NATION LEADERSHIP

Every nation should have a leader. Leadership will bring new dimension to this game. It will generate cooperation between nation members and sense of belonging to the nation. Currently, this game too much about individual skills. How about the game have government or some sort of fleet commander?

My suggestion is the game will appoint the first pc who gain licence 9/9/9/9 become a commander for 3 month duration. When it expires it will go to other pc with the license. The commander will be relieved of duty when,
1. Leave the post
2. Not online more than 72 hr
3. The nation do not have any space station for 8 consecutive days

Commander Abilities
1. can appoint 10 lieutenant
2. Build capital ship
3. configure capship weapon
4. all llieutenant abilities

Lieutenant abilities
1. Fly capship
2. Upgrade Patrol
3. repair capship

SPACE STATION

My idea is to have Station that any nation can takeover or can be made neutral.
Preferably 9 stations in grey area (3 station per system).
1. System A ( enter from itani wormhole & go to system B,C )
2. System B ( enter from serco wormhole & go to system A,C)
3. System C (enter from UIT wormhole & go to System A,B)

Each station has 12 patrol 6 turret 3 shield generator. If shield is on, the station is invulnerable to energy weapon.
(Patrol AI: will attack other nation pc. max 4 ship attack 1 attacker. Stop chase when 3000 m from station.)

Takeover condition: all defense above destroyed & 1 attacker must dock & reset it.
If the attacker fail to dock in 5 minutes, the defense will auto reset. Any pc who at the station (afk or park when log out) during takeover is considered dead & will spawn in wherever their homestation as these station cannot be made as a home.

Advantages of having station, 1 station reduce 5% cost (maxed at 45%). Each station sell different ammo, mine and not available anywhere else. Only owner nation can dock regardless of faction rating. The station buys ore from pc. The price is based on the station ore stock.

By having these, the nation will work together to have more station in order to enjoy cheaper & better ammunition prices. Each nation will also pick which station they prefer based on the ammunition sold there, proximity to civilization where they can return fast to defend it or nearby area have lots of valuable ore. PC will be assigned to guard jump point & the station.

1 station will generate minimum 1 million credit per week for the nation. Other income is based on transaction done on the station. The credit can be use to maintain patrol. Default patrol is licence 5/5/5/5 (free).
1. patrol 6/6/6/6 cost 1 million per week.
2. patrol 7/7/7/7 cost 2 million per week
3. patrol 8/8/8/8 cost 3 million per week

OR, the credit can be use to produce a capital ship!

CAPITAL SHIP

A nation must own a station for at least 1 week in order to produce a capship for 1 time fee of 1 million & some ores gathered by pc & sold at the station. If the capship destroyed, the nation must wait 1 week penalty to build new ship. A nation can only build 2 ship in a system & only 2 same nation capship is allowed to be on a system at one time. In other words, these capships can travel between the 3 systems to attack other station. . If this game still not ready to let player control capship, the commander or lieutenants must lead the ship to the location (just like capship event).

Each capship have 24 patrol, 6 light weapon, 2 heavy weapon. The capship patrol license follows the station patrol rank. The different is station patrol respawn by timer after destroy and ship patrol keep on coming until the mothership is destroyed.

Benefit of having capship

1. capship can travel to attack other station or guard wormhole to attack intruders as they enter the system or just simply guard a station but beware of ion storm during travel. In order to avoid abuse by a nation who has capitalship to attack other system, make sure every time the capital ship jump to another system, it will be caught in a massive ion storm.
2. All the nation pc can dock & access to FREE excellent fighter & bomber ship. However, these ships only can fly in sector where the capship harbours.

Capital Ship repair

The capital repairing will cost some credit and can only be done outside battle. The capital ship also have auto regeneration % during battle. This can avoid some lame tactic where small squad can destroy the capital ship.

PROBLEMS

Based on game design where factions are constantly warring each other, this suggestion could be frustrating. Imagine ppl build a capship but only to be destroyed when enemy ambush while no player online to defend it. If the nation constantly guarding & wait other nation to attack, it will creates tense & player will get bored easily. That’s why the capitalship must be strong to fend the attack itself. At least, the attacker requires around 20-30 ppl & around 15-20 minutes to completely destroy it without pc assistance of the defender side.

Another solution is to create war declaration mechanism. Once the war has been declared by the commander 2 days earlier, the station or capitalship of the opposite faction can be attacked. If the ship or station is attacked outside war, the attacker will suffer faction penalties including from his own nation.

I hope i can get developer response this time.

There was a thread "Galactic Political System" at http://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/3/8606 some time ago, that was similar to this. Incarnate posted there that he "always wanted to do something along these lines."

Capturable space stations are on the "soon^tm" list.

Regarding your CapShip suggestion, I think that would be cool for a nation special Super Capital Ship, but I think the plan for most Capital Shps is that Guilds or individual players will be able to own them. But Nation Government owned Super Capital Ships would be cool.

There are parts that I like and parts that I don't about your idea. I like the idea of trying to get nations to feel more patriotic and trying to get them to unify under a C&C but I don't think it needs to be treated like a guild commander and have special powers over standard players. That type of control could be misused and may negatively effect someone's gameplay.

Capturable stations, as was mentioned previously by Beolach, has already been mentioned and is hopefully soon to be introduced.

As far as Capital Ships are concerned, I don't believe that there should be any max # that can be "up" and or "constructed". If the player base can collect the neccessary tradegoods and ore needed to make a CS then they should be able to have it built. Also, regarding "free" ships, I don't like it. CS's would only be able to carry a certain # of ships anyway, instead, why not give CS's the ability to reload ammunition, that alone would make them twice as valuable in combat. Not only would they benefit the light fighter for repair purposes, but also the heavy bombers for more rockets and missles. As for regen on a CS, a certain level of self repair should be apparent, but I think it should take the form of small repair bots that fly around it and use small versions of the repair modules, that way you can cripple a CS's repair ability, but with good defenders it's turrets will always be operable and the ships damage due to enviroment can be minimalized.

A nice war mechanism would be to institute Guild Wars, once player controlled CS's are available. Which is what I think is planned anyway.

> As far as Capital Ships are concerned, I don't believe that there should be any max # that can be "up" and or "constructed".

Useless trivia time: the cap ships we have in VO right now are "Heavy Cruiser" class ships; historically, the "Heavy Cruiser" class of naval ships was actually created in order to meet the terms of an international treaty (the Washington Naval Treaty) that limited the maximum tonnage of individual ships (which is why the Heavy Cruiser class of ships came into being). The same treaty also limited the total number of ships of each class that a nation's navy could have in operation at any single time.

So, IMO it does make sense for there to be a limit on the number of Capital Ships in a nation's official military. Most cap ships should be purchased & operated by guilds & players, and such privately owned cap ships should not count towards the limit. But, some "super-capital" class ships could be only available to each nation's official military, and so there would only be a limited number of those ships in existance.

Which ties in well with the powers I think a nation commander should have - they should not have much power over players, but rather most of their power should be over the NPCs of their nation (especially the military). But, one thing I do think a nation commander should have the power to do, would be to assign a player to be the captain of one of the "super-capital" ships, that only exist in official nation military.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_cruiser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Naval_Treaty

well this isn't the earth, and I dont' see the Itani and Serco as having any kind of "understanding" or treaty that limits the number of vessels in there arsinal, but if you want to limit the game and keep is desolite that's fine.

I don't think the C&C should be able to assign Captin'ship to anyone, that will breed favoritism and will lead to bickering. And thus negative gaming experience. IMO. If anything, it should be FCFS

[edit: Wow, this is a much longer post than I thought it was going to be.]

Nations engaged in war have always wanted an understanding of what they can expect of their enemies. And in the case of Vendetta Online, the UIT would be able to provide additional reason for the Itani & Serco to sign agreements on how much military strength they can (officially) have. As a neutral party in a rather precarious position, the UIT would very much not want either of the warring nations to become too powerful, and the threat of the UIT cutting off all trade (including the Purified Xithricite produced by UIT sub-factions) would carry enough clout to convince the Itani & Serco to sign the treaty.

Also, I don't see how this suggestion would make the game any more desolate at all. It is only the nations' official militaries that would be limited by any treaty, private citizens (individual players & guilds) would still be able to purchase any publicly available capital ship, without it counting towards the limits set in any treaty. So any number of players can own any number of ships.

Just out of curiousity, what is C&C? I know you mean the nation commander, but that's only one C. Anyway, it would depend on how it was implemented whether or not it is likely to be abused. I highly doubt the position of nation commander would have much permanency at all, and as I think a general vote by members of the nation is likely to be a significant part of determining a leader, it would be in the best interests of the current commander not to abuse his powers (unless he has no intention of trying to be nation commander again), and even if he does abuse his powers, he would be easily replaced either at the end of his "term", or earlier if his abuse is bad enough to warrant removing him from office.

There are also plenty of ways to make it difficult or moot for the commander to appoint captains solely according to favoritism. For one thing, it would only be the super-capital class ships whose captainship that would be assigned by the nation commander (well, I guess maybe he could assign captains for other capital ships in the nation military, but as it would only be the super-capital ships that would only exist as part of the nation military, they're all that concerns us here), and really I don't see captaining a super-capital ship as being all that much different from captaining one of the normal capital ships that would be availale to the general public. And it's not like captaining one of these super-capital ships is a reward: it's more a responsibility. How a nation's official military ships are used reflects back on that nation.

And I never said being appointed by a nation commander should be the only way to gain captainship of a super-capital ship. Say each nation is limited to 9 supercapital ships: 3 of these ships could be captained by players appointed by the nation commander, 3 could be captained by players who enlisted in the nation's military & earned a high ranking, and 3 could be held in reserve for critical military operations, and the captains of these ships would be determined on a first-come-first-serve basis at the time of the & for the duration of the operation they were needed for. No doubt other people can come up with more ways of assigning a captain to these super-capital ships.

Also, bickering doesn't necessarily lead to a negative gaming experience. I bicker w/ enemy players a lot, and call it fun. And even if appointment by the nation commander was the only way to become captain of a super-capital ship, I still don't think any bickering over that would necessarily lead to a negative experience. Why should I care that I wasn't appointed captain? I can still fly my own ship, and I don't even have to worry about military regulations (something the captains of the super-capital ships would have to worry about).

"Also, bickering doesn't necessarily lead to a negative gaming experience. I bicker w/ enemy players a lot, and call it fun. And even if appointment by the nation commander was the only way to become captain of a super-capital ship, I still don't think any bickering over that would necessarily lead to a negative experience. Why should I care that I wasn't appointed captain? I can still fly my own ship, and I don't even have to worry about military regulations (something the captains of the super-capital ships would have to worry about)."

That's your view, may not be the view of everyone. Which is why I left that quite general. C&C Commander & Cheif, head honcho, the MAN