This is a question for those who have captured conquerable stations solo.

I'm well aware that it's difficult but possible. What are some of your tactics/strategies for doing so?

Do not destroy any turrets until they are all below 15%, then take them all out in as few reload runs as possible. This prevents them from respawning while you are still whittling down the rest. Alternately, you can destroy turret 7 and 8 (the missile turrets) first, so you can work away at the rest without that annoying missile-lock beeping, THEN get the other 6 down to low %. You'll have to kill turret 7 & 8 respawns again, but then you're home free. That is... unless someone shows up to defend it :)

This works ^

But this works better: Bring a friend or six.

How long do turrets take to respawn? Do they heal on their own over time as well?

I can imagine that a rag/chaos/gem setup would take quite a few trips to unload and reload. Is that really the only reliable setup for going at it solo?

Yeah 15min to respawn and they only heal after a respawn.

It's way easier than it used to be. They used to have 5x the armor they do now and you could still do it.

Thanks. Now to wait til everyone goes to sleep....

That's the boring way to do it. It's more fun when you get a big group and attack head on while everyone is crafting. :)

Then once you take it, that group is still online and will immediately attack you. Yielding nothing getting done for your trouble unless they are the ones who go to sleep.

The entire conquerable base system relies on either
A. nobody opposing the current owners caring to build something at the moment or
B. they're all (or all but one or two) asleep/offline.

Any other configuration and nobody gets anything done at the base.
There's simply not enough players in the game to make holding a base + ensuring safe passage of weaponless transports while defending against a group of any decent size. If the game's popularity expands and that situation changes then the entire system would require major changes. Otherwise manufacturing would bottleneck at these few places and the only solution would be to blanket share a key with everyone. The only reason why it works at all now is because of B. stated above.

Yeah then you have a huge battle for hours and it's great fun for everyone. Isn't that the point of this game?

not if you're trying to actually do something in the base, like manufacture. And it would hardly last for hours. You only attack a base to either annoy the current owners or you want to actually build something. If the objective is to take the base to build and you can't build then you're going to go do something else, it's not worth the waste of time when you can bank on the current holders all going offline at some point in the day for hours.

If you're going to setup a game with "roles" and try and make those roles effective and meaningful, then the entire "point of the game" can't be to spend all your time shooting other players or getting shot at. The reason why that's the only thing people consider fun is because right now all the "roles" in the game are retardedly boring and offer little to no incentive to follow them.

If we're going to ignore everything but pvp by acknowledging that the other aspects aren't fun then why even waste time with any of it? The devs can re-structure the universe to be abig arena (wing commander did this and failed) and everyone who logs in, just gets dumped in the arena system and shoots the other team. Less wasted resources.

The point isn't that fighting is not a big part of the game, it's that the developers created a game that doesn't consist of _only_ fighting for a reason but the implementation of the non-fighting roles have taken a far far far back seat to the fighting roles. So much so that they are only currently viable if a player has little to no opposition (a state that only exists while hardly anyone is logged on). A situation which the devs are actively trying to reverse, but without fixing the non-fighting roles first, you'll end up reducing them to being completely useless. But hey, many of the regular posters on the forum are long time players that built their tridents already so who cares about anything but pvp.

That's the boring way to do it. It's more fun when you get a big group and attack head on while everyone is crafting. :)

Sure, but the OP asked for advice on solo-conquering.

BTW, OP: It's not hard, merely tedious.

The best way to solo a station is to jump in from a position that keeps your dent out of range of most of the turrets. After that, assuming there isn't any opposition, start working your way towards the stations by taking out the nearest turrets and moving your dent gradually closer.

I recommend that instead of avoiding the guards, that you shoot them. By doing so you will often pick up a law neut or two in the dent as you work your way towards the station.

@cellsafemode- are you speaking from experience or imagination? Because in the 10 months of spending most of my time moving to and from these stations, I have to say that they are generally quite and boring places to be. In fact, half the time I don't bother to leave the sector when I log out for fear of being knocked back to Arta Celestes because some hostile group took control while I was offline.

@Death Fluffy

I doubt he has a dent that he needs to worry about keeping from the turrets, since if he had one he wouldn't be asking how to conquer a base.

There're boring places to be because nobody is logged on. I'm not sure what else your comment was directed at.. Yes, you spend most of your time un-impeded. So does the other people who are logged on when you're not. And so on. That was the point. The current capture the station method of manufacturing is only viable because you will always have huge chunks of the day where there is nobody online who can or cares to defend it. Every single day.

The day that ceases to be the case, is the day that this means of manufacture simply wont be viable. And the devs are doing everything they can to bring more players and they're doing that before coming up with a better system that doesn't depend on nobody being logged into the server. This means when a solution is needed (and it will be) it'll be rushed and half assed.

I'm not sure how to make it any more clearer. The entire system of manufacturing is reliant on the sparse playerbase and the whole direction the game is going is to remedy the sparseness, but that's the wrong order to work with things if you want thought out changes.

It would be pretty trivial for the devs to increase the hitpoints of the turrets again if stations start changing hands too fast. There are a number of other variables that can be tweaked -- respawn rates, number of guard ships, etc. So there's no brewing crisis here. The current numbers work for the current playerbase, and when the playerbase changes, they can change the numbers.

As for order of development -- what the fuck do you know? Has Inc been sharing all the behind the scenes stuff they've been up to with you? For all you know, they might fully intend to deal with this before they generate an influx. Even if they don't, keep in mind that they can't afford to spend years polishing up every detail of the game before increasing the playerbase and cashflow. Chickens and eggs.

It's pretty obvious all pizzasgood does is troll every single new post to the forums. Anyone who thinks simply makin the bases harder to takever will balance the issue has no grasp of the gameplay at large.

I'm sorry but yes. there are people (gasp) who have experience in games of this genre and even more, there are people who aren't trolls with one tract minds like you. And no, we dont think our opinions matter enough to make any difference to the future of this particular game because it's not a community game.

So the only person's who opinion on the matter actually matters is not you. And your repeated unhelpful and personally directed posts regardless of the topic in the multitude of forum posts just make you look sad. And sadly indicative of the sociopathic reputation that the regular userbase of the game has garnered.

But by all means.. Continue to post suggestions and what not that contribute nothing to the benefit of the game or topics being discussed. Your faux approval of the powers that be will surely endear you so that you too can have the same benefits of Sieger and the like when it comes time to ask a favor. I can't see any other reason why anyone would be so blindly a kiss ass as to say that the devs can't afford to spend years polishing details when they've existed for a decade not polishing details just fine.

Station conquest can be a great point for conflict.
It is easiest to capture them when they're undefended by players, where is the fun in that?

If you genuinely want to build at a station, then join or inquire of the guilds who are part of the coalitions which usually hold the stations.

Typically each side of the Serco - Itan conflict has reciprocal agreements with other guilds. Sometimes both sides will allows non-nationalistic guilds free access. The current non-aggression pact seems to include ITAN - TGFT - PA - ORE Such things are fluid in the game and change over time, sometimes rather quickly.

The lower armor of the current turrets make it easier for a small group to take a station and keeps large coalitions from blocking enemy access to the stations.

The game will change. Vendettas change. We live in the now, we die in the now.

This seems to be getting kind of dramatic. Yes, conquerable stations are not fully implemented. They're a testbed, with the capship construction layered on top of them to (at one point) drive some usage of the respective testbed. Three statically conquerable stations were never relevant to my goals anyway, the whole point was to get some practical idea of the balance of conquest mechanics prior to enabling fully player-owned stations. The latter is still some distance out, and we've had no development resources to put into the mechanics of conquest recently, which is unfortunate.

But, the fact is, things are a lot more complicated from where I'm sitting. We have opportunities available right now that are unique, in that they put us on similar footing (in some ways) with much larger and better-funded companies. But those opportunities, like launching on iPhone, are time-sensitive and these windows are closing. So we're putting a lot of effort into things like that while we can.

Yes, we're also fixing gameplay. But I am not focusing on the top-level gameplay first, that would be kind of nuts. We have a lot of broken gameplay in the early stages too, and we lose a huge percentage of new people within the first 5-10 minutes of the game. So, I do the best I can to try and wisely divide our time between different shifting opportunities and financial challenges, so we can keep making the game.

I haven't had a budget to just "look ahead a year or two, plan, and develop on said plan" since around 2002. So yes, a lot of things are kind of odd and half-assed, and I don't really have anything I can say about that other than "yes, it sure sucks". Some of our users have become embittered by this and left, and others have stuck around and become kind of jaded about it, and it may all seem kind of strange to someone new. But, the game just being here at all has not been trivial to accomplish. And we continue to do what we can with what we have, based on the view from where I'm sitting.

I definitely make no claim that my decisions are perfect, or ideal (or sometimes, good at all). But we are still here, and moving forward.

It would seem pretty obvious that the correct advice having been already given earlier in this thread that my description was meant as 1) a smart ass response to the question and 2) an encouragement to build because owning a trident makes a lot of things much easier- and by that I mean not just moving cargo.

I disagree with your assessment. If Vendetta becomes such a chaotic and violent place as you seem to imagine, then despite Incarnates implication that the conquerable stations will eventually be replaced, possibly by player owned stations, any trade or manufacturing at all will be shut down. Players would be unable to move any substantial amount of cargo without a large escort to protect them, even with tridents (which can be trivially easy to destroy if unprotected) well before they get to them. As the population grows, I expect to see the game evolve to address new challenges. It would be pretty easy to add turbo thrust to the behemoths for example. Giving them shields might be more involved. Right now, implementing either option would be absurd where a year from now, it could be an urgent necessity. As Rin mentioned, it can easily be made more difficult to take a station without a group effort in multiple ways in order to reduce the frequency of attempts.

I'm sorry you seem to have hurt feelings because not everyone is laying down and accepting your viewpoint as gospel. Frankly, I think Rin is one of the posters that contributes informed and thought out positions about ideas on these forums, even when he is disagreeing with one of my suggestions.

Thanks, Inc, for your explanation. Can you tell us a bit more about what player owned stations will be like, in comparison to the current static conquerable stations? Will they exist as separate instances (per person) in a single sector, or can players share one station? Seems that you intend that they will be conquerable - what are the ramifications for the original owner?

As for the rest of you - it's fascinating to watch male egos rubbing off on each other and the amount of writing/ranting that ensues. I think I'll sit down here a little longer with a bowl of popcorn. This is good material for a psychology paper!

I find it amusing how people think calling me a sociopath at random is a good insult. On the plus side, at least they seem to be moving away from using "gay" in that situation. But calling me a sociopath is hardly more accurate, it does not offend me at all, and it implies that there's something wrong with sociopaths. Sociopaths may have bad empathy, but that doesn't automatically make them bad people.