Proposal: PoB boarding attacks

[jammi]

I mentioned this idea in another thread recently, but figured I'd expand upon it in its own right to give it a little more exposure. The gist of this idea is to enable a wider range of viable attacks on PoBs than are currently possible, especially for factions that don't have access to battleships.

This command utilises freighters - any freighter will do, so long as it is classed as a freighter. The command used would be /board. The command will only work if you have Marines in your hold, you are stationary and within 50m of the station. Once activated, the command will also drain your powerplant to zero. This means in order to be successful, you will need to have and retain space superiority around the station. Platforms and enemy players will need to be destroyed or the freighters are toast.

For maximum effectiveness, this should also be deployed along with requiring munitions for defence platforms to regen. 200 munitions per platform respawn would probably be about right. A campaign to bleed munitions from a base beforehand would then be effective, or even necessary.

Once the command has been successfully initiated, the freighter will damage the station over time, consuming Marines in the process. When you run out of Marines or if you move, the command stops. The specifics would be that a marine is depleted every 2 seconds, meaning a ship with 540 units would take roughly 20 minutes to deplete.

Each two second tick would inflict 132,000 damage, which is equivalent to 1.5 battleship Cerberus turrets firing for 2 seconds. This means a boarding freighter is approximately half as efficient as your average 3 cerb siege battleship, meaning twice as many freighters would be needed than standard battleships. This makes them useful as a supplement to an existing siege fleet, or for factions without battleships attacking low level bases.

Naturally you want some way to countermeasure this. Marines could be garrisoned on the station, adding to FOW upkeep in the same manner as regular crew. This would prevent 50,000 strong marine garrisons, for example. Each defending marine will deplete 2 attacking marines before being killed itself. All defending marines need to be killed before boarding damages the station. Alternately, instead of garrisoning marines, a player could elect not to deploy a security force and simply absorb the damage directly as they would in a normal siege.

Additional supplements to defence ideas: add a barracks module, which would enable the free garrisoning of a certain number of marines - perhaps 400 - 500. Additionally, bases with military IFFs have more effective marines, i.e. defenders kill 3 attackers instead of 2.

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[SpaceTime]

A very nice idea which serves as a replacement for factions that don't have access to Battleships.

My only concern is the military IFFs on bases. It would be a huge boost for military IFFs while corporate IFFs would have no benefit. I'd propose instead that each Defense Module on the base would make the defending marines more effective by 10%-15%.

[Foochow]

This is actually a good idea. I see the RP and raiding potential from this. It would be more RP for Armored Transports to carry the Marines and do the boarding. I'd like to see this implemented to see it in action.

P.S. Inb4 Bowex) PMC

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[evanz]

absolutely NO

[jammi]

absolutely NO

Care to elaborate? I'm not detecting a well reasoned argument here.

[Sciamach]

If it can be coded: please for the love of god let it be so

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.

[Independent Miners Guild]

While I like the idea, it will only make supplying a base more annoying.
It is already very annoying, and you already have to check on a lot of values, and mistakes cost you billions and months of effort.
With more options implemented to harm bases, I just fear that caring for them will become even more tedious...

And... let's be honest and look at what it would mean in reality:
Wednesday, 4:30 am: master-race shuttling marines in. It's already crappy with these early morning weekday attacks, and opening cheap ways of hurting other people's constructive efforts might not be a good call.

If marines cost like a lot, so that the cost is sigificant (like: in the hundreds of millions for a successful attack against a normal base), I could be okay with it. Reasoning: It replaces the need for a Battleship, for a CAU armor, etc etc. It can't be anywhere like cheap. But that would again make it very costly for base owners and I somehow do not feel like putting more burdens on those who create something that others just prey upon to destroy it once they see a chance.

There are some side-effects, too: the need for turrets would rise a lot. So more bases would have even more turrets. Do we want that?

Moreover, this would especially put pressure on the low tier bases, whereas high tier will almost be immune to it. Try and sit still in a ship in one of the senior base perimeters while hostile. Battleship Cerbs will show your marines space.

And rep will be a pain, too. Because these freighters in the 2.am raid ofc would be FL-IDed or would have an ID that is neutral to the base, to be able to unload without problems. So the code would have to include that unloading marines => attack => triggers base defense.

Furthermore, there is no reason a Military base should defend better. I bet Liberty Rouges are fierce defenders and Mollys would at least be as badass as a BowEx security squadron and all of them would be comparable to a bored military security crew on a base.

Jack, torn between "interesting playing scenes possible" and "reality: 3:30 am night raid with 12 player on".

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[evanz]

also, itll be a base killing group creating neutral repped ships to the base they want to attack, flying about 10 transports just dropping off marines, to destroy from inside

[Rebirth]

Everything that is not a snubcraft is listed as "freighter", capital 8 battleships would do just fine sitting there in front of the base with regens from a repair ship #meta, lol

I don't like the idea in general due to me being a lazy guy anyways ...

[Highland Laddie]

The /board command should instantly trigger the base defenses to prevent neutral IFF "loophole" attacks. Also, I would make the armament requirements a bit less. Would also prefer the Barracks Module to add 15-20% effectiveness to defenders.

A very interesting idea.