Post-Dominion Sovereignty: Small alliance options
What happens when PvPers start to coalesce gravitationally
CCP has released the dev blog detailing the new sovereignty upgrades and upkeep for Dominion. The tears in the resultant threadnaught have started to fall in upon themselves and may form a black hole from whose event horizon the existing PvP nullsec alliances may never escape.
Looking at things from the perspective of a small alliance, however, the new design will cost 14m every two weeks just to hold sovereignty over a system, plus an additional 70m every two weeks for the infrastructure hub (based on the decreased price). Essentially, we’re talking 6m/day. So you’d have to spend something like 180m/month to have a system you can upgrade. If you install “strategic upgrades” like cynojammers and jump bridges, the cost spirals upwards rapidly.
To counteract this, after the first week you can install various industry and military upgrades (more grav sites, WHs, guaranteed anomalies, DED plexes, etc.), then after two more weeks you can upgrade those, etc. Assuming you can hold the system for 100 days, you can have up to 10 (!) guaranteed anomalies, etc. etc. At this point, you will have spent around 600m ISK just in fees, not to mention any logistics. After all, you’ll almost certainly need at least one starbase there.
A fully upgraded system, which has reached level 5, will then provide 10 guaranteed anomalies, 5 guaranteed grav sites in addition to any belts, and probably lots of signatures, plexes, and wormholes (depending on what a “significant” increase in probability means). I think that can easily support 30+ pilots: 10-20 combat pilots running an anomaly or two a day on average, plus miners and explorers with plenty to do. This means that your industrial and PvE-type pilots will not need to roam all over the cluster just to find something they want. The PvP combat pilots will probably need to defend the system from time to time, not to mention roam and look for fights since presumably the anomalies don’t really get their motors running beyond just enough to keep their hardware (ships, ammo, etc.) replaced.
Let’s compare this to W-space, where anyone wanting to take your space away from you must work much harder due to the difficulty of bringing in a fleet of sufficient size. Logistics can take more work out there, I’d think, since you must import fuel for your towers while the nullsec stuff only requires fee payment, assuming you can find appropriate ice nearby (not necessarily a valid assumption). You also don’t have anything resembling guaranteed anomalies (combat sites) or radar / magnetometric (hacking / archaeology) sites, but if you choose a system with static links to higher-class WHs, you can usually find something to do, albeit with a little more effort. And I believe miners nearly always can find a gravimetric or ladar site (mining or gas) out in W-space. Also, you don’t actually have to ally with anyone, much less work with your neighbors since those will change frequently.
A nullsec system can definitely look attractive once you have enough pilots to justify it. Your pilots can almost certainly reach it more easily, albeit this implies that you may have a little more difficulty holding it. And they have said they may tweak the costs even a little bit lower as well. That doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad design to me, as long as we have the tools to manage income (e.g. making sure alliances get some revenue from their member corps who collect the taxes, et cetera).
So I don’t think this actually means the sky will fall on us. I think it does mean that small organizations that want to live in 0.0 K-space may need to reach out and talk to their neighbors, work out mutual defense pacts, and consider incorporating more and more industrial operations into their overall plan. Or, you know, live in W-space. More options can lead to more interesting gameplay and social structures.
(UPDATE: Galen has organized a small feed of community blog posts analyzing this new information.)
(UPDATE 2: Prometheus09 had a post that helped me note something I’d missed before: the sov upkeep tweak, not just the infrastructure hub. Figures updated above.)
Image credit: thebadastronomer
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Date: 2009-11-09
Categories: OOC