Conquest of Solar Systems

[Deantwo]

I answered your question, you asked if I want to besiege every little world in a system, then claimed that only larger empires will be able to do this, I pointed out this will almost never happen.  If someone actually puts a bubble on every random airless moon, not that anyone will ever do that as that is totally pointless, you ignore them and only attack the planets that matter, which are very rare things.

You can't design a system with the mindset of "it is pointless, no one will ever do this." Haxus added the new world volume and population limits to prevent cities from becoming a strain on the servers, yet a bunch of players are trying their best to reach those limits. Even with the old-style cities there were a few players that fully colonized their whole solar system and reached the population limit on all their worlds.

I don't see any reason not to build a super-shield-thingy-building on every freaking world I have even a basic mining colony on. Resources are infinite and I love making my attacker have to work for whatever pleasure they get out of attacking me. Sure they can ignore the little moon colonies, but that depends on their reason for attacking in the first place. If the attacker is attacking to remove a tiny empire from their territory, then leaving tiny self-sufficient moon bases is a security risk as they provide starmap information. So again you can't generalize the attacker's mindset to "will only attack important targets" either, and you yourself said that players make all their worlds self-sufficient.

In the city shield case, you know you are under attack because the shield is continually being bombed, which is both loud and also an obvious light show.

What if the attacker is bombing the far side of the planet? Will it then just be a flashing shield in the sky? What if the attacker is bombing a world on the the other side of the solar system? I don't see much advantage from the whole "bombing light show" thing if you have to be on the world and directly under it. But I guess cities on the world could just spam the Empire channel every 30 seconds?

Shields also already block transporters and prevent enemies from walking through them.

Currently you can still run around inside a shield killing people, (by blasting the shield until it flicks out temporarily and then deploying an orbital Zensras to cleanse all life), however this would not be a problem if the shield was invulnerable for days.  Its very clean and hard to exploit from a mechanics perspective.  City shields are already very close to doing what I am suggesting.

By the way, you know anything that isn't moving too fast can pass through the current shields, right? Just wanted to ask.

This also gives the player a lot more they can do to influence the outcome of the siege.  You would want to design your city to fit under the shield as much as possible, might park spacecraft under the shield to protect them from being destroyed overnight, and the size and strength of the shield bubble is already something you can change in the designer.  With the system wide siege there isn't much player choice involved, its the exact same outcome (all of your ships and military buildings gone overnight) more or less no matter how you design your cities.

"How long do you want to be protected for, 3 or 7 days?" isn't really an interesting or useful choice. Someone will design a nice looking blueprint optimized to have the maximum possible shield stats and everyone will use it, unless it takes multiple days to construct no one will care.

Yes, my idea doesn't have much choice, because giving people the option to shoot themselves in the foot usually goes poorly for them. And that includes giving them a choice in what to protect, since I really don't see a point in letting a newbie or veteran player forget to build the super-shield-thingy-building in their new awesome city.