Conquest of Solar Systems

[Deantwo]

It's not that simple. It's also about it being credible and not being an arbitrary rule saying "lol you can't attack because rules, wait x hours before actual battle." That wouldn't be the Hazeron spirit.

Not trying to be rude or mean or anything, but this made me sort of laugh considering the new "noncombatant" feature.

For the noncombatant feature I already have the French Empire threatening me with placing alts/ships/whatever on my homeworld so they can instantly attack me the moment they see me login. I guess it is more specific bullying targeted specially at me than what would normally happen against the average newbie player, but it still doesn't seem like a good system to rely on in the long run.

I would rather have the propaganda style siege suggested here than the noncombatant feature in the long run. It just seems like a better way of slowing down war and newbiestomping than totally disallowing attacks on people that are offline. Being attacked while you are offline sucks, but being online rarely makes that big a difference, especially when we are talking about newbiestomping. Timezones exist, so chances are that some enemies will never be online when you are.
If the attacker has to literally dedicate one or more ships to a week long siege, there is a cost for the attacker. If the defender can then somehow destroy the sieging ships before the siege is over, either with their own ships or the help of allies, the defender can win before they were ever in actual danger. A simple battle that doesn't require both parties to be online at the same time.

[Greydog]

How about "Karma Police" ..

Haxus could create NPC empires that spawn within the borders of empires that have a habit of being bad, with the intention of keeping malicious empires looking within to maintain their own security. The same feature could be used to help keep a check on Large expansionist empires as well.

Kind of like the natural disasters in Civ City.

[AnrDaemon]

For the noncombatant feature I already have the French Empire threatening me with placing alts/ships/whatever on my homeworld so they can instantly attack me the moment they see me login.

Threatening, eh?… guess they learned the lesson.

IW-3 project (237 kB)
Anybody remember? Now, imagine this little beauty looming some-20-meters overhead.

Back in the days, we were very appreciative of new empires spawning inside our borders as that would give us an additional officer, but we asked them kindly to evacuate to the nearest habitable outside our borders. Or just obliterated the city if we were unable to establish contact within a week.

[QuakeIV]

The notion of city or planetary shields forcing you to besiege multiple planets per system is broadly speaking wrong-headed. Most planets, and even resource zones, have no value. There is no reason to attack targets that already mean nothing to the enemy.

There are two types of planets that matter to war fighting capacity, resource harvesting worlds, and shipyard industry systems. Generally the resource harvesting worlds don't have overmuch effort put into defending them, and if city shields were a concept, resource worlds most likely wouldn't be practical to shield. The majority of the resource extraction nodes could be bombed out, removing the resource world from the equation, unless many separate shields were constructed. This could be limited any number of ways, for instance simply allowing only one shield per world.

[Yurk Embassy]

Not trying to be rude or mean or anything, but this made me sort of laugh considering the new "noncombatant" feature.

As I said two sentences later, Noncombatant is different. Attacking someone who's not even there isn't fair by any standard; it breaks immersion in itself. Although, in my opinion, if there ends up being such a thing as planetary shields or countdown before attack, Noncombatant mode might as well be removed entirely, as lengthy sieges would be long enough for someone to notice and act upon.

The notion of city or planetary shields forcing you to besiege multiple planets per system is broadly speaking wrong-headed. Most planets, and even resource zones, have no value. There is no reason to attack targets that already mean nothing to the enemy.

I mean, there are habitables too, that produce officers; those can be weaponised very effectively, be it by gathering a small fleet by yourself or by having officers in players' ships, which can also make a huge difference. Not to mention every enemy city you find is susceptible to be a quick refuel/resupply/repair/refit point. But you're right; many planets, in themselves, have no value at all, and that's also part of the idea. If empires see no reason to attack a planet, nothing forbids them from not attacking it. If these planets have no value and are more troublesome to invade, at least it'd make it less frequent for powerful empires to go "Haha me gonna stomp that noob because that's fun." However, if they mean to take a system that includes both valuable and worthless worlds, the other worlds occupied by the enemy would have value in the context of war with this empire, as they wouldn't want them to keep a foothold near their newly-acquired possessions.

Their decisions with regards to war and invasion would be more often driven by strategy, which would not necessarily be a bad thing (for example, in Total War, you don't wanna attack a walled city without artillery if you only have one army and more enemies are lurking around your own city; that's critical thinking, and yet having to think that way does not make the game any less fun). That would, without stopping it, reduce the chances of noob and weak empires getting their asses kicked for no reason.

There are two types of planets that matter to war fighting capacity, resource harvesting worlds, and shipyard industry systems. Generally the resource harvesting worlds don't have overmuch effort put into defending them, and if city shields were a concept, resource worlds most likely wouldn't be practical to shield. The majority of the resource extraction nodes could be bombed out, removing the resource world from the equation, unless many separate shields were constructed. This could be limited any number of ways, for instance simply allowing only one shield per world.

I think I see your point about resource cities being rather stretched because resource-based. However resource worlds wouldn't be that much of a challenge to protect, with one-per-world, planet-wide shield generators. This one thing could be easily balanced by making it unavailable for moons, capping them to one per planet, forcing players to place them within an Empire city jurisdiction. Maybe even limiting it to one per star system, instead of the worlds themselves, but that would be weird, hardly convincing in terms of Lore, and in that case, systems filled with cities could still be taken more quickly than it'd take for a player sleeping at 1am to wake up and log in.

[Deantwo]

Attacking someone who's not even there isn't fair by any standard; it breaks immersion in itself.

But that is an impossibility. While we live in the real world where timezones and daily routines keeps us from being online at the same time.

Which is why I think we are both suggesting a system that would let the defender destroy the attacker's sieging ship while they are offline.

Maybe even limiting it to one per star system, instead of the worlds themselves, but that would be weird, hardly convincing in terms of Lore, and in that case, systems filled with cities could still be taken more quickly than it'd take for a player sleeping at 1am to wake up and log in.

To hell with lore reasons. We barely have lore reasons for anything in Hazeron.

But this is the basis for this entire thread, that sieges should be against a whole solar system at a time, because you can't think of the worlds in a solar system as independent. Very few players make all their worlds completely self-sufficient, so if one world is captured or destroyed the rest of the worlds will fall into ruin one way or the other over time.

Having a solar system wide shield generator is probably the best way of thinking about it. Assuming we don't just want this to be a building-less feature, since having a physical building isn't really required and it would just be yet another thing that a newbie can forget to do.

Also, calling it a shield generator also seems to suggest that an attacker have to maintain fire on the shield for prolonged period of time. This seems pretty unnecessary, especially if the weapon's strength doesn't matter. Veteran players will just start designing all their warships with an additional smallest possible energy weapon and only use that against the shield until it drops, then switch to their powerful weapons.

[Deantwo]

If you really want a lore reason, it could just be said that the ancient ringworld builders made automatic solar system wide protection systems throughout the universe. They are so advanced that it is treated more like a universal law than technology. An attacker simply have to stay in the target solar system for a full week, reading an ancient war declaration poem that works to disable the protection system upon full completion. If the poem fails to be read completely nothing happens and the defender remains safe.

In other words, I am pretty sure we can think of some lore for whatever idea we come up with. The mechanics are what matter.

[QuakeIV]

Also, calling it a shield generator also seems to suggest that an attacker have to maintain fire on the shield for prolonged period of time. This seems pretty unnecessary, especially if the weapon's strength doesn't matter. Veteran players will just start designing all their warships with an additional smallest possible energy weapon and only use that against the shield until it drops, then switch to their powerful weapons.

I consider this to be a bad faith interpretation of the suggestion.

Most likely there would indeed be a long term bombardment weapon on any given ship, in fact there would probably need to be for fuel reasons, however one option to enforce a minimum size on this weapon would be to have the siege shields act much like current city shields. If you wish to push them into siege mode, you have to bomb them until the conventional shield drops. After that point you would have to keep up with the recharge rate until the shield is finally overloaded and shuts down. If the shield is allowed to fully recharge then it resets itself.

In general if these shields became a thing it might be preferable if they existed as a modified version of city shields we have now, rather than existing side by side with them.

I'm not in any case sure why you are suggesting that solar systems would necessarily fall as one. I tend to build colonies so that they are at the very least independent in terms of air and food power and so forth, mainly to avoid huge failure cascades due to supply chain issues. You say few people do it, but I am fairly sure its nearly standard practice. It seems like at best the system-wide siege idea would make it easier to conquer large swathes of space in a reasonable time frame, but it seems like thats an annoyance you have never personally been subjected to so its weird to me that you are so determined to make the case for that.

Which is why I think we are both suggesting a system that would let the defender destroy the attacker's sieging ship while they are offline.

Regarding attacker ships being destroyed while offline, yeah, thats likely. That would be part of the aforementioned notion of placing the advantage firmly in the hands of the defender. I think in general its probably fine for it to be far harder to attack than defend. In my opinion by far the biggest obstacle to changing cities into something that take a while to build up is the fact that they are so easy to quickly destroy. A way to defend them has to come first, as a pre-requisite to them being harder to build up.

[Greydog]

A Declaration of War is still the best reason to institute a waiting period before an attack. The defender could accept the declaration at any time during a set period (say 24 hrs) beginning the war immediately. If the was no reply before the time period ends then the attacker can begin. Any colonies or structures are not covered by a jurisdiction are unprotected and may be attacked without a declaration. The time period would work across an entire empire and not just a single system. Once it's up, any of the defenders systems could be attacked.

I agree with Quake in that it's smarter to take what you need from a system and either ignore or mop up the rest later. This is a place where morale would come in handy. Destroying a systems command structure and ransacking it's capital would be a big hit on the other inhabitants in the system.

Also that defense should come first and be easily made somewhat formidable so long as the defender actually builds it.

Shields ..

Planetary shields could be a thing but not as something that just appears when the planet is threatened. It should be a couple of huge ground emitters on either side of the planet that are tied to a series of orbital emitters. It should use massive power, Need massive resources, and take forever to build. City shields should still be there as a (more powerful) second layer that needs to be cracked.

Shields could operate at a unique frequency that allows only those with the right one to pass thru. This is another scenario where espionage would come in handy. It could also be fun to make a way for a squad or two of commando's to infiltrate and try to take them down that way.

[Deantwo]

I'm not in any case sure why you are suggesting that solar systems would necessarily fall as one.  I tend to build colonies so that they are at the very least independent in terms of air and food power and so forth, mainly to avoid huge failure cascades due to supply chain issues.  You say few people do it, but I am fairly sure its nearly standard practice.  It seems like at best the system-wide siege idea would make it easier to conquer large swathes of space in a reasonable time frame, but it seems like thats an annoyance you have never personally been subjected to so its weird to me that you are so determined to make the case for that.

I don't really understand the point you are trying to make here. Are you saying you would rather have to spend multiple days sieging each and every world of a solar system one at a time? And only large empires that can field more ships should therefore be able to siege solar systems with many worlds? Assuming you need one ship per world siege.

And all the newbies that don't know they should make every single colony self-sufficient are just at a disadvantage because the attacker can avoid wasting time and warships on little mining colonies that will decay on their own?

I have yet to see any of the shield generator ideas mention the invulnerable surface-to-space weapon systems and how the attacker is supposed to withstand that firepower for days of a siege. Or is the attacker supposed to just be bombing the other side of the planet? Until the defender quickly build new invulnerable surface-to-space weapon systems under it?

I would rather have a single week long siege against the whole solar system at once. The attacker having to be in orbit of the sun or at the rim of the system so they aren't disadvantaged by invulnerable surface defenses. The defender having to actually take the fight to the sieging ship, or just evacuate around it.

In my opinion by far the biggest obstacle to changing cities into something that take a while to build up is the fact that they are so easy to quickly destroy.  A way to defend them has to come first, as a pre-requisite to them being harder to build up.

Yeah that has been an issue since before destroy-able cities. There is no difference in the value of a city that have existed a year, verse a city that was built a week ago. But this seemed like a while separate issue and I didn't want to get into it here.

If you wanna make a thread for the topic, I would love to read your thoughts on the matter.