As it currently stands, one can blow up station turrets ad infinitum and, unless one kills all eight turrets within a relatively limited span of time (no small feat given their rapid auto-healing), the station will merrily keep defending itself by pumping out turrets automagically.

This. Is. Retarded.

At some point, even a lone attacker should be able to exhaust an undefended station's automated defenses. Each station currently fields an array of eight turrets. While I think their auto-heal should be cut off entirely and their respawn time made shorter to compensate (thus allowing for a 'wear them all down and then blow them all up quickly' strategy), an even more reasonable (and not mutually exclusive) thing is to cap the number of turrets that can respawn in X hours.

To start the debate, how about 100 turrets within 6 hours? Destroy 100 turrets in 5 hours, and none of the 8 outside will respawn if destroyed in the next 60 minutes. After 6 hours, it's a fresh set of 100.

I'm unsure what you mean as to auto-healing. Are you referring to the re-spawn time, or is the issue more with the turrets reappearing if the sector resets? I've attacked stations....more times then I care to remember, as its always highly annoying, and never has a turret began to magically heal... It is really irritating, however, when you've done the work and you have to answer the phone and the goddamn things all get reset. That's only happened to me once and Ive found that it quite possible to solo the stations as they are; given you have the patience.

100 turrets in 6 hours.... would be virtually impossible for a single player (4 rag runs to destroy a single turret approximately 2 minutes each for 8 minutes...x100 =800 minutes /60 = 13.33 hours), and probably require about what it takes now to take the entire thing in less then 30 minutes.. I dont really see the point here, unless you're trying to argue that the turrets shouldn't reset when the sector does?

I have solo'd a station (in about 45-60 minutes). It's not hard... you just need to know what you're doing.

Turrets do not auto-heal. What they do is respawn after 15 minutes. I applaud you for trying to kill turrets one at a time, but sadly that time was horribly wasted.

If you're point is to make the turret respawning or regenerating mechanic to be more obvious, then I agree with that sentiment.

Yeah, I don't see the point of this, especially given the suggested numbers. In my opinion, having the turrets re-spawn with low armor (and having them heal for a finite duration of time) is a much more sensible and elegant plan, as proposed in the thread Aticephyr linked in his post.

Also, I don't know what you're talking about when you say "no small feat given their rapid auto-healing" and "I think their auto-heal should be cut off entirely", because they don't currently have auto-heal, nor have they ever.

I absolutely abhor the idea of anything in VO slowly healing itself.... nor should npcs heal your turrets... someone should have to suck it up and BE there.

Yeah, endercp12, in the counter-suggestion, they won't heal themselves except for when they first re-spawn. Read the linked thread. You can think of the way it works currently as the turrets completely healing themselves instantly when they re-spawn, and this would nerf that. It wouldn't provide any advantage to defenders over how it currently works. None whatsoever. It would actually make stations much more difficult to defend. It would also remove the temptation to destroy your own weak turret so that it'll re-spawn with full health.

If turrets re-spawn at little to no health and do not heal nor have NPCs helping to heal them, then the defenders would probably need near a 1:1 ratio to successfully defend a station. Currently a station is defendable against 1:3 or 1:4 depending on skill level... I'd like to see the ratio come down to about (but not get below) 1:2.

NPCs can't defend on their own, and wouldn't be able to mount a successful defense (even against a lone attacker) even with NPC healers as I described in my linked post. I agree that people should have to be there (no shit), but I believe there should be a continued advantage to defending rather than no advantage to either party.

The most important thing to understand is that the auto-healing after re-spawn suggestion is a defense nerf, not a buff. It offers no advantages to the defenders whatsoever compared to how it currently works, under any circumstances.

Turrets do not auto-heal. What they do is respawn after 15 minutes.

This is false as of a week ago. Try it and see. If they were respawning, they'd be back at 100%, not increasing increments above what you'd knocked them down to, but below 100%. Of course, despite your running your mouth in an ostensibly knowledgeable fashion, they don't just pop back at 100% after 15 minutes -- they do exactly what I said they do.

Well, I just tested to confirm; turrets do not auto-heal, like we said... I knocked a turret's health down and sat there and watched it for well over 10 minutes. Its health did not change. The only ways a turret can heal are if someone gets a repair gun and repairs it, the turret is destroyed and re-spawns, or the sector resets. I've never seen it work any differently.

If I hadn't just had an extremely unpleasant evening/morning, I'd go to Pelatus and take the gun-cam pics I need to prove you wrong. However, women being the unpredictable creatures that they are, this will have to wait.

Question, though, whether you have a key to the station, the turret of which you were shooting. I can't think of anything else that would alter this, but I'm quite sure of what I observed over many bombing runs in Pelatus.

Yes, I had a key. I asked incarnate in-game and he was unaware of any auto-healing feature other than the 3 methods I mentioned. Also, recent frequent attackers of the Bractus station (who obviously didn't have keys) confirmed that they haven't seen any auto-healing either.

+1 to OP.

+ send a system message "99 turrets left", "98..", etc.
+ limit station guards.

OP: Limited Station Reserves

So, make it that the station does not produce turrets. They have to be imported from somewhere else, by station's owners. And have limited reserves, as proposed. Lets consider 100.

When 10 turrets respawn, stock<=90, station logistics request it offering mission "*Bring defense turrets".

When stock=0, its over. No more turrets respawn.

Maybe apply the same for guards' ships.

This would be a perfect testbed for station manufacturing system...

I tend to agree that eventually these should require proc missions from which the turrets will be manufactured. For now, some sort of hourly numerical limit would be sufficient.

Lecter, I think Alloh may actually be on the right track here.

The issue with your original suggestion (besides your confusion regarding auto-healing) is that attackers kill turrets much too slowly for it to work. In my experience with conquerable stations, a group of 4 attackers usually destroys 8 undefended turrets in around 30 minutes. A solo attacker could never take out 100 turrets in 6 hours or whatever, nor would he want to. Attackers, regardless of how many there are, always reduce the health of all the turrets down to below 10% and then take them all out at once. Tweaking your numbers wouldn't help either. People simply don't conquer stations that way, and they still wouldn't do it that way if your suggestion was implemented, or the numbers would have to be decreased so much that they would make conquering easy and unpreventable by the defenders.

I think the turrets should have the potential to "run out" over long periods of time (days or weeks). Stations should require upkeep to maintain their defenses to prevent their turrets from running out. The owners should have to craft or buy turrets to prevent from running out of station defenses. However, the defenses would never run out because of a single attack, but only because of multiple attacks over the course of days or weeks. Under normal quiet conditions, 100 turrets would honestly last for many weeks. Under heavy attack (like what we've seen in Bractus these past few days), 100 turrets would probably still last a few days.

So, if you were only given a certain number of turrets to start and had to craft, manufacture, or buy additional turrets, I support the idea. An "hourly numerical limit" really makes no sense, nor does any numerical limit that can't be replenished.

Basically, the goal of the suggestion changes with this modification. It isn't to nerf defenses during a single attack anymore. It's to force owners to maintain their stations to keep them over long periods of time. This suggestion could then be combined with this one, which nerfs defenses within the scope of a single attack. With this modification, the two suggestions aren't mutually exclusive. They compliment each other because they have completely different affects.

It doesn't take that long to kill a single turret, Strat: people destroy 8 undefended turrets in about 30 minutes because they're currently only able to take a station that way. If they focused instead on killing one turret at a time as fast as possible, they'd burn through a lot of turrets in 6 hours. Is 100 turrets/6 hours the right number? No idea. My point is that the reason "people simply don't conquer stations that way" is only because of the unlimited stocks of turrets -- if the right balance was struck, leaving the station undefended for a significant period of time would allow for conquest by attrition.

I agree Alloh is on the right path, but unless I'm missing something his suggestion would also require some sort of limit on how many turrets a station could spew.

Well, I disagree. The only limiting factor to how many turrets a station can spew should be how many the station has in stock. This should not be limited by time in any way. Limiting station reserves of turrets should make owners work to keep those reserves up, not give attackers a new way to conquer a station that leaves the defenders with no way to defend against it. If you have enough attackers to take out a single turret each run, the defenders would have no real way to counter the attack, because they would have no chance to repair the targeted turrets, and no way to get more turrets. Eventually the station would simply run out and there's nothing any number of defenders could do about it.

Fair enough; you'll note that I suggested a time/number as an interim step to forcing defenders to craft turrets -- X turrets per Y hours is a lot more sensible than the current infinite turrets. However, the other issue becomes "how many of these can a station stock at once?" Otherwise, they become like N3s: defenders do minimal work to create tens of thousands of turrets and they're de facto unlimited from then on.

However, the other issue becomes "how many of these can a station stock at once?" Otherwise, they become like N3s: defenders do minimal work to create tens of thousands of turrets and they're de facto unlimited from then on.

Aye. I thought of that and I agree. I was thinking the stations should have a maximum storage capacity of maybe 500 turrets or something. The number should big enough that it won't be a factor in any single attack, but low enough that the owners have to put consistent long-term effort into holding a station long-term. The other factor that would affect what the storage capacity should be is how hard it will be to make a turret.

Of course, we also need to add some real benefits to having stations to make it worth while to craft turrets. At some point, the prestige will cease being enough.