Currently earth orbit would appear to be the biggest Pirate haven in the known universe.

SOL Corp tells us that they take piracy seriously yet their security forces that stop us from being able to attack each other in earth orbit sit around twiddling their thumbs while two of the most notoriuos pirates (ByRad & Scion) regularly enter earth orbit, and or have a ship permanently in orbit. Seems a little strange to me... what gives, are they getting a bride under the table or what?

Perhapes a legal system could be introduced. If you attack, destroy, or loot another player, your given a criminal record (a simple points system would do). Once your number of points goes over a certain level your either denied access to eath orbit and to dock at the SOL stations there. Or even better your also actively attacked by SOL corp security forces once you do arrive in orbit. This would make earth and any other highly developed SOL planets a no go zone for pirates, However there could still be some lower security areas where they can still go to buy/sell stuff and do ship upgrades or whatever, but in those places they would also run the risk of being attacked.

We could then pay a fine bassed on the number of points to clear our criminal record. So that players can still engage in some PvP activities, It could even be that attacking a player with a criminal record doesnt give you any criminal points, and perhapes even earns you a small bounty, as long as your clean yourself.

Tracking the point system, or bounty earned would also give two more aspects that could be included in a Top Players ranking system. Allowing different players to focus on being top in a certain rankings.

At the moment one of the limiting factors to expanding into space is the availability of manpower to crew modules.

We can manufacture new modules, but have no-one to crew them. It means that all of us need to assign one ship that regularly returns to SOL and picks up a whole gaggle of new civilians to crew our modules.

It would be an interesting option if we could install living quarters on our stations and then offer the crew in them for 'sale' at the station, or also as potentially to 'buy'

This would open up a new job opportunity for captains, transporting crew and potentially other supplies out to the areas under development. see also my other thread regarding a distance price modifier.

Currently if i have a station i can offer the minerals im mining on the planet below for sale.

However there is little incentive to do so.

I propose that the buy/sell prce for resources have a distance modifier applied to them. That is the further away you are from SOL the more the resources are worth when trading between players.

This should be relatively simple to implement, a simple scalar modifier bassed on distance to SOL.

If set appropriately it could open up the opportunity for traders with economical ships to make a profit by buying resources at a distance and transporting them to SOL or to stations that are requesting them. ... potentially transporting fuel back out from sol to the outlying stations.

However it should be set so that the fuel costs for using a faster ship eat into the profit margin too much to make it a simple cash cow.

Im havent looked into it but i assume that there is no margin between the buy and sell prices, perhapes introducing a small one could enhance the trading effect without making it too easy to exploit.

to get an accurate picture, you should have about 20-30 shield modules on the surface to match the Laser module cost.
Those modules will be more then enough to repel the attack 20x500 = 10000 shield, 30x500 = 15000 shield.

With 15000 shields, you're almost impervious and can withstand up to 2-4 Laser MK I hits easy.

Sure, but the planet only has 9 slots, Where am i going to put all these Shield generators... or is there something im missing here?


Even if i have a 16 slot planet, and a 15 slot station above it. that gives me 31 slots total to play with. I can install the exact same stuff that a ship can. so to be equally matched against a class 5 ship warship i probably need to devote around 13 slots to military use. But that only gives me a 50/50 chance in battle. If i loose i loose it all, if the ship looses, it looses a few crew, maybe some cargo, and must repair its armour. If i want to have a decent chance i need to devote considerably more to military use, perhapes 20 slots, and then i may have 2:1 odds in my favour still not great and it leaves only about a 1/3 of the instalation left over for economic use... which after all is why id build a station like this in the first place. to generate some profit. But then you have to look at how much it would cost me to put together something like that, It will take me many weeks to break even, and in that time our beloved pirate has since upgraded his ship to a class 6... which turns my once reasonably well defended instalation into a smorgasboard of cheap minerals to our wouldbe pirate.

Ok so if the basic shields are so weak then i should upgrade to advanced Shields, but wait, that takes 17 marks at who knows what science cost, and in that time all my SLB's have been wiped out because the guy investing research in weapons has allready got laser, and built himself 3-4 of them, against which i stood no chance. But even if i did manage to hide some away and survive then the whole picture becomes even more bleak when we start talking about rail guns vs Advanced Shields... one rail gun has +12000 attack, one Advanced Shield has +2500 defence. Id need a ratio of 9:1 just to ensure i can absorb 1 critical hit from a Mark-1 rail gun... so with all 9 slots on my 9 slot planet filled up with shields im kind of wondering what the point is...


IMHO the risks to the ships captain need to be increased when he is attacking a stationary object, ie a planet or station and in additon the planets and stations need to get a significant bonus to defence. Can this not be explained through scale... planets are well... really bloody big things. Where as the ships are tiny, what does the largest have 100 * 100m3 double it for the glue in between and its still just a speck next to a planet.


For the moment i will adjust my game play tactics. But the unbalance now makes the game pretty newbie unfriendly, and we all want lots more new players dont we. In the long term it will be almost unplayable, we will certainly have no permanent planetary installations. Even if we find ourselves a nice 100 slot rock home world... pitched against just a small fleet of war leviathans it will stand little chance. You cant say keep your ship in orbit...because well if all your ships are in orbit to protect your planet, what is there left to do?

FWIW I think the ship to ship combat can stay as it is... ships can escape, and the playing field in terms of investment vs Risk is level. If the other guy simply has a more powerfull ship then he can expect to defeat me and perhapes capture a little of my cargo, etc.

Id like a little more information about how much damage things can take. Im a little confused.

I just had nine modules with a combined power rating well over 11k taken out by a single hit that did 8k damage

Incidentally that was a 9 slot planet instalation that had 3 SHG's A Viper Squad, a Marine unit and only 4 civillian MIF/ATH units.

I very much doubt id have been any better off with an extra SHG, and an extra VIPER or MAU unit as the guy that attacked i know has at least 2 more military units on his ship.

It seems to me that the battle balance ship to planet is very heavily weighted in favour of the ship. particularly in terms of risk reward. The ship captain has minimal risks, if he looses he looses some crew, must do a few repairs to armour and can get straight back into it. the planetary forces however are destroyed completly... Id estimate sunk costs of around $100k or more for that planetary instalation, and profit extracted at a small fraction of that. It makes me think that there is very little point in colonising planets other than those that you have a station at... and even then that wont de safe for long.

And all of this is with an attacker whose ship only has the tutorial reward laser plus a couple of vipers... how are we going to possibly defend a planet and even a planet - station pair against a larger ship with more lasers.