Ignore my earlier post about the defenses not being overkill. The turrets were broken up until a few minutes ago. Only the missile turrets had increased armor. The gauss turrets had the same armor as before the update. So only 2 out of 8 of the turrets were buffed. I don't know how hard it will be now that they are fixed. I suspect it still won't be too bad, but I won't know for sure until I test it again.

An undefended station is an undefended station. I have no problem with a station that broadcast to every key holder when it is under attack, but if no one comes to defend it, I think it should be up for grabs.
We could have stations that only 12 people can take, and I expect there is a purpose and place in the game for such stations. I also think there is a purpose and place in the game for stations that even a single player can take and hold.

I suppose you could damage but not kill all the turrets until they are all near death as a way of dealing with the quick respawn. In this way the station is still possibly soloable when undefended.

That's what we did today, Maalik. It was easy with 5 of us, and I think we could have done it with 3. It would have been very difficult alone, but not impossible, I suppose. However, again, they fixed the gauss turret armor late this afternoon, so it wasn't at full strength this morning or last night after the update.

The insta-kill turret missiles need to be replaced with missiles that aren't redonculous. Instakill missiles are fine for borders, but for station defenses they're too much, so either get rid of them or give players access to missiles as powerful. Turrets are smaller than the conc mines but they have uber gauss and uber-missiles? I don't think so. Make them large enough to support their weaponry or scale their weaponry back. Rather than giving them a massive armor buff why not make 4x as many?

RE: the ideal number of players necessary to conquer a station.

Currently, 2 to 3 skilled and coordinated players can take the station if it is undefended. The problem is that 3 to 4 trained apes can take the station if it is undefended. I would rather have some type of conquest mechanic that legitimately differentiates between skill levels in players, rather than requiring sheer numbers. This is a twitch game, after all.

I would rather have some type of conquest mechanic that legitimately differentiates between skill levels in players, rather than requiring sheer numbers. This is a twitch game, after all.

Ding ding ding.

Can we take a page from Deneb's border conflicts and EVN's planet conquest approach, and have a "defense fleet"? Not cents with a single neut III, but X number of nasty things that must all be killed off, with a wave of Y of them launching at a time, in order to take the station? Maybe not instead of the turrets, but supplementary to a somewhat nerfed version of them; if everything is not dead in, say, 45 minutes, the defense fleet would from that same number again and the turrets would respawn. This would result in a much more epic battle for the station, focused on the ability to quickly destroy other ships in combat flight -- which I sort of feel like is the one most interesting part of VO. The current system is focused on getting a bunch of rags together and making bombing runs -- blah.

LENB raptors with shields!

Maybe different stations with different defense scale? There could be "easy" stations, that could be soloable, but if you come back tomorrow its someone elses. Then you could scale up to a uber-station that takes a dozen experienced players, and someone can keep it for a much larger amount of time.

I was looking more towards various defense scales, with the potential for station "owners" to upgrade defenses over time and such. There is certainly merit to having more "strike force" or "defense force" type opponents, and I support the sort of "wave" scenario that Lecter talks about, but we just aren't quite there yet in the game mechanics. It was my hope to do something more strategic with territorial conquest, of which I viewed stations to be one small part. Not unlike the system of needing to knock out queens to take on the Leviathan, there might be some similar requirement to conquer regions of space to make a station stronghold more vulnerable, etc. This could be viewed in terms of reduced manufacturing capacity due to depleted raw materials: since mining drones were wiped out of outlying sectors, the rate of manufacture of defensive ships would similarly drop off (or cease for a period of time). That thinking was really more "multi-sector" than single-sector, but the same design could be scaled back to a single sector (as long as it contained asteroids that were mostly outside of turret range). Defended clusters of drones must be knocked out to reduce the manufacturing rate of defensive enemies, which when eliminated also make the turrets more vulnerable.. or some such.

Anyway, a Suggestions forum post would really be the most logical place for.. Suggestions. If there is a need to differentiate from previous Station Conquest threads, a new one could be made.

So a team of 5 pirates (me included) attacked the station tonight and with many bombing runs and a lot of organization we took out all the turrets. Nothing happened, there was no text, and we couldn't dock to take the station.

Knowing of the new two minute delay I anticipated this, and we grabbed fighters, put a guy in the dock spamming the enter key, and took control of the sector (strategically, not officially). One minute later, with the guy in the dock still button smashing away for good measure, a member of the supposedly ex-defending team managed to turbo past our little blockade and get to the dock... and to our surprise he docked as though the station never entered a turnover period. The turrets didn't instantly respawn, in fact only around 15 seconds later a single turret undocked... and it happened to be turret 7 which we had killed 10 minutes earlier. One by one, the turrets began to respawn... all in the exact same order that we killed them... 2 minutes from when we killed the last turret nothing happened. No one was kicked out of the station and neither could we still dock.

Long story short, we killed all the turrets and the station didn't enter the turnover period.

There is a bug that made Turret 7 break and when it broke, it didn't tell the station that it was no longer around. So, the station conquering logic thought there was still an active turret. Letting the sector restart would fix it, but I have to fix the bug and change the station logic to handle cases where the turrets break.

Thanks for reporting the problem.

No problem... now that I think about it it was actually like turret 6 or something that respawned first. I must have thought it was turret 7 because that was the first one that was off the sensor log and I thought someone else had taken it out because it was a missile turret. This makes sense because we killed turret 8 first, actually, because it was the missile turret, then before we killed the last gauss turret (the first gauss turret must have been 6) 8 respawned and it ended up being the last one killed as well as the first.

Any dev comment on the 'defense fleet' idea to replace just having uber-turrets?

I agree killing turrets with bombers while being picked off by defenders in fighters isn't fun. The uber missle turrets especially should have a much lower armor. The turret damage is way too high also. It's just not fun to be killed with two shots. I suggest that turrets have a small weak spot which will kill them with 2000 damage from an energy weapon only. Swarms would not damage this weak spot, they would affect only the uber armor. This way attackers can at least face defenders in fighters.

This afternoon I attacked the station solo, it takes a long time but it is possible if you play it strategically. It was sped up four-fold when I was joined by Mr. Chaos, but still... it's definitely possible to solo the station.

But still... I would much rather an assault style that rewards actually killing the turrets rather than getting them all really low before going around and popping them which is really a silly strategy. And, although my team agreed not to do so when we were defending, we could have easily fucked over the attacking team by destroying one of the turrets they had gotten very low. I'd suggest keeping all the stats the same except increasing turret respawn time to 30 minutes or more.

I am not too keen on Capture the Station's present gameplay but number of defenders needed per attacker seems decent. It looks a group of defender can hold off an assault by up to about twice as many attackers.

As attackers pick the time of the assault, presumably to their favor, defenders will very often be outnumbered and should be accordingly be given significant advantages.

If respawn time is moved upwards then something else has to change to compensate.

How about a 2% hull per minute repair rate? This makes it much more reasonable to kill the turrets given a 30 minute respawn time rather than have the armor back to full after 15 minutes of neglect. It also adds a little advantage to stations against small forces when there are no defenders around.

A lower (2% or so as shank suggested) repair rate would be a decent trade off for a longer (again as suggested 30 minute) respawn rate. It would effectively make the station non-soloable, which is good, and give the attackers a reason to actually kill the turrets as they come in (focused strikes). It also would give the defenders a real incentive to actually defend/repair the turrets as quickly as possible. So umm yeah +1 for Shanks proposal...

Turrets should not self-repair. Enough said.