) channel. Now there's a 5-minute period where Song waits around at the dock (they can't move from there) and Celestine can muster a defending army. Bonus: a temporary transport pod appears on Celestine Crossings which defenders can enter, and at the 4-minute mark, it'll leave and dump all the defenders on a random room in the cosmpiercer (that's not the dock).
At the 5-minute mark, battle royale!
Pros: no PVE shenanigans. More actual PVP.
Cons: not much in the way of space combat
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Interdict and subsys kill takes long enough time and it is currently a bandaid at the absence of an engineer to keep resurrecting people. And it can fail as well at times.
Using environmental things is part of PvP in a sense. And if one is worried about guards, one can attempt a naval blockade just in case. Usually attackers has that number advantage that defenders does not possess.
Either way one will not get a decent PvP fight if one side is attacking in superior numbers already. We see that on rank 2 cosmpiercers generally. But we also got decent fights too lately more or less on equal numbers.
I should not have been able to do that.
The current incarnation of PVE cosmpiercers favours the defenders too heavily.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Also those kinds of defensive stop-gaps make the battles costly enough that people take additional care and we are not going back to the times of one faction sweeping through massive swathes of the cosmpiercers because they have the superior numbers at that particular time. Timers really would not cut for that job. This way at least we are motivated to defend our holdings albeit that might not be successful all the time.
Furthermore PvP-on demand options were mentioned in roadmap if I remember correctly. They might be the options where player vs player battles might gain the spotlight where cosmpiercers require a more thorough teamwork.
addendum:
To give concrete examples, in Imperian, city raiding is essentially a PVE affair because guards by themselves were enough of a challenge against players. Most raids happen when the defending cities are at 0 fighting population because even the presence of 1 B-tier defender is enough to thwart an entire raid.
That's where we are right now. In a 4v1 scenario, the only way that 1 should have won was if all the 4 of the opposing team were level 20 players, single-transed.
During my cosmpiercer defense, one of the 4 CA players was Ren, who alone should have obliterated me (I am, honest to goodness, barely even a B-tier. I just have an OP class
- Ilyos (August 2019)
Also it is not healthy to compare Cosmpiercers to Imperian raiding. Here presence of a defender can present problems but there are measures and cautionary actions that can be taken against them. Furthermore cosmpiercers have several distinct layers where you have to consider. In 4 vs 1 scenario, potentially they could simply prevent you on the space but the attackers must have thought their tactical superiority on the ground would be enough. So perhaps they made mistakes on ground approach too and did not execute the assault optimally in that situation. Also layout of the cosmpiercer changing also plays a significant role. They could have landed so close to adjacent three control rooms with one guard each and voila!
On CA side we do everything in our capability to make cosmpiercer activities as alluring as possible with rewards and personally I would not want anyone to join those battles if they do not enjoy the prospect. From my perspective it is a result of our RP activities regarding Inka Indomitable Industries. Cosmpiercers make me motivated to search for captains, hackers, fighters actively and promote/enable their activities. If it felt like a pure PvP sub-game mode I would not be this motivated at all. And I am personally not a fan of timer-ing and OOC scheduling for assaults.
Regardless, I enjoy cosmpiercers and think it has been a balanced success, despite there might be several things that can be tweaked. When I look at the map I see the shift in the cosmpiercers at a decent pace, not too fast, not extremely slow. And it also puts strain on economy which is great to see how your other policies perform.
- Ilyos (August 2019)
And I am confident that developers will provide avenues for those who prefer pure player group PvP as well. Maybe ground combat siege points additional to current cosmpiercers.
- Ilyos (August 2019)