Full Version: Sov Changes

"Do not fear change, embrace it."

This blog is the first in a series which will focus on giving you a glimpse into some of the big features of our next expansion, Dominion. In this one, we want to give you a high level overview of how we plan to change the sovereignty mechanic. Subsequent blogs will detail things such as the theories behind some of these new concepts and, eventually, the actual mechanics as well as a few other key bits we feel directly affect the massive sandbox of null-sec game play in EVE. For now though, let's get started.

Out with the old...

In the beginning, there was no sovereignty... then there were starbases. Intended to be ‘homes' of a sort for corporation or alliance members, or even a lone miner in deep space, these venerable structures have since been pressed into a multitude of roles for which their initial design was never intended. Their link to attaining control of star systems is something which we will move away from in Dominion. So now comes the words which so many have longed to hear:

Sovereignty will no longer be tied directly to starbases.

This decision was an obvious one, as there is no one thing that causes more consternation amongst players than the seemingly endless task of shooting towers. Once the choice to do this was made, we then went ahead and pretty much scrapped the entire current system and started to build a new one from the ground up. Literally years of forum posts, player experience and feedback from the CSM contributed to what was a long, arduous process. What has emerged is a much leaner and infinitely more expandable system which we can continually evolve over time.

The thoughts and theories behind this process will be detailed soon in a following blog, but I'm sure you're ready for some actual information.

Planting the Flag

There are no sov ‘levels' anymore; you either have sovereignty or you do not. The mechanic for claiming a star system will be much more simplified and symbolic. You will plant your ‘flag' in the form of a new claiming module and it will sync up with the traditional ‘borders' of a star system, namely the stargates. The exact mechanics of how this works and why will be explained later, as we are still in the process of balancing the system, however we can tell you one of the more important bits.

Upkeep

Who makes sure all those stargates in 0.0 continue to run? Who pays the bills to the crews and funds essential services to ensure there are no breakdowns? When Dominion is released, the answer is simple - if you want to control the space accessed by these stargates, you will be responsible for their monthly maintenance and upkeep. The current design calls for this to be a simple ISK transaction, representative of things like duct tape for reactor maintenance, Amarrios breakfast cereal and other important stuff.

The other major factor is the more space you spread your ‘Dominion' across, the more expensive it will become to maintain your stargate network. We do not want to see alliances holding space simply for the sake of holding it or just making their color on the map bigger. We want to see alliances more properly utilizing their space and providing more places for their members to generate income. In order to facilitate that, we are going to let you do some really cool stuff!

Home Improvement

One issue that we intend to specifically address is that of ‘infrastructure'. This is a word you are going to hear a lot more of in the months and years to come. Essentially, we are going to give you the tools to improve the space you hold. There will be many ways you can do this, but they will all fall under one of three categories: Military, Economic and Industrial. These are not set ‘paths' that you can follow, simply a classification of daily activities that take place in EVE.

The idea is that some areas of space are obviously considered of less worth than others and always have been. This is going to change. YOU are going to change it. Through the investment of time, money and effort at all levels, an alliance will be able to directly affect the value of and develop the space they hold. This will consist of things as simple as investing in improvements that allow your members to discover new riches in systems long thought barren and useless. The resources were always ‘out there', hidden or out of sight, and now you will have the tools to access them. Other developmental areas will concern the expansion and efficiency of your industrial base.

In essence, you are going to be able to make your space more attractive to both your current alliance members and also smaller entities that might be looking for incentives to take their first steps out of Empire. The goal is to provide incentives for you and your allies to not have to spread out so much in order to provide reasonable rewards for your pilots.

I want to blow *%#$ up!

No matter what happens, there will always be important things to shoot. The key is finding a balance between allowing smaller gangs of raiders to disrupt the day to day operations of your space against requiring massive battleship and capital fleets to actually remove you from the same space. Conquest of space in Dominion will differ greatly from what exists currently, as will the ability of roaming gangs to cause an ‘AFK Empire' no end of frustration.

Just as raiders will be presented new opportunities to create havoc, aggressors intent on all out conquest will have to carefully weigh their plans and make decisions on what and where to attack first. Strategies that work in one system may completely fail in the next. Defenders of space in Dominion will have new ways of defending their space as well. These tools will not replace a proper defense force but they will provide new and exciting options which ensure that not every fight is the same and will reward investment in military infrastructure.

Dominion Tools

Tying all of this together will be a feature we are tentatively calling the "Sovereignty Dashboard" (cooler name pending). Depending on your level of access in a corp or alliance, you will be able to use this new feature to get up-to-the-moment information on what is happening in a given system of space that your alliance controls. You will be able to see where the efforts of your alliance are going, what areas of space are being developed and how you as a member, director or executor might help. This is just an overview of basic functionality. This feature may be expanded upon and you can expect more details soon.

Iteration & The Future

One very important point to take away from this blog is that everything described here is only the beginning. One of the mandates that we've followed in our recent development cycles is that any new features we introduce be open ended enough to allow for future development and improvement. The wormholes of Apochrypha are a prime example of this in that who knows what else might be lurking in the darkness of wormhole space? Likewise, while we felt that the old sov system was at an evolutionary dead end, with no ability to properly expand upon it, the new one we plan to introduce in Dominion is specifically aimed at allowing us to continually tweak it and introduce new content.

As an example of this philosophy, one feature which we plan to implement early next year as a direct follow-up to the new Sovereignty system is the introduction of Treaties. Without going into too much detail, Treaties will be a fully functional mechanic that formalizes many of the agreements already in game. The plan is to give alliances the tools to ‘rent' out areas of their space to other alliances or corporations, create formal military treaties and establish diplomatic boundaries with regard to your alliance interests.

As you can see, we are not doing this by half measures. The sandbox is about to get bigger and badder than ever. This is EVE Online - Dominion.

- CCP Abathur

We've been thinking about nullsec for quite a long time. The last big round of changes were made in Revelations II back in summer 2007, and we've been watching the results ever since. Some things worked out pretty well. Some things not so much. Some things have changed in the intervening period. And now here we are, two years on, and we've been given a mandate to re-engineer the dynamics of nullsec. Which is exciting, and challenging, and maybe a little scary. We think this stuff is kind of important, and it's not like there's anyone else in the industry who we could talk to about this stuff even if we wanted to. Nobody else does - has ever really done - what we do here: it's undiscovered country.

So anyway, here we are today. Nullsec is largely the domain of large, 2-3000 member PvP alliances, grouped up into inevitable coalitions and engaged in not-quite-impossibly large wars. Costs are mosty covered at the alliance level by a combination of old money and high-value moon minerals. The latter continue to rise in price due to ever-increasing demand from invention, and the after-effects of last year's exploit-related burp invalidating the calculations used to construct the Alchemy pressure-release valve. Most of the space that's up for grabs is owned by a clone army of ideologically-distinct but functionally-similar alliances, making the entire political landscape depressingly homogeneous. The state of the military art is not much better - sub-capital fleets are wheeled out for cyno-jammer take-downs and then packed away before they can fall victim to multiple doomsdays, leaving huge capital fleets to park themselves in front of a never-ending procession of starbases. And the smaller groups, the newer organizations hoping to gain a foothold in the Great Game, are left begging for crumbs around the edges. Who's going to let security-risk nobodies into their back yard when they'll never be able to compete pay as much as a single dysprosium moon?

We're not convinced that this is the best, most interesting, most dynamic and most emergence-friendly state of being for nullsec, so we're going to make some changes.


Why nullsec is worth working on

Nullsec is cool and different and awesome because of emergence. It's not the most populous area of the game, sure (and more on this shortly), but it provides one of EVE's most compelling and unique experiences. It does this because, by and large, we let you the players call the shots. This does have some impact in empire, but in nullsec the effect is writ large.

By giving players and player organizations tactical and strategic freedom, we allow a situation to arise where each challenge is different from the last, because every time there are different people involved making different decisions which result in different outcomes. You may have seen this effect in trailers such as The Butterfly Effect, and it usually goes by the name "emergence". And it's awesome.

The reason emergence works is that players make decisions. The more decisions that players can make, the more emergence you get, and the more interesting the experience is. Therefore, a primary development goal in nullsec is to enable players to make decisions, which can be boiled down to two directives.

First, try to give players tools. More tools give players more options, which means more decisions. Of course, to have value these decisions need to be meaningful - it's not enough to say "you can paint your shed red or blue" if the color of the shed has no impact on anything else.

Second, try to avoid telling players what to do or how to do it. The current sovereignty system, for example, mechanically prescribes a certain path to conquest, which limits the number of command decisions to be made. Obviously you need some mechanics in order to reach a definitive outcome - which lessens the number of decisions but also makes them more meaningful - but in general, the strategy is "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate".


The other thing

As mentioned above, nullsec isn't the most populated area of the game, and doesn't contain anything like the majority of EVE's characters. This presents both a challenge and an opportunity for this expansion. A challenge, because we obviously have to be careful not to ruin the gameplay for everyone in empire by accident, but an opportunity because we can change the balance here and give more of our players a chance to experience nullsec gameplay.

We're aware that some players just aren't interested in the nullsec experience, and that's fine, but we're also aware that there's a lot of players who'd like to try it out but can't seem to get started - in no small part because of the problems outlined in the first few paragraphs. If we have a really compelling game experience, and we have players that want to try it out but can't, then we're doing something wrong somewhere.


Where we're going with this

Ok, so that's pretty much the top-level view. Let's drill down a bit to some of the big whats and whys.

The first big departure is the actual sovereignty system itself (which is only a small part of the whole picture). Right at the start of the project we asked "why do we even need a sovereignty system?", and the main argument for keeping it has nothing to do with shooting at things. Rather, the biggest reasons for having a mechanical system of ownership are to have something we can use to regulate who can do certain things in a system, and (more importantly) to let people stake out their territory. Being able to say "this is our space, we fought hard for it, and now everyone can see what we achieved" is important to a lot of people.

A system to do this can be fairly lightweight. It needs to handle systems changing hands, of course, but it can afford to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. Currently we have a prescriptive sovereignty system: you fight over sovereignty explicitly, with the sovereignty mechanics determining who owns the system. A descriptive system says who's in charge, so it only needs to change hands after the dust has settled and one side has emerged triumphant. The actual fighting is deregulated - rather than mechanically telling you what to do (shoot sixty hardened starbases), you just need to do whatever it is you need to do so that at the end of the day the enemy goes away.

Of course, there's one class of thing that can't be left entirely free-form, and they're the things that helped bring about the current sovereignty system in the first place: stations. Outposts and conquerable stations are the river-crossings of EVE - each one lets you project power all around it, and as a result they're pivotal military objectives. Station ping-pong - waking up in the morning and finding that someone in a different timezone had taken your station, and the first thing you had to do was shoot it again to take control of it so you could re-dock - was very silly and we don't want that to come back.

There's no reason that the solution to this has to be the sovereignty system, but it does need to be timezone-proof. There's also no reason that it needs to take two weeks for an outpost to change hands - while comparatively shorter switches give the defender less time to mount a defense, they also make re-conquest easier. The combination of a lighter, descriptive sovereignty system and a separate mechanism for outpost conquest should (we think) lend itself much better to emergent outcomes.


Density and density

Sovereignty and outposts are roughly half the problem. The other half are the two related concepts of resource density and population density, and here everything ties itself into a messy knot that can be unravelled in a fairly elegant way.

Where to start? Resource density in nullsec is too low to support a high player density, which limits the number of people that could theoretically live in nullsec. Moon mineral values mean that there's no need at an alliance level to worry about other resources anyway, which limits the number of people who are actually allowed to live in nullsec. A lack of population or vulnerable resources means smaller fleets have little strategic relevance. Alliances hold vast tracts of space that they have no actual use for, simply because they can, locking out other groups from using it.

These problems are all interlinked, and solving them with a few key changes should bring a lot of good results.

Firstly, let people upgrade their space, and in particular its resource density. By increasing the resource density, you increase the potential population density, and by letting players do it rather than simply seeding more resources, you open up more decisions and more emergence.

Secondly, reduce the amount of income that can be derived from mining moons. In conjuction with the first change, this means that the best way to raise funds for an alliance will once again be to fill your space with as many people as possible, upgrade your space as much as possible and watch the money roll in.

This serves several masters. It gets more people into nullsec - one of our objectives - by making big alliances want more people in their space. It makes it much harder to be a big, rich, military alliance; rather, things should move more back towards the old dichotomy between big rich carebear alliances and smaller, poorer military alliances, because history (both in EVE and in the real world) shows that badass military organizations can't handle crop rotation without going soft and squishy. This dichotomy leads to more interesting conflicts; balanced but non-symmetric wars and political interactions between organizations with wildly differing objectives tend to be more entertaining than fights between largely identical groups. And if some alliances are relying heavily on lots of people working in their space on a regular basis in order to fund all their activities, interesting and strategically meaningful small-fleet combat materializes on its own, without resorting to "here is a structure for twenty ships to shoot": there's lots of soft targets for roaming fleets to harass, and space-holders have a pressing financial incentive to keep the residents of their space safe and fight off any incursions.

Thirdly, charge rent on systems. This allows us to scale the rent based on how well-developed a system is, which means it's less of a no-brainer to upgrade (meaningful decisions!), and also reinforces the idea that the more people are using a system, the more money it'll make you. In conjunction with a few well-placed additional penalties, it also combats alliance sprawl, leaving more space up for grabs and again letting more people experience nullsec.

Obviously, the anti-sprawl mechanics are a bit of a soft limiter, as you can always split up your alliance into multiple "alt alliances" to work around any possible mechanic in this vein. That's ok though, although to explain why needs a short digression on social structures in EVE.

The most stable social structures are almost always corporations, and they're also the ones with the most value for players. Corporations usually survive turmoil, and they represent the strongest set of social bonds. Alliances are fairly stable and represent some additional social value, but often fragment after major defeats. Finally, coalitions of alliances are pretty unstable and rarely last beyond whatever war brought them together. (It's also interesting to note that the number of real people in the average large corporation rarely exceeds Dunbar's Number, and that the average stable military alliance is almost always ~3000 players divided into 6-8 major corporations, but that's not directly relevant.)

Groupings of "alt alliances" fall somewhere between regular alliances and coalitions in terms of stability (and by reducing the number of people in alliance chat to a more manageable number, likely actually increase social utility), so even if alliances attempt to circumvent soft limits by fragmenting themselves, they're decreasing their stability and to some degree at least increasing the number of political entities present in nullsec, both of which lead to more conflict and more interesting emergent behavior. And of course in addition, by adding some non-linear cost scaling, the upkeep system will likely encourage at least some multi-region alliances to consider whether they really need all that additional space or not...


Recap that for me?

We implement the following:

A simple, descriptive sovereignty system
A separate mechanism for governing outpost conquest
A way to increase the resource density of your space (as well as other cool gubbins)
A reduction in the value of moon minerals
An upkeep system for the space you hold and develop

We get (hopefully!):

A more comprehensible, streamlined and robust way of showing who owns a particular system
A better conquest experience
More organic, meaningful and fun small-fleet combat
Less territorial sprawl by major alliances
A more diverse and interesting political landscape
More opportunities for players to get involved in nullsec
More awesome emergent gameplay

If it works out like we're hoping, we think this is a pretty good outcome.

-Greyscale


Postscript

This is actually my third stab at this blog. The first was a 3000-word rehash of some internal documents, which was interesting but too wordy and not informative enough, and the second draft I binned after getting to 1500 and realizing I was still warming up... We even discussed not doing this at all for a bit, but decided it's worth doing what's essentially a theory-dump for three reasons. For one we find this stuff really interesting for its own sake, and figured that a few of you might too, and for another we've found internally that a lot of the things we're doing make no sense until you have the "why" of it explained.

The third reason though is to show that we really have thought about this stuff. Nullsec gameplay is a big deal and a lot of you are rightly worried that there's a huge potential to screw this up badly (I know it keeps me up at night sometimes). We think though that we've got a good handle on the underlying theory for what goes on out there, and that gives us a good basis to move forward on. It should also go some way to explaining why we're being fairly comprehensive here. The current systems in nullsec are a bit like a house that's been built up piecemeal from a single small hut, and while it has a lot of rooms, the layout doesn't make a lot of sense ("why is there a toilet in the middle of the living room?" "well, three years ago..."). Most of the prior discussion we've seen, both internally and externally, has been limiting itself to knocking through a few walls and rearranging the furniture; what we're trying to do here instead is to level the entire building, and then rebuild the foundations and the ground floor according to an actual plan. The resulting structure won't (initially) have as many rooms as the current one, but it's been designed with coherent future extensibility in mind, and more importantly the toilet will actually be in the bathroom this time round.

"If I have an unstoppable super weapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve." - Evil Overlord Rule #40

It began over four years ago with the Dreadnaughts; massive engines of destruction designed to engage the starbases released in the Exodus expansion and the Outposts of Cold War. Then came Red Moon Rising and the advent of Carriers, Motherships and Titans.

When capital ships were first introduced, the Alliances of EVE were just beginning to expand into nullsec. The sight of more than a few capital ships in one place was a newsworthy event. The first Motherships were near-mythical beasts, used by ruthless pirate corporations and powerful PvP alliances, able to stand against and destroy entire fleets nearly single handedly. The mere suspicion of an alliance even building a Titan was enough to spawn epic battles and wars whose legends live on to this day.

How times change!

Over the last couple of years, both the size of capital fleets and the use of capital warships has grown at an exponential rate. "Hot Dropping" has shifted from being something done to decide the fate of a war to becoming a blood sport that major alliances play with each other, with dozens of capital wrecks littering the battlefield after such engagements. Factional Warfare even sees regular use of Carriers and Dreadnaughts.

With the current number of active capital ships on Tranquility, they can no longer be looked upon as tools of the elite. This evolution of warfare has made it apparent that capital engagements are not some random occurrence anymore but simply another level of combat in EVE. Some of these ships have withstood the test of time better than others. So, now we're going to walk through the various classes of PvP capital ships and explain how we see them fitting into Dominion and beyond. Traditionally, we would start from the bottom and go up, but I'm not traditional.

Titans

The most dramatic change to Titans will be the removal of the current area of effect, grid smashing, lag generating, fun killing, fleet destroying super weapon. It's gone, folks! In its place will be the first of what we hope to be a new line of mutually exclusive super weapons, usable only by Titans. The first of these will debut in Dominion and will keep the names of their grid-wide predecessors but will now focus their destructive energies upon single targets. (Insert Admiral Ackbar quotes as you please!)

To illustrate what we are talking about here, let me share the early concept art for the new Amarr super weapon:



There is nothing fancy about this. You will have to warp your titan on grid and actually target an enemy ship to ruin his day. You won't be killing other supercapitals in one shot, but very little else is going to survive. The weapon has drawbacks that are designed to prevent the Doomsday drive-bys of the present, but you'll find a couple more changes which might encourage you to stick around a bit longer than before.

First up is that the current weapon bonuses on Titans will get just a tiny bit of an enhancement so that the turret locators actually might get used. This damage will vary with fittings, just as with any other ship, but will certainly enable a Titan to make its presence felt if the pilot so chooses.

Second, to ensure that you don't instantly melt and can survive more than a minute on the modern EVE capital battlefield, we will be giving Titans a respectable hit point increase. This will not render Titans invulnerable to assault, but it should allow allied forces time to properly assist them after someone says, "Hey, watch this!" on voice comms and gets in trouble.

The future of this ship class is not set in stone and as EVE continues to evolve they may find even more roles to play. For now, we consider these changes to be a step forward in bringing Titans closer to being an actual ship instead of the giant nano-smart bombs they have become. However, Titans won't be alone in dealing with the capital fleets of EVE...

Motherships no more...

Perhaps no ships in EVE symbolize the majesty of the game more than the Nyx, Wyvern, Aeon and Hel. Featured in dozens of player-made movies, official trailers and screenshots, it is a sad testimony that their presence has not been a factor on the capital battlefields of EVE for quite some time. The simple fact is that this class of ship now stays mostly parked on trained alts and is rarely used as they are nothing more than expensive targets for hungry legions of Dread pilots.

No more.

Motherships are being reclassified as Supercarriers. The name of ‘Mothership' has long caused confusion as to what the intended role of these ships was supposed to be but we are finally putting that to rest. This refocusing will see these ships go through a few changes. Gone will be:

· The ability for Supercarriers to fit Triage modules.

· The ability for Supercarriers to fit Clone Vat Bays.

· The ability for Supercarriers to fit one additional Warfare Link per level.

One side effect of this change is that the build cost for Supercarriers will go down slightly as they will no longer require the Capital Clone Vat Bay components.

What are they getting? In addition to receiving their own hit point boost, Supercarriers are going to get new teeth in the form of the deadly new Fighter Bombers they can launch. Fighter Bombers have exactly one purpose: to destroy capital ships and look very cool while doing so. Here is the Gallente version:





Fighter Bombers will be unique to the Supercarrier class, launching specialized torpedoes capable of inflicting immense damage against other capital ships. We are still looking at a few other ideas that will help Supercarriers do their jobs more effectively and you may see those popping up on SiSi in the coming weeks.

One more thing - the Hel is getting rid of its current repair bonuses and trading them in for bonuses that enhance the endurance of its Fighters and Fighter Bombers. I guess the Flight Deck Chiefs on Hels like duct taping spare bits of armor onto their strike craft or something...

Carriers

While we are still looking for possible ways to tweak them, Carriers as a class will remain unchanged in Dominion. We have however reduced both the duration and fuel consumption of the Triage module by half in order to allow a bit more tactical flexibility in their usage.

Dreadnaughts

The heavy hitters of New Eden will continue in their role as the primary anti-structure and anti-capital ship in EVE. Since my blog last week, many have expressed worry that their beloved Dreads would have a reduced purpose in Dominion. This is not true. If anything, Dreads will be used more than ever against not only each other, but new challenges which will require the mentality to "Siege green!"

Dreads will remain unchanged with one small exception - the Moros will only receive its drone damage bonus if it is in siege mode.

‘Bays' Again

We are also working hard to bring the next iteration of our ‘bay' concept into Dominion in the form of Fighter / Fighter Bomber bays for Carriers and Supercarriers. This will allow you to better organize and separate your primary strike craft from your regular drones. In addition to allowing us to better balance the numbers of drones that these classes of ships carry around with them, we are also doing this for performance reasons. The server does not like it when Supercarriers have 1500 spare Hobgoblin II's in their drone bays and making the server happy is always a good thing.

Will there ever be more capital ships?

Not in Dominion. The biggest issues with creating new capital ships involve both finding a defined role for them to fill and then devoting the considerable art and design resources needed to bring such massive ships to life. As EVE continues to evolve, we will be on the lookout for ways to possibly expand the capital ship lineup. After all, something has to wear the tag of Mothership again at some point!

To close, please be aware that we are planning some special events on SiSi in the near future to live test all of this stuff, so be on the lookout for announcements in the Test Server Feedback forum!



- CCP Abathur