Completely grief-proof way of faction homebase capturing.

[Mariux]

As it stands, homebases are indestructible in order to provide a safe place for faction members to store their ships, resources and factories. However, it severely restricts faction warfare as usually all factions ships and resources are stored in a homebase which makes raids impossible. I have thought of a good solution to this problem.

If faction A wants to attack faction B, they send them a war request (Yeah, that sounds funny, I know). The faction B can decline it if they don't want to be attacked (this prevents large factions from steamrolling small or inactive at the time factions). If faction B accepts, however, the base invulnerability is removed, for, say, 4 hours for BOTH factions. Of course, the bases would only be vulnerable to that specific enemy faction the war was declared on.That means that there is no attacking and no defending faction, just pure pew pew. It also means that factions that are willing to do any sort of conquest will need to actually fortify their home bases.

Another great thing about this solution is that it encourages alliances, consisting of factions large and small. Let's take the example of factions A and B at war. A much smaller and less developed faction C decides to step in and help faction A. While they cannot attack faction B, they are able to send faction A ships and give acces to warpgates controlled by C. In case of victory, faction A might share some loot with faction C.

This is probably not the best solution, but it is certainly better than what we have now.

 

[Phocian]

I don't think that's the solution although it's good to come up with ideas to stimulate the PvP and player interaction.

I say this because we are back at the same problem unless you want to risk everything which most players won't what is there to gain apart from fighting for fightings sake as you gain nothing strategically.
At the moment and I'm sure this will change in the future there is no reason to fight.
When territory has benefits, resources to fight over and when factions can safely recruit members to their ranks then wars will take place I hope!

 

[Mariux]

I don't think that's the solution although it's good to come up with ideas to stimulate the PvP and player interaction.

I say this because we are back at the same problem unless you want to risk everything which most players won't what is there to gain apart from fighting for fightings sake as you gain nothing strategically.
At the moment and I'm sure this will change in the future there is no reason to fight.
When territory has benefits, resources to fight over and when factions can safely recruit members to their ranks then wars will take place I hope!

No reason? How about taking all the unused enemy ships like salvagers, their resources and a heavily damaged homebase for buildblocking/rebuilding?

 

[Phocian]

You make my point. Why would anyone risk being sent back to the Starmade stone age ??
Most people don't like inflicting pain on themselves.
I see your suggestion as something you and maybe other players in the same mind set would like but most players would go ok I have nothing left after four months building, what's on steams sale today and they are gone.

 

[Mariux]

You make my point. Why would anyone risk being sent back to the Starmade stone age ??
Most people don't like inflicting pain on themselves.
I see your suggestion as something you and maybe other players in the same mind set would like but most players would go ok I have nothing left after four months building, what's on steams sale today and they are gone.

Or you could be a clever bastard and leave your resources at faction C, D or whatever

 

[Phocian]

Or you could always leave a player/faction with the means to return to the fight after a few days? Unless the objective is the total destruction of your enemy?

Anyway we are polar opposites on this suggestion.

 

[Blaza612]

A problem is the grief-proofing itself. Faction home bases are immortal due to the possibility of griefers coming in and recking it, how about we let them do it. It will give people an actual reason to put some defenses up and keep their ships safe. In order to do this properly, we'd need an AI setting to allow it to attack anything neutral without the faction being at war with neutral, that way, you can create no fly zones in which players will have to avoid. This doesn't solve the entire problem, but it's all I could think up for now :p

 

[Mariux]

A problem is the grief-proofing itself. Faction home bases are immortal due to the possibility of griefers coming in and recking it, how about we let them do it. It will give people an actual reason to put some defenses up and keep their ships safe. In order to do this properly, we'd need an AI setting to allow it to attack anything neutral without the faction being at war with neutral, that way, you can create no fly zones in which players will have to avoid. This doesn't solve the entire problem, but it's all I could think up for now :p

New players would become too easy targets though.

 

[SuperWookie]

As much as I would love to go besieging bases, I can see a lot of new players getting obliterated by pirate factions and quitting the game because of it. Yes there needs to be a way to remove invulnerability, but it needs to also be made so that bigger factions can't steamroll the smaller and weaker.

I think the best option is along the lines of what the OP stated. Instead though, when one faction declares war on the other, only their station is made vulnerable until the other faction accepts. Any hostile action from the other faction would automatically accept the war declaration. Both factions would be able to revoke the war declaration, until it is agreed upon by the challenged faction, in which case peace is not an option for at least a few days. This way the vulnerability is optional yet highly rewarding if you play your cards right.

 

[Jumper11550]

I think a possible solution here is to add a toggle (or perhaps a timer) to the homebase faction block that allows the players to turn off invulnerability. If it's a toggle then there would be a minimum cooldown before it could be flipped, or perhaps a requirement that no enemies need to be near the station before it can be set back to invulnerable. If it's a timer have a minimum required time it must be made invulnerable.

The caveat here is if a faction attacks another's homebase without exposing their own it is done for them. Their own homebase enters a 12/24/48 hour vulnerability period as well as the other faction receiving notifications about who it was that attacked them.

This lets the players that want to play in a riskier environment do so without removing the protection from anyone else that doesn't.

 

[Ithirahad]

This is a strange workaround, not really a solution, and in practice actually using the war system would be a rare occurrence seeing as it would risk all of your resources. As I see it, to really fix the issues with invulnerable homebases, we need a lot of mechanical additions and modifications.

• First and foremost, there needs to be a way to have faction-chosen AI defense ships automatically spawn when a base is attacked. The easiest way to make this work would probably be just to require putting the blueprints into a "beacon" block, but this just seems inelegant immersion-wise. A more abstracted solution involving paying faction points for ship block value or mass is another possibility, but could lead to exploits involving enemy farming if not implemented carefully.
  
  
• Second, maps need to change. The current "find everything everywhere all of the time instantly" map? That's gotta go. You should have to, you know, go out there, explore, and scan for things, including enemy bases, asteroid belts, planets, wormhole routes, warpgate routes... (In fact, wormholes and warpgates shouldn't show their routes until you have either come within visible range of both ends or scanned both ends within scanning range.) A feature where players could share the locations of discoveries with others via a "Map" metaitem for a definable map area would be nice, as would an option to auto-share discoveries with your faction.
  
  This would help areas of the game besides combat, especially once passive resource (re)generation is a thing, but since we're talking about faction combat I'll restrict my explanation to that for now.
  
  
• Third, all stations need a base shield capacity, and a very large buff to the effectiveness of shield caps and generator blocks when placed on stations. Otherwise, half the time all those NPC/AI reinforcements won't mean anything because the enemy came in a ship big enough to squish your base like a bug and leave with all the loot.
  
  
• Faction point-based protection could become a thing, but I dunno how to balance this. And one way or another, there would need to be a better (but still grief-proof) way to drain enemy faction points for this to work...
  
  
• If planets finally get a revamp and become more useful and better-looking, similar accommodations can be made regarding them, shielding, and protection. Also, shield pools can become global, rather than per-segments, if a segment-based planet system remains.

Once all of these are implemented, we can safely and simply remove the permanent homebase invulnerability, and this whole issue will be negated. People will be able to have secret, separate faction banks, materials caches, production facilities, and more, and the loss of a homebase would become merely a decimating loss rather than the complete doom of a faction. As long as they don't put all their eggs in one basket, at least.
[DOUBLEPOST=1446658984,1446657455][/DOUBLEPOST]I think I'm gonna re-post this as a thread later, along with some more/other notes. And the obligatory shameless plug links to my previous suggestions regarding how the universe should work.

 

[Blaza612]

Well, if my previous idea would make homes too vulnerable, how about go halfway, and do something similar to EVE (or completely identical :p)? Faction homes can be similar to sovereignty structures or outposts. They will have three states, vulnerable, active (Don't know what to call this :p) and reinforced. Your homebase will normally be active, in which it can be damaged, but 50% of all damage is negated. If your base is under attack, you can either manually put it into reinforced mode, and have the setting for it to automatically reinforce on. Being reinforced makes the homebase invulnerable for a certain amount of time, but after say a couple hours or so, the base will no longer be reinforced, and will become vulnerable for about an our or so. After the station is no longer vulnerable, it'll be active, and can be set to reinforced again.

When reinforced, all station services will work at 50% efficiency to prevent factions from spamming reinforced mode. Reinforced mode is essentially a time to do some last minute preparations, and call in for reinforcements. In vulnerable mode, they'll work at 125% efficiency, so that a faction can either defend it easier or flee quicker. By station services, I mean factories, shipyards, etc.

 

[Valiant70]

You reminded me of this when you mentioned planets: http://starmadedock.net/threads/planetary-shield.20397/

I question the feasibility of the whole hombase system. To me it seems like all bases should be made more difficult to attack somehow, and the invulnerability removed entirely.

Another possibility is making all bases invulnerable when no faction members are online. To prevent combat-logouts from saving things, I think it should take a bit of time to kick in after logout. It's not perfect but it's better than what we have now.

 

[Edymnion]

Yeah, no.

I don't want to see anything that allows faction home bases to lose their invulnerability for any reason.

 

[Panpiper]

How about the current homebase system be maintained as is, except that they cannot hold factory modules or enhancers. People would still have a secure place to dock and log out, but also a reason to build defenses on something that could be attacked.

 

[Phocian]

It's hard to come up with a suggestion for bases, stations while they are so woefully weak compared to ships.
Currently you would be hard pressed to make a turret or turrets on a station capable of seriously hurting a large ship let alone killing it.

I still think that all those players wanting to kill player stations should not look to changing the one thing that allows players to not lose everything and so remain in the game but look to a future update where factions have other viable stations and planets in their Empire that serve a purpose as infrastructure that's supports that faction.

The last thing starmade servers need is to drive players to quit the game.

I still don't understand the desire to completely annihilate another player or group of players when we all know how much time and effort goes into gaining resources and building. I wonder how, those desperate for the ability to attack home bases would feel if they put themselves in the role of the defeated faction with absolutely nothing left rather than the attacking force.
Historically as an example last two world wars no conquered nation is wiped completely off the face of the planet.

 

[Ithirahad]

I still think that all those players wanting to kill player stations should not look to changing the one thing that allows players to not lose everything and so remain in the game but look to a future update where factions have other viable stations and planets in their Empire that serve a purpose as infrastructure that's supports that faction.

Yep. Once a system like this is in we won't really need faction homebases in the first place, although if stations in general get a large buff...

 

[Panpiper]

Currently you would be hard pressed to make a turret or turrets on a station capable of seriously hurting a large ship let alone killing it.

After a couple of instances of having very large hostile ships in range of my homebase, making life quite difficult for my then battleminer to do it's work, I slapped together a pair of missile turrets for it. It was not a great difficulty to come up with a missile salvo that launched 40 decoy missiles plus eight heavy missiles that combined, hit for six million damage. Now that is not going to stop any titans, but it 'will' deter attack from 98% of ships, as well as serve as a 'hard point' fire base to retreat to for extra firepower if dealing with something that is too tough for your ship to deal with on it's own.
[DOUBLEPOST=1446742755,1446742443][/DOUBLEPOST]What I would suggest among other things would be to remove the diminishing returns for shield capacitors on stations, and also eliminate the 'in combat' penalty to shield regeneration on stations. This will allow substantially larger shields on stations than on corresponding titans, and make those shields potentially vastly more resilient, forcing an attacker to have to commit a much larger weight to an attack. Note that I do think that a faction still needs to have some sort of parking garage for off line ships that cannot be attacked. Whether that be a homebase or not is debatable.

 

[Edymnion]

Main reason I am completely against anything that removes home base invincibility is because it amounts to a server ban without admin approval.

If you completely destroy someone's bases, you have destroyed everything they have worked for, and you have likely stripped them of any resources they have to start rebuilding with. Plus, you've established yourself as a dick who completely wipes people out. Nobody is going to stay on a server after that happens to them, because its a safe bet that if they manage to build up again, you'd just come wipe them out again. It basically kicks people off the server.

Anything that allows that, even if it takes them okaying it (which lets face it, somebody would be tricked into it) is not acceptable to me.

This isn't Starcraft where everybody starts over every new game. This is more like World of Warcraft in hardcore mode, where if you die your character is deleted.

No player on a server that isn't a server admin should be able to completely remove another player's ability to play the game like that, under any circumstances.

 

[kiraen]

How about this, split damage reduction per base.
If you only have one base, it's 100% damage reduction, or invulnerability.
If you have two bases they each get 50% damage reduction.
3 is 33%, 4 is 25%, etc etc.

This way, the larger the faction, the more spread out, and the more vulnerable to damage they become. Bigger faction, bigger target.

As a faction get weaker they get pushed back and more protected. Eventually the losing faction will be limited to a single (probably damaged) base. They won't be able to be wiped out completely and will have some sort of facility to rebuild from.