At the moment there are two main factors in judging who owns sovereignty of a system. The first is the official method of Fozziesov which requires you to drop an iHub. This is what allows you to have your alliance name on a system and grants players quality of life improvements. The second way is completely unofficial, having a number of citadels that your alliance can stage and operate from in an area. In practice, this is a much better indicator of who truly controls the system.
The Problems
Controlling an iHub is much like marking a tree in the woods and walking away. It sends a message to others that you own it, but it is far from permanent. Another alliance can easily set up in your system and just wait till you are no longer able to come back regularly and reassert your claim. The iHub can be virtually ignored till flipping it is no longer much of a hassle. Very few players will actually say that they enjoy the hunting for nodes across a constellation. Even people who benefit from the current mechanics don’t say, “I want to log on today and entosis some stuff!” Originally the idea was to spread out fleet fights, but this has failed. Most serious entosisers are in cruisers that sit 150km off of the node and can only be caught by bands of frigates. This mechanic does not encourage fleet fights, in fact it is quite the opposite.
Domination of citadels tends to be what actually allows a group to live in an area. The mechanics around the new structures have their own problems though. An Astrahus is fairly cheap and dropping a couple of them at the same time usually ensures that at least one of them will make it online. Once the citadel is active, it can survive for three weeks without any effort from the owners (This is its own problem that I will not be addressing in this article). This means that for the cost of a few billion isk, a group can almost guarantee themselves a sub-cap beachfront. While some people may scoff at the idea of sinking a few billion isk into getting a foothold, this is a relatively small cost for any serious group of players. In general, if a group can’t afford to risk that much, they probably aren’t ready to try and hold sov by themselves and defend it properly.
My Solution
If you need citadel superiority as well as an active iHub to have a solid claim on a system, why not combine them? Change iHubs away from the current fozziesov and have them follow citadel defense mechanics. Keep it so that only one of these new iHub citadels can be anchored in a system at a time. It will have a timer to online with a window for others to attack it, same as any other citadel. This will return things to a single point of conflict that allows for fleet fights instead of interceptors and nano-fit cruisers. Aspects of fozziesov can even be included in a way that actually makes sense. Maybe have the defensive tank of an iHub linked to the system’s ADM, a higher ADM means a higher damage threshold. This maintains the importance of living in a system to provide defensive bonuses that are the key to Fozziesov.
But what about the five man alliance that can currently take sov but might struggle with hitting the damage minimum? The harsh truth is that they probably shouldn’t be trying to own sov right now. We need to stop and think; just because they can do it doesn’t mean they should. If anyone really wanted to take sov away from a small group under the current mechanics, they would just drop a few citadels and make the space inhabitable. The idea behind fozziesov was fine, but it missed the mark in execution.
Header Image credit: Rose Knightley
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Do Little
Maybe iHubs and/or TCUs should be service modules in Citadels. Give people the option of anchoring them independently as at present. In structures, they consume fuel but are are protected by the structure defenses. Anchored independently, no fuel required but easy to kill.
July 15, 2017 at 9:51 amLekly Do Little
I actually had a similar idea, but it would be difficult to have the current iHub upgrade mechanics work. Right now you can possibly have every upgrade in one iHub. If you change it to service modules, then you’ll need to figure out a way to stack the upgrades of each type 1 to 5 as well as have enough slots.
I really like the idea and think it’s in the right direction, but I’m not sure how it should actually be implemented.
July 15, 2017 at 3:07 pmDo Little Lekly
A Standup Manufacturing Plant is capable of building an infinite number of freighters at the same time. Please don’t ask me to explain the physics that makes this possible but I think the devs could find room in an iHub service module for a few upgrades if they wanted to!
July 15, 2017 at 3:21 pmFreelancer117
Good read, thank you for posting.
July 15, 2017 at 10:08 amCan you please write one about the change and current state of warp bubbles ?
Pew Pew
I see what you’re saying but you have no frame of reference or analysis of the history of the game here.
The whole point of changing the Dominion mechanics was that a single point of conflict leads to blue doughnutting.
Why? Because when there is a single thing to fight over with timers what matters is who can bring the most powerful fleet to that timer. This means big, well organised, alliances almost always beat smaller, less well organised, ones.
Therefore the natural strategy is to grow your alliance as big as you can to try and win more of these single point conflicts.
Moreover it promotes a kind of gameplay based on “only showing up when you are sure you will win.” So if your enemy has a more powerful fleet than you it’s not even worth showing up at all because you’re just throwing ships away for nothing.
Wars become stale and cold because it’s just one big alliance steam rolling another which doesn’t even bother to show up and the smaller alliance then has to choose who to integrate into to continue to play in null.
And we know all this because when building Fozzie sov there was a huge amount of discussion around these exact issues.
So what you’re suggesting here is that we just jump back to the broken system we had before. I disagree with that.
I know Fozzie sov is not working properly and I think it’s one of the big problems at CCP that they aren’t willing to go back and actually fix systems which they half built but it’s reasonably obvious at this point that if you can argue for your solution in 2 paragraphs then it’s not been thought through enough.
July 15, 2017 at 10:34 amJin'taan Pew Pew
>The whole point of changing the Dominion mechanics was that a single point of conflict leads to blue doughnutting.
Has FozzieSov led to _less_ blue doughnutting? We’ve seen less wars in the past ~2 years of Sov than any 2 years of Dominion. I can’t help but think this is partially driven by how inherently non-combat focused FozzieSov is.
July 15, 2017 at 12:43 pmLekly Pew Pew
We are in arguably an even bigger blue doughnut now than before. Eve is in a state of cold war. If anything, it has made it more difficult for small groups to hold space because they are easy targets if anyone actually wants to evict them.
July 15, 2017 at 3:04 pmJumpingJack Lekly
No you are wrong, it made very easy for almost everyone who ever wanted to hold sov to hold it now, couse it has no value, nobody is going to bother and go kill the FCORE const in Fountain, why? Couse its not worth to bother lol, its same situation everywhere, why nobody trash TEST or CO2 sov now? Couse its not worth the aids, the problem that occured outside CCP original plans is that now even the smallest groups are farming isk with supers in their sov, and their sov is 100% safe couse nobody wants to bother to take it, its just not worth the effort, the game sov mechanics joined with citadel mechanics made every sov warfare boring and retarded grinding of timers for stuff that is not worth anything, not to mention that the sov also killed alot of content in the game couse now rus will be safe couse they are in rus tz, us will be safe couse they are in ustz and eu will be safe couse they are in eutz, timers that came with new sov killed all the inter tz content there simply so many factors that at the end brought us in position where nothing is happening, and people are just overkrabing 24/7, on top of wich CCP never tought to introduce any stimulation for any kind of PVP, instead they gave us these retarded events where you kill 2 rats to get skins and other useless stuff, so bottom line is, CCP killed content in game, and the sooner they admit their mistake in all of this and start paying attention on results of their changes the sooner the game will be more healthy, there is no cold war, or any other bullshit, there is just NOTHING worth fighting over under current conditions and rules of fighting
July 19, 2017 at 10:36 amhoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ Pew Pew
They could just go back to original sov but with citadels and whoever has the most in a system wins.
July 22, 2017 at 2:12 amPew Pew hoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ
You mean like it was when you needed POS’s to have sov?
I think that has the same problem I was talking about above. You need to have the largest capital fleet around to win the timers, so more and more people merge and you end up with only mega alliances that never fight.
IMO a really good sov system is one which supports multiple different sizes of group. Think of a healthy ecosystem. You want elephants and tigers but also herbivores and parasites. You want asymmetric warfare. If being the biggest is the only thing that matters then it’s all elephants all the way and everything else will die out.
July 22, 2017 at 10:55 pmCarlGustav
First of all i like citadels bit i think ccp went the Wrong way with them i likes there initial Idea. that Its your Housing. Now if The size of a citadel was truely dynamic and I could add as Mutch to one as I wanted. So I want 1000 lines of research ok cost 1000 times more to fuel.
I want to add more guns to my Death Star. More guns cost more ammo.
Then add a mini game how to fit it all.
Where you can get bonuses/penalty for how you stack items.
Now that would allow a small group to band together and build a small fortress while the major alliances would create literal death traps that could alpha off titans.
Tie in the sov to those structures as you have to entosis a Death Star to even make the system vulnerable and we get bigger fights just to make important system vulnerable.
Add in a Star drive module so you could move the Death Star and we got a nice invasion beachhead
If system is unclaimed the system can be held by a small citadel. If claimed the biggest citadel holds it (untill over a threshold). If several xl exist in system of opposing forces system is under attack. And loses Indexes
July 15, 2017 at 11:00 amhoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ CarlGustav
No mini-game! The last mini-game they gave us for POSes was the original space aids.
July 22, 2017 at 2:17 ampervertparade
>This means that for the cost of a few billion isk, a group can almost guarantee themselves a sub-cap beachfront.
Possible autocorrect error; this final word ought to be “beachhead”. Unless of course the Astrahus has been deployed in a spot which provides a gorgeous view of the adjacent nebula 🙂
July 15, 2017 at 11:57 amLekly pervertparade
Good catch, I will see if an editor can fix that.
July 15, 2017 at 3:08 pmGanthrithor
GO BACK TO POS WARFARE.
Fuck, how many times do I have to say it?
July 15, 2017 at 5:53 pmTurk Ganthrithor
Those who have the most citadels in the system own sov?
July 20, 2017 at 5:08 amGanthrithor Turk
Possibly? I argued forever ago that the solution to the excesses of POS warfare (high moon-count systems were shitty for logistics people) was to move the sov-controlling POS to planets (thus limiting the maximum number of required structures to saner numbers). Surely you could do the same thing with Citadels given a few code changes (and the necessary Citadel rebalance that’s already incoming).
July 26, 2017 at 5:00 amDrahma Lhalma
I started playing before we had Sov mechanics and Alliance Mechanics. We had about 6 corps numbering about 60 real life players and their alts who wanted to mine Crokite in Lower Syndicate. The sole purpose of banding together was to maximize income in the face of a pirate menace. We defended space as a group because we needed the ISK to build battleships to mine in (it was 2004).
Back then our “fame” came from pilots who made maps by flying around the galaxy and seeing who lived there, or being told that space had been taken. So, we appeared on a map to salve our ePeen and we became rich because we defended our space. THERE WAS NO SOV MECHANIC
We could not achieve our goals without the ISK from the Crokite and that was impossible without a bigger group. What happened to this “Alliance”? We got steamrollered by a group called Supremacy who kicked us out of Syndicate because they needed the Crokite. We ended up forming RAZOR, up in Deklein using the new Alliance system introduced by CCP,
Citadels are a throw back to that time, no-one cares about the game sov other than to be able to appear on a sov map. The problem is that there is too much money in the game, people aren’t hungry enough and everywhere is becoming the same. Supremacy didn’t stay in Syndicate long, they hated mining as much as they enjoyed kicking over our sandcastle and they went off to find other sandcastles. When they left a group called Goons showed up …. to mine crokite, so they could afford to get out of rifters.
Somehow, folk with more brains than me need to figure out how to capture the energy and enthusiasm of those days, Eve online should not go quietly into the night.
July 16, 2017 at 10:24 pmhoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ Drahma Lhalma
Even knowing about battleship mining makes you old.
July 22, 2017 at 2:16 amDrahma Lhalma hoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ
Ha Ha – My first 2 weeks in the game I zipped around collecting wreck loot that had been “created” by my CEO in his APOC. I got paid a share of the mining ISK made each evening. That 0.5 system was terrifying.
July 23, 2017 at 1:50 amhoodaticus ✓ᶜᵒᵛᶠᵉᶠᵉ
So, basically, the idea is to revert FossieSov, with a few tweaks.
I LOVE IT no sarc.
July 22, 2017 at 2:09 am