Offline Protection is Exploitable

[Deantwo]

It's very simple, you engage in hostilities then you are no longer protected while offline from those you have attacked. By the same token, if you take advantage of your attackers lack of protection and attack while they are not online and cannot respond then you lose your protection from them as well.

I mean if it is limited to like a 24 hour loss of offline protection against empires you have attacked, I guess it could fix part of the issue at hand.

But there are still a lot of issues this wouldn't stop, and it would totally invalidate the whole "defenses can fire while under offline protection" thing that is currently the only thing that can counter ships left in orbit over a city that is under offline protection.

And this would do nothing to stop the abuse of alt empires used to hold onto captured cities so they can't be re-captured as mentioned in the opening post.

[QuakeIV]

You could probably close the surrender gap to some extent by saying you cannot surrender cities while an active war is ongoing.

Its counterintuitive but you could imagine the following:

1. City is taken
2. City surrendered to offline empire
3. War is declared on offline empire
4. 24 hours later the protection lapses and the city can be taken

Surrendering cities could then be done as part of the peace process if needed (this has never actually happened that I know of, surrendering is afaik pretty much exclusively used to move cities between empires willingly) and if the losing side doesn't hand over what was agreed just re-declare war and take stuff.

[Grecanis]

Could the game recognize a chain of control for systems that also recognizes how an empire either lost or won control of a system. Allowing a cities founder to reclaim a city that was taken forcibly no matter who is in possession currently.

What I'm suggesting is that if you are the aggressor then you lose the ability to be protected while offline only to those you have attacked. The defender is allowed to defend and/or attack any enemies still in the contested system, including reclaiming anything taken by the aggressor. If however the defender decides to take the fight to the aggressors systems then the defender also becomes an aggressor and also loses their offline protection from that particular empire for the duration of hostilities as determined by diplomatic contact.

If initial aggression was made by mistake then it is up to the parties in question to cease hostilities via diplomacy.

If an empire wants to camp your system until you log on there is not much you can do about it if they are not set to a hostile stance. Also there is no way to guard against creative people finding ways to circumvent any mechanic. You can however try to give them reason to pause and think if they really want to open that can of worms.

The subject of this thread is the exploitation of combat logging and hiding taken systems on alt empires. The notion of being able to reclaim a system you have had taken from you may harsh, but if we are able to see a chain of custody for the system in question then the empire that was given the system by the aggressor can not say they didn't know.

There could be a timer on reclaiming systems. Say, 24 to 72 hours after which the system must be taken normally.

[Deantwo]

You could probably close the surrender gap to some extent by saying you cannot surrender cities while an active war is ongoing.

Yeah I literally just wrote about that in the other thread I linked at the start of this thread. But this all assumes we want an actual formal war declaration system.
See: (Idea thread post) Formal War Declaration