This is the place I call home...

It's been some time now since we put in starbases. We're fairly happy with how things have turned out because it was a huge thing to put into the game, but as is usually the case, there are still a few things that need ironing out and developing further.

One of the things that needs addressing is how sovereignty wars are fought; It's just not that fun when you're sitting in your home system, maybe thinking about that Outpost that it would be nice to buy, when someone comes along with a swarm of disposable small towers and takes it from you.

We still want medium and small towers to be able to make a claim rather than forcing people to place a large tower in every system to stamp their mark, so one of the first suggestions was a points system. A points system would work, but for my tastes it's an overly complex solution for a potentially easy problem.

The New Claim System

What we would like your feedback on, and what will soon be on the test server [with the intention of deployment in Red Moon Rising], is a system where larger towers override the claims made by any smaller towers.

If you have a large tower in a system making a claim, anyone that wants to take that claim from you will have to do it with large towers too. Medium towers will also obviously override small towers. If you want to play ball, you'll have either play the same game as the other person, or one-up them.

Note that if you have the same number of large towers as the other person, it will not compare medium and small towers, it'll just be contested [no sovereignty] as was the case before with a draw.

At the same time, we've upped the time that it takes for a tower to exert a claim on a system to 5 days after it was brought online. You now have the best part of a week to respond to someone putting up towers in your system, and they have the logistics of the associated fuels to deal with.

Wait. There's more...

Towers In Higher Security Space

As part of some of these changes, we've changed where you can have a starbase. You'll now be able to put a starbase in secure space up to (and including) 0.7 sec, with the restriction that some structures won't be available to you. Moon miners and reactors won't be useable above 0.3 security space (same as now). There's going to be an added cost for running towers in empire sovereign space in the form of consumption of leases.

Structures that Require Sovereignty

We're also now able to have structures that will require you to have sovereignty over the system. This opens things up for us to introduce more benefits than just fuel reduction in the future, but some of these things are in the early planning stages.

And this all ties into...

Don't forget that this ties into the new tech 2 ships we're bringing out, which will increase demand for TL2 components, and that the Red Moon Rising manufacturing rewrite enables us to do some new interesting things with research and manufacturing in starbases eventually.

Now we can really start talking about your home in EVE...

Addenda...

Towers in high sec space will be attackable by people with war declarations against you, they will not respond pre-emptively against anyone except a war target. They will respond to aggression.

Redundancy's First Law of Game Features: 'When mentioning a feature or change to the playerbase after release, people will generally assume the interpretation they find most controversial.'

New Starbase Roles

New starbase roles are part of RMR too, and I completely forgot to mention them!