Within some reasonable limits, allow winning and losing battle skirmishes over a period of days to alter the faction ownership of the 2 or 3 systems between serco and itani space.

Possible things to think about with this model:
- allow the same ships to be available so that plays can buy, and squirrel-away their preferred opposing-faction-specific ship?
- adjust when a sector is taken over by:
-- number of BS won/lost in <days>
-- speed with which BS is won/lost
-- number of remaining ships/losses

So a slow advance could be quickly repelled if the response was fierce and there was little opposition.

This would provide more motivation to participate in group battles, since there would be something at stake. No to mention more realistic.

Yeah! Adding silly and mostly annoying things that are based on the outcome of a stupid mission that's far enough away from any actual player interaction to qualify as "newb-only" is a GREAT idea!

(don't mind genka)

endr: We are going to make border skirmish have more direct impact on the Serco and Itani (item availability, etc). However, conquest of entire systems is not likely within the current universe. Next door to Deneb is Eo, a newbie Itani Capitol system. I can't very well let that fall every week or so.

On the other hand, grayspace wars between corporations could *very well* result in territory gain or loss. I'm a lot free-er to do chaotic things there.

Maybe tie CtC to BS by having stockpiles of Purified Xith affect item availability or how quickly/many reinforcements arrive - this would increase the importance of CtC and give everyone something to focus on between Border Skirmish missions. (Also, mention of CtC in the Missions lists might help remind everyone that it is there - like the BS reminder mission which shows up between BSs.)

Was thinking about the Goliath Cannons and thought it would be interesting if they were powered by Purified Xith deliveries via CtC. Cannons (or a control station) could be captured via a Mission which would than require the delivery of X amount of Purified Xith to fire. Cannons shouldn't be a "game changer" - just powerful enough to be worth fighting over. (It's been a few thousand years since they were installed so not as awesome as when they were first used.)

Inc, just a question here -- are you guys storing the results of BS missions anywhere?

At then end of one (when you win) you are shown how many kills/casualties you caused...can that be tracked and perhaps some sort of player badge be added for certain levels of casualties?

Also some sort of damage based stat / reward would be nice...

Perhaps getting credit if you happen to destroy a turret as well.

Yea, the results are tracked.

So maybe player badges for BS? Perhaps they could unlock some ship or weapon variant that would be geared towards BS itself...

I am fairly new to this game, and I know all the coding is complicated, but I have been wondering about this since I started playing.

Border Skirmish is not very important right now, and I don't have much motivation to play it since shooting those cap ships down was only fun for about two skirmishes, ju know. I think it would be awesome to have sector by sector battles to take over systems. I mean, it doesn't really have to be B13 every time, does it? Maybe the border skirmish can be constantly going on, whether in deneb or somewhere else, or maybe in a new bunch of systems that the itani and serco both want to own, whatever.

Players could get orders and form groups on which sector to try and take, and maybe escort some cap ships into the sector, and if they win, that side is one sector closer to the next wormhole and to taking control of the sector.

You could even introduce the concept of rebels if you ended up putting it in previously owned serco or itani systems, to go with the back story of conflicting ideals. depending on the length of time systems or sectors had been owned, the number of dissenting rebels, which would just be bots flying normal ships could increase or decrease, depending on how well the ruling nation dealt with the rebels and how long nation had had to convert their conquered people.

This would give the planets an actual purpose too, since controlling a planet sector (people live on planets you know) would make a difference. The rebels and the actual sense of the itani serco war having a point would make a big addition of fun to the game in my opinion.

Plus flying in these systems would be more interesting since there would be the constant threat of rebels, enemy ships, and junks likes thats.

I think most of this stuff (minus the big part (i.e. the sector control dynamics)) is already in the game. Bots are there. Factions are there (you could ally yourself with rebels, do rebel missions, and this would provide a good mechanism for changing sides in the game from Serco to Itani vice versa). Stations, planets, and border skirmish are all already there. I mean, in reality, you already define systems as serco or itani guarded, so you could just make that conditional on the results of the previous border skirmish in that sector. You said you stored the results.

Anyway, I guess it's all harder than I think, but it would be worth it. I would definitely spend more time in those sectors because there would be stuff going on.

Well, I hope I don't get burned for suggesting that. I'm sure it's been said before.

This is what we're trying to do :). There are some technical caveats in the way, which we're sorting through. Border Skirmish was never intended to be a single-sector thing, it's a simplified testbed of a single instance of a much larger war. We wanted to work out the gameplay problems there, first. Eventually, Deneb will be entirely dynamically contested. I'm optimistic that the Deneb change will take place before the end of the year.

But, yes, there are problems that crop up. Making sure the infrastructure all works.. making border skirmish as fast as possible on the server, so having 10 of them running at once doesn't kill our server cluster, so on and so forth.

It is a good suggestion, but it is indeed harder than you think. The Border Skirmish was put in place quite some time ago as Something To Do. We all begged for such a thing, and our request was honored. Unfortunately, it had to stand on its own because a lot of infrastructure is required to link different aspects of the game together such that things "matter". In the next several months we will see a great deal more interdependency in VO. The economy and the faction changes will be the most obvious aspects of this at first. In short: relax, the devs had some form of what you are looking fo in mind all along.

Oh NO! Inc sniped me. Oh well, I was pretty close.

that's coo. You guys could always buy some more sweet computers for your cluster! Anyway, good luck. I'm sure it will be cool. I like how we all get to make suggestions and that you guys actually reply to them in what, an hour? Respects.