First I would like to say I am glad to see border defenses are improving and I do appreciate all the work that goes into things.

Having said that I have to say that the new setup at verasi WH into edras leaves much to be desired and I think it could be much improved. From various testing you can easily bypass every turret and some have event went so far as to say they are useless.

One problem that I have noticed and is present with the SF in all flavors and forms is focused attention and single item ranked order of doing things. i.e. you shoot the sf they run and dock immediately to repair. They are so blindsided by single events that it's easy to distract them with almost anything.

The layout is not in a good military defense position at all. For one the turrets are to far out to be effective, it may work with the levi and capships but not with station turrets.

From observing the turret behavior from various angles I would like to suggest the ultimately the AI get changed and seriously beefed up. Their fighting styles could use some adaptive methods as well. Overall more responsive, a sliding scale for difficulty (i.e. start out easy and the more you shoot the harder they get)

Move the station closer to the WH. Move the turrets in closer to the WH and tripple their numbers, make them more difficult and non-stationary, have them patrol from the station to the WH, the in system jump in points could be in that path and the WH entry point and exit point would be at the thick of the turrets. Have the station or capship launch fighters as the difficulty level increases. Put observation drones on the edras side, passive intel gathering mode only, they report to the station/capship presence in the sector and the number of players they will be contending with then take action accordingly.

One possibility is add turrets into the station itself and move the station close to the WH. Change some of the weapons to a neutron type weapon from a gauss type weapon.

Also add navigation hazards at the WH itself. It's so easy to do a crazy ivan and avoid all the turrets. Either roids, heavy useless item drops (i.e. lead weight), fog or the like.

Even with all of this in place it would still be somewhat easy to get past the border. Could even make missions out of this, corvus smuggles goods into UIT space, UIT defends and enforces cargo inspection and smuggler crackdowns on illegal goods. rogue pirate NPC's attempting to prey on the disabled/damaged ships that make it out of the range of the turrets, etc..

I think it's funny that some people find the turrets way too difficult, and others find them way too easy :). I expected this reaction though, and that you would all find tactics to pass them in short order.

Anyway, the turrets are not the be-all end-all. They're only one aspect of planned defenses (I mentioned fleets and patrols and things earlier). Yes, the current strike forces have some bugs, we have tickets allocated to those topics and will address them when we get a chance.

It is inadvisable for me to pack objects too densely around wormholes. We're going to be having a lot more large-scale shipping traffic.. capship transports and the like, and they need room. A lot of room. That factored into my placement of the current test turrets.

If I wanted to, I could create turrets so ridiculously powerful that none of you would possibly stand a chance. Obviously, that's not what I want.. so the fact that people are able to get past the current system is a good thing. Think of defenses like an onion. Maybe a thick outer skin, but then you get past that and life becomes easier.. for awhile. Not until you try breaching Capitol systems will you really get your ass handed to you (and many of you will probably be able to tactically pass through there too, but it will be "exciting" and not super easy to do a lot of other stuff at the same time.. like picking off raw-newbies in baseline tutorial systems).

Plus, wouldn't it be interesting to have something like, say.. a message go out on an Itani wire "Dr Lecter has breached the border at Jallik, and has slipped away from pursuit. Please be on the lookout for this dangerous character. 25,000 credit bounty now posted by Itani Central Command." And any time he gets picked up at a guarded wormhole or is sighted by a strike force, the ticker gets updated with his last position.

I think it would be much cooler to have strike forces sweeping through sectors, looking for bad guys (imagine, say, Solo & company hiding amongst asteriods from the imperial fleet in Empire), than to simply have border guards who are so terrifyingly devastating that no one ever breaches the borders. Like everything in the game, I prefer "varied" levels of safety, with the only really critical areas being newbie capitol systems.

Anyway, please continue with the feedback, it's very cool.

Nobody say anything. Inc's most recent post is uber. >.>

Incarnate, thanks for having an awesome head on your shoulders. I'm glad you're taking this defense thing in a completely different direction from EVE's super-defenses-that-will-destroy-you-if-you-be-a-bad-boy-and-if-you-manage-to-dodge-them-the-GM's-hand-you-a-ban nonsense. As far as turret placement goes, maybe four to eight turrets on the Edras side of the wormhole and half/quarter as many turrets on the Verasi side would make it a lot more difficult to get in, but not so impossible to get out.

well in light of that part this makes the turrets little more than testing which is a good thing. The roving patrols of some type of bot (maybe not SF but more observer style bots) would be a most excellent idea.

I have to admit I see things way differently than the average person does in regards to stuff like this. I was also not considering more in terms of the entire nation space which I should have been. Makes things way more interesting and scalable.

I would also like to see a sector, say somewhere in grey that's isolated, that would have a defense like you mentioned, so hard core that we would not stand a chance. Say an isolated sector that is not currently in use just for testing of this :) I would be willing to bet we could find many creative and cleaver ways to work it over.

One more option I thought about. Pack a sector way dense like a donut where you have to pass the roid clusters (say fog/ion storm) to get to the clearing and the WH which is open (nothing around it, no fog/ion storm). In the fog/storm you could have npc pirates that's looking for easy prey. Also turrets in the clearing would help greatly as well.

Like an onion....but everybody like parfait:)

Sounds cool, looking forward to getting hunted!

I want to say that perhaps we do not need capships at all. Instead why not provide shields for certain ships and only at a somewhat low level. I do not really see the need for a large cap to use in trading or fighting. It would be more of a challenge to have to do it in something with the hold size of a Behemoth XC but weapons ports on it and light shields.

This would increase the need to really run a convoy of ships to grey space to do trading and at the same time provide a useful purpose for using swarm missiles to bring down shields and then attack a trade ship.