Conquest of Solar Systems

[QuakeIV]

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. ... 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. ...

Allow me to provide a considered response to this point:

Most planets, and even resource zones, have no value.  There is no reason to attack targets that already mean nothing to the enemy.

I will elaborate further.  The only cities worth sieging are shipyards, and resource harvesting worlds in the QL248-255 range, which are so rare that there is typically not more than one per sector.  If they bubble other targets, ignore them and go around them.  I personally think that makes siege targets acceptably rare enough.

... What if the attacker is bombing the far side of the planet? ... What if the attacker is bombing a world on the the other side of the solar system? ...

Empirically speaking, the answer is that nothing happens because the shots hit the planet.  I also have built ships with the longest range possible weapon and they arent even close to shooting across the solar system.  Its not clear why you thought this was something worth bringing up.

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

This is a fair point and I didn't know that.  As mentioned the attacker still cant damage the buildings, but they will be able to shoot people in the city.  This would obviously be an issue worth fixing but I in all good faith believe its minor enough that its not catastrophic, the city itself would survive this, as could parked spacecraft (if for instance you hangared them or didnt have any external entrances).

... "How long do you want to be protected for, 3 or 7 days?" isn't really an interesting or useful choice. ... Yes, my idea doesn't have much choice, because giving people the option to shoot themselves in the foot usually goes poorly for them. ...

At this point the only real consideration would be build time (days at least), and resource usage (days or longer of production).  Actual mass production of shield modules takes a huge amount of effort to set up, and it can easily take weeks if you need millions of them.

Regarding making sure players can never shoot themselves in the foot as a gameplay objective, I think pursuing this removes all relevant and interesting choices from the game, and also support the return of the peace dimension for those who want a game that is impossible to make wrong choices in.

By the way I don't know if this thought had entered your mind yet, but if the defender bubbles every planet in a system, you can generally speaking ignore all but one of them and just go around them because they don't matter.