Faction Infastructure and Homebase Invulnerability: A solution to permanent turtling

[JustBcuz]

what if

a newly formed base / faction initially starts out invulnerable (damage to station shield = incoming damage / 100)
but as time progress it will phase into a vulnerable but extremely buffed mode (damage to station shield = incoming damage / 99)
and further down the road this buff decreases till it hits (damage to station shield = incoming damage / 70)

then you still got a beast of a station with fairly little amount of shield block investment.
another thing that might improve player interaction is being able to raise this buff per member within the faction
(damage to station shield = incoming damage / (70 + (membercount x 3)))
making:
1 member reduced damage by 73%
2 member reduced damage by 76%
3 member reduced damage by 79%

with a cap of 85%

this way its still possible to kill of a station and keep newbees out of harms way till they grew large enough to stand on their own legs

best regards,
wanzer.

I would rather a system described in the original post over yours for two simple reasons.

• Your idea does not solve the issue of offline attacks and forcing around the clock 24 patrols to protect infastructure
• Your idea offers no means of "battle timetables"

Good suggestion none the less, I do however think that out of the 3 problems the idea in the original post would fix, yours only fixes one.

(mods pls, y u hav to make me keep answering this mans idea)

 

[Calhoun]

I would rather a system described in the original post over yours for two simple reasons.

• Your idea does not solve the issue of offline attacks and forcing around the clock 24 patrols to protect infastructure
• Your idea offers no means of "battle timetables"

Good suggestion none the less, I do however think that out of the 3 problems the idea in the original post would fix, yours only fixes one.

(mods pls, y u hav to make me keep answering this mans idea)

Altalert pls

 

[JustBcuz]

Altalert pls

Calhoon pls

 

[Elo106]

I like this suggestions just in case Shine doesn't want to make Homebases invulnerable we could leave them be but not allow them to have a factory / a huge factory debuff.

So essentially a Homebase would become your vault of ships and resources that no one can touch but you need another station to build stuff.
If we now add a no station within x sectors of the Homebase we would have trade ships transporting items between Homebase and factory-stations. This can be expanded with more features like the mentioned Harvesters and shipyards etc.

That way you could cripple a faction by destroying their "secondary" bases, pirates could raid transport-ships but you could never completely "bash" people from a server.

 

[JustBcuz]

That way you could cripple a faction by destroying their "secondary" bases, pirates could raid transport-ships but you could never completely "bash" people from a server.

Aye

That was the idea.

The main argument from most of the players who oppose any suggestion of removing permanent complete homebase invulnerability is that by doing so players could loose everything they had on a server overnight while they were offline.

By removing the homebase cap, even if one is destroyed, someone can still have others to store resources at. To completely wipe someone off the server would be almost impossible with this idea.

 

[SneakyFish]

Perhaps faction infrastructure gives a regular stream of money or production buffs. Attacking them wouldn't necessarily make the home base vulnerable but it would cripple their ability to produce ships. Issue with the vulnerability idea is that sometimes I don't play for days or even a couple weeks. Not much of an incentive to come back if everything I have is destroyed after taking a three day break.

 

[GDPR 302420]

Perhaps faction infrastructure gives a regular stream of money or production buffs. Attacking them wouldn't necessarily make the home base vulnerable but it would cripple their ability to produce ships. Issue with the vulnerability idea is that sometimes I don't play for days or even a couple weeks. Not much of an incentive to come back if everything I have is destroyed after taking a three day break.

In my honest opinion the only players who would have the problem you describe would be one man factions. Grouping up with others would solve this problem. The multiple homebase system would allow you to keep to your own while defendings others who would in turn defend you.

Regular money or productions buffs however would not in my honest opinion be effective, current factions can build fleets pretty well without them.

The input is appreciated none the less, its good to hear the opinons of those who would oppose the idea and not just the ones who support it.

 

[Jebediah1]

The purpose of this idea is to prevent players on servers from using homebases as a means of avoiding hostile interaction with other players while still allowing for new players to be able to have a means to protect themselves from having all their work being destroyed overnight while they are offline.

Constructive criticism is appreciated and encouraged, non-constructive arguments are not appreciated and will be reported to the moderators for spam/off-topic.


TL:DR

Attacking factions in order to destroy a factions homebase, would need to deplete the shields of a non-homebased station, wait 24 hours while preventing the defenders from fixing the station, destroy the stations, wait 24 hours while preventing the defenders from linking a new non-homebased station and then destroy the homebase. Stations like this could be numerous and thus completely destroying a faction would require the commitment of a lot of manpower, resources and time.


Forward

In the current faction homebase system, newer players are are able to avoid complete loss of all their assets on multiplayer, but any players are able to hide in their factions homebase upon being put in danger and can either go AFK or simply log off, this essentially kills a large portion of player interaction and is ultimately bad for the game, especially on servers where open pvp is encouraged.

The reason this can be done is because there is simply no reason to have infrastructure anywhere else, a homebase can literally do everything any faction needs to survive. This idea will allow for homebase invulnerability, but a faction will be required to have infrastructure outside of their homebase in order to function and maintain the invulnerability. I strongly believe that permanent turtling should not be a viable gameplay choice in multiplayer, but I do understand that newer factions need a method to prevent complete loss of all infastrucutre, forcing these players to start again.





The Idea

To make way for the system I am prosing, several changes would need to be made

• Homebases would no longer be restricted to one per faction, any amount of home bases can be controlled by a faction, a limit could be set in the server config files.
• Secondly, faction points would no longer affect if a homebase would be invulnerable or not (they would be kept in the game simply as a placeholder for if the devs decide to implement ways to spend your faction points)
  
• Thirdly, the faction menu would no longer show where a homebase(s) are located, and would now show the system coordinates of systems controlled by the faction.

As for homebase invulnerability itself, homebases once set would have its invulnerability enabled for 7 irl days, after this 7 days is up, it will become vulnerable again UNLESS the controling faction constructs another, non-homebased station in the same system system (which needs to be owned by the faction that owns the homebase)

This station would use a new system module (computer and module) that could only be placed on non homebased stations. How it works is it would generate energy that would “power” the invulnerable “shield” on a homebase.

This could (I will say could for this kind of stuff since the developers can name it whatever they want) be called a “Solar energy harvester” and this module would be placed on a station and will generate a form of “energy”, this station could be placed anywhere in the same system as the station that needs to be homebased.

The Solar Energy Harvester would generate a different form of energy that could be called “solar isotopes” and the station would then need to be linked via a GUI the the station you wish to be homebased, the station would have a requirement per second (si/s) that would need to be generated by its linked Solar Energy Harvester Station(s) in order to be invulnerable. This requirement would be based on the size of the station and its docked entities and how “expensive” it is (a station made of hull would be need less solar isotopes than a station made of advanced armor) This could be done with more than one station per faction, and multiple invulnerable stations with their own Solar Energy Harvesting station(s) in any system owned by the faction.

If the si/s required was increased due to additional blocks being added to the station or a ship/turret being docked to the homebase, docked entities on the homebase would become vulnerable and would no longer count to the si/s requirement, if all docked entities were not enough, then docked turrets would be next, if that was still enough, the homebase would enter the homebase sieged stage. (Homebase Sieged and other stages are described below, keep reading)

The establishment of a link would be instantaneous, unless the station is under siege (described below), Once this link is established and the minimum si/s requirement is fulfilled, the homebase will be invulnerable.


Now, in order for another faction to destroy this homebase, they would need to get the homebase through a series of "stages" as described in the linked picture below.

If a hostile faction wished to destroy one factions homebase(s) they would need to commit a large amount of time and assets with the next portion of this idea.

In order to destroy a homebase station, a hostile faction would be required to destroy the Solar Energy Harvester station that is powering the homebase, they way they would do this would be to look at the Starmap of the system an enemy faction inhabits, turn on a filter which would show lines between the Solar Energy Harvester stations and the target homebase (similar to how the lines in between jump gates are shown)

They would then need to go the coordinates of a Harvester station and deplete its shields, once the shields are depleted, the shields will not regenerate and the station would no longer generate power (but would still generate solar isotopes) but no further damage could be done for 24 irl hours (again, this could be changed via the server.cfg or Schine may even have the default higher or lower) This would be shown via a timer on the entity similar to an overheating timer. If a defending faction wanted to prevent further damage, they would need to use a power supply beam on the station to fill up its capacity by 10% and then use a shield supply beam to recharge the shield capacity by 20%. This would be repeated until the shield capacity is full, then the shields will recharge and the timer would stop. The attacking faction would need to try again.

This stage would be called Harvester Sieged

Shield ignoring weapons such as warheads and astronaut cutting torches would do no damage at this point as they could be used to bypass the Harvester Sieged stage





If the owner of the sieged harvester did not “fix” the Harvester station within 24 hours (or whatever time is set by the server.cfg) then the attacking faction would then be able to finish off the station and overheat it just like any other station, the defenders could still fix the stage using the described method above if the attackers did not come immediately to finish it off.

This stage would be called Harvester Vulnerable





Once this occurs the homebase will be invulnerable for another 24 hours (again, depending on server.cfg) before it loses its vulnerability, the only way to stop this timer from reaching zero would be for the defending faction to link another Harvester station and furfill the si/s requirements of the station, linking during this phase would not be instantanious and would take 2 irl hours (can be changed in server config)

This phase would be called Homebase Sieged





If the timer ran out, the station would lose vulnerability and could be attacked and destroyed (if the attackers do not come immediately, a Harvester station could still be linked, taking the same 2 hours to prevent destruction and restore invulnerability)





Closing

Overall, I think this would address a lot of the concerns PvP players have about turtling and concerns PvE players have about being able to lose everything overnight.

Factions intending to destroy a homebase would be required to commit a significant amount of time and manpower to do so, the defenders would have the advantage so destroying a homebase would be hard, but possible. Even if a homebase is destroyed, a faction can still have others with the same mechanic so even then, a faction cannot lose everything in a single strike with this system.

In a sense, a faction could lose some of its assets in a short timeframe, but completely destroying a faction would be a very difficult long term commitment.

I do see a potential argument against this, and that would be that a faction could attack all the Harvester stations at once while a defender is taking a 3-4 day break from the game, my counter argument to this would be that the only factions that would have this problem would be 1 man factions, and this would encourage these 1 man factions to group together, the multiple homebases feature of this suggestion would allow members to keep to their own while defending each other and ultimately themselves.

Now before everyone looses their shit, this system, like many things in StarMade would allow server admins to opt their servers out of it in their server.cfg file if they choose to

Improvements? Ideas? Constructive criticisms? Smartass remarks?

Only implement this on large PvP servers. This will fuck over the scrubs but it might increase tensions in places like LvD. I like the idea though it sounds cool.
[doublepost=1501988180,1501988136][/doublepost]

In my honest opinion the only players who would have the problem you describe would be one man factions. Grouping up with others would solve this problem. The multiple homebase system would allow you to keep to your own while defendings others who would in turn defend you.

Regular money or productions buffs however would not in my honest opinion be effective, current factions can build fleets pretty well without them.

The input is appreciated none the less, its good to hear the opinons of those who would oppose the idea and not just the ones who support it.

Welcome back lol

 

[GDPR 302420]

Only implement this on large PvP servers. This will fuck over the scrubs but it might increase tensions in places like LvD. I like the idea though it sounds cool.

The idea was for it to be an opt-in/out config option similar to reverse FP.

I am not asking for the current system to be replaced, that would never be considered.

 

[shadowcrusnik]

One issue with this is that during the first 24 hour period, the defending faction can (I'd imagine quite easily) restore the Harvester to its original invulnerable state. The only way to stop it would be for the attacking faction to have at absolute minimum (though likely more if the defending faction brings a powerful ship(s) to defend the supply beam ship, or if the supply beam ship is itself powerful) 1 guy on and watching that station round the clock. That would be suuuper difficult to do.


How about, instead, the station can only be resupplied (albeit much faster) during the actual vulnerability period, therefore if the defending faction wants it safe they have to go to its defense as soon as possible, else the attacking faction will destroy it. This does truly create the timetable for battle as suggested by the first comment. Noone has to be on 24/7, once something happens, a date and time for the fight is set, and both factions (assuming they are equivocally manned and equivocally active) will have ample time to organize their forces for a full scale battle.


For the homebase vulnerability, when a Harvester goes up to link to it, I'd do something similar. As soon as the station is linked, a 24 hour invulnerability period begins with the new harvester, both sides have 24 hours to organize their forces to battle at the new station at the end of the timer. Once it goes up, Faction B has to keep it alive and kicking for 2 hours to return to original state. Otherwise, if the station is destroyed, the home base returns to whatever timer it had left on it during its original invuln period, and Faction B cannot link any new harvesters until at least 2 hours after the home base becomes vulnerable. At which point the above is repeated.


This could lead to some very back and forth battle, but at the least these battles all give both sides ample time to prepare themselves, and a reasonable timeframe in which to have these battles. To go through an example like the first comment.


Faction B has a system with a homebase and a harvester. Faction A mounts a surprise assault and disables said harvester, starting the timer.

After 24 hours, both Factions engage in battle, Faction A is victorious and destroys the harvester entirely, sending the homebase into its final 24 hour invulnerability period.

After 12 hours, Faction B links a hastily built harvester nearby (so the homebase's turrets can assist, if this ends up being a broken solution then there could be a minimum distance, potentially even defined by systems away for linked harvesters). Another 24 hour timer starts for this harvester.

After the timer, Faction A mounts another assault on the newly fbuilt harvester. At this point, either they are victorious and then wait out the remaining 12 hours on the homebase to have the final battle, or they lose and have to fall back and regroup to mount another assault on the new harvester and start the process over again.


I think provides a simple, easy to understand and fair flow of battle that doesn't give too many advantages to either side (Faction A can start the process whenever they please and have time to build their army of ships, but Faction B gets time to set up hard defenses, like station turrets during the invulnerability periods).

Also, to help with problems of larger Factions picking on smaller ones and dominating entire servers (thus making it an unfun experience where little actual conflict occurs)

A Homebase can have its own Solar Harvester, however Harvesters themselves are limited in how much energy they can produce to a flat amount. So while a small homebase could power itself (thus being totally invulnerable), the larger it gets (including docked entities), the more that faction will have to rely on outside sources (meaning the largest of factions would need multiple harvesting stations, making them even more vulnerable to attack as the falling of any one of these stations could take down their home bases shields). This means small, just starting out factions have a solid growth period to gather support and resources before they enter "The big leagues" and the greater galactic scene. Obviously, non-homebase stations would still be vulnerable, so the point at which a homebase needs to rely on a harvester would have to be placed right at the cusp of when a faction absolutely requires additional stations for the purposes of shortening travel times between various resource collecting zones (assuming the new resource distribution system schine wants to put in goes through) and to improve their production and resource storage efficiency (would be annoying to walk through hundreds of ships to find the one you want, but if they're a bit spread out among multiple quick-travel points storage and organization of these resources becomes easier).


Boom, problems solved! (Though obv im not perfect, prolly shittons of new ones with this system)

 

[GDPR 302420]

shadowcrusnik you make some very valid points which I certantly agree with.


I might shove a quote of your post in the original post.
Nvm I can't shove it in the original post because I forgot that was one of my alt accounts who made that post, I can no longer access said account.

 

[jayman38]

I like this suggestions just in case Shine doesn't want to make Homebases invulnerable we could leave them be but not allow them to have a factory / a huge factory debuff.

So essentially a Homebase would become your vault of ships and resources that no one can touch but you need another station to build stuff.
If we now add a no station within x sectors of the Homebase we would have trade ships transporting items between Homebase and factory-stations. This can be expanded with more features like the mentioned Harvesters and shipyards etc.

That way you could cripple a faction by destroying their "secondary" bases, pirates could raid transport-ships but you could never completely "bash" people from a server.

I rather like the idea of crippling production on a homebase. Instead of completely stopping all factory production on a homebase, I think it would be adequate to simply deactivate the factory enhancers on any station that becomes a homebase. The factory enhancers on a homebase effectively become decoration-only, but can immediately go into use when the homebase flag is removed.

With this, You slow down production, but it doesn't halt completely.

This could be worked-around by adding more factory blocks to the station, but the added overhead of managing all those factories, instead of just a few would make de-homebasing a very tempting option.

A faction could "flash" their homebase status to get a sudden rush of production from the factory, but that would tempt any nearby enemies to strike in that narrow window of vulnerability. However, the vulnerability would only be in effect when someone is online, so it wouldn't necessarily lead to losing everything overnight. Unless someone forgets to turn the homebase flag back on....

You'll occasionally get complaints from players who "swear they turned on the homebase flag" or insist that homebase invulnerability switched off spontaneously while they were offline, leading to massive losses, but that's just how the station cookie crumbles.

There could be a server switch that allows the server admin to choose between this new behavior and the original everything-works homebase behavior.

 

[GDPR 302420]

I rather like the idea of crippling production on a homebase. Instead of completely stopping all factory production on a homebase, I think it would be adequate to simply deactivate the factory enhancers on any station that becomes a homebase. The factory enhancers on a homebase effectively become decoration-only, but can immediately go into use when the homebase flag is removed.

With this, You slow down production, but it doesn't halt completely.

This could be worked-around by adding more factory blocks to the station, but the added overhead of managing all those factories, instead of just a few would make de-homebasing a very tempting option.

A faction could "flash" their homebase status to get a sudden rush of production from the factory, but that would tempt any nearby enemies to strike in that narrow window of vulnerability. However, the vulnerability would only be in effect when someone is online, so it wouldn't necessarily lead to losing everything overnight. Unless someone forgets to turn the homebase flag back on....

You'll occasionally get complaints from players who "swear they turned on the homebase flag" or insist that homebase invulnerability switched off spontaneously while they were offline, leading to massive losses, but that's just how the station cookie crumbles.

There could be a server switch that allows the server admin to choose between this new behavior and the original everything-works homebase behavior.

Good idea but if I was to "flash" my homebase to get a production boost, I could turn it back on the minute I got a "Neutral has entered your system" notifacation to protect my HB, which kills the entire point.

 

[Wolverines527]

Now i have to disagree on this on grounds that weaker factions will just quit not only will this game lose current players it will also keep newer players from continuing on faction home base invulnerability allows just that type of forgiveness to new players it protects your stuff i have a counter to this

You give players an incentive to build an empire say a mining bonus for each system you claim say like a 5% boost

And if you are with just a homebase you lose a fac point in place of hp that would be lost say 1 faction point per hit if your shields are down you and once you are out of faction points your teritory is unclaimed like it is currently thus taking away your 5 bonus (if you have 1 system in your control)

Hope that pleases both camps ether way im against vulernable home bases

 

[GDPR 302420]

Now i have to disagree on this on grounds that weaker factions will just quit not only will this game lose current players it will also keep newer players from continuing on faction home base invulnerability allows just that type of forgiveness to new players it protects your stuff i have a counter to this

The alternative is permanent turtling that kills player interaction and causes players to quit because they have nothing to do.

This is an alternative that can be enabled or disabled in the config, its not intended to replace the current homebase mechanics.

Also worth noting that weaker factions are given ample time and ability to gain protection, in particular the 7 day "grace period"

You give players an incentive to build an empire say a mining bonus for each system you claim say like a 5% boost

Infastructure such as additional claims can be destroyed while potential defenders are offline, which seems kinda counter-productive if you are seeking to make a system more "newb friendly"

One of the things this suggestions is tackling is offline attacks.

And if you are with just a homebase you lose a fac point in place of hp that would be lost say 1 faction point per hit if your shields are down you and once you are out of faction points your teritory is unclaimed like it is currently thus taking away your 5 bonus (if you have 1 system in your control)

Again, this encourages offline attacks where defenders cannot do anything.

 

[Wolverines527]

The alternative is permanent turtling that kills player interaction and causes players to quit because they have nothing to do.

This is an alternative that can be enabled or disabled in the config, its not intended to replace the current homebase mechanics.

Also worth noting that weaker factions are given ample time and ability to gain protection, in particular the 7 day "grace period"



Infastructure such as additional claims can be destroyed while potential defenders are offline, which seems kinda counter-productive if you are seeking to make a system more "newb friendly"

One of the things this suggestions is tackling is offline attacks.




Again, this encourages offline attacks where defenders cannot do anything.

And that brings in the point of making strong defenses or having players that can play from all time zones rather sticking with just a few friends i have had to face this as a leader on serveral mmos

So you ether do one of 2 things ether A you build stronger defenses which include fleets our swarmers with ion turrets or you recruit people who play on a different timezone that plays at that time your off ether way if you deside to turtle you will lose things and deserve to lose that and it would encourage conquest especially systems with planets (when npc character come)

every system is going to have its faults no matter how you toss it. but we should look toward protecting new players with a forgiving system because no matter how you look at it noobs will be the life blood of starmade so tell me wouldnt you want Protect those from a guy who owns a titan looking for easy kills i gurrantee you that many in the current and noobs will just quit our player base is already a fring group atm

offline attacks will happen reguardless so that isnt much of an argument to be honest
I rather be able to still have the home base

Only time that should be removed is if said faction hasnt been active in 2 weeks

 

[GDPR 302420]

And that brings in the point of making strong defenses or having players that can play from all time zones rather sticking with just a few friends i have had to face this as a leader on serveral mmos

Due to the way weapon/defence scaling on stations and ships works, making strong defences on a station isnt going to protect from offline attacks. Stations lack a lot of the advantages ships have and thus are also much more vulnerable (warheads or just brining a larger ship can easily destroy/cripple a base with no effort or risk) even with large defences (which btw causes a lot of lag issues)

Also, having players being able to patrol around on the clock for defending a faction is completely unreasonable to expect from people who want to have fun playing a game.

every system is going to have its faults no matter how you toss it. but we should look toward protecting new players with a forgiving system because no matter how you look at it noobs will be the life blood of starmade so tell me wouldnt you want Protect those from a guy who owns a titan looking for easy kills i gurrantee you that many in the current and noobs will just quit our player base is already a fring group atm

The last time new players ever made up a majority of StarMades playerbase was the yogswarm.

Also, noobs do have ample protection in this syste, 7 day grace period and ample time to restore invulnerability once attacked. Should also be noted that I highly doubt every single server would opt-in to this system is implimented, so noobs do have a place to go if the protections in this system are not good enough.

offline attacks will happen reguardless so that isnt much of an argument to be honest

The timer mechanics of my suggestion allow for a "timetable" for battle. It allows both attackers and defenders to prepare to have an ample defence as it progresses through the stages. Factions would have time where they need to be online to defend, a total offline curbstomp of a faction would only occur if the defenders did not make any attempt to organise a defence, which if they did not do that then they deserve to have their stuff lost.


I think my statement can be summarised from a quote from the leader of one of the Arma 2 clans I used to be apart off.
"If the defenders against a foreign invasion fail against a horde of attackers, chances are they did not want to win the war as much as their enemies, the attacking nation would likely be a better goverment then the defenders in that case"