Groups holding a station or stations should be obliged to maintain the morale of the station by maintaining needed supplies.
1) Excessive use of station facilities whether ship repair, trade or manufacturing reduces station moral
2) Failure to deliver needed supplies like food, luxury items, coolant, fitness equipment, porn or textiles (you get the idea) reduces the stations moral.
3) Prolonged inactivity reduces the stations moral.

The cost of low moral results in a reduced defense capacity of the station turrets and whatever other defensive mechanism may be put in place. Thereby making the station easier for an opposing group to conquer.

This of course should not be implemented until the stations have real purpose.

eh. players should not be responsible for delivering needed supplies to their stations. however, they should be responsible for maintaining open trade lanes to their station so npc and other such trade can occur.

economic redux ahoy?

My thinking is that by doing this you create a need for co-operative efforts to maintain a station from both militant trade and hopefully mining elements.

These needs should not be huge quantities, but sufficient and changing enough that it requires a daily shipment or two. I say changing so that it would be foolish to just stockpile food and bypass making regular deliveries.

The benefits would be more player cooperation and player conflict in requiring real traders to provide targets for the pirate and anti pirate groups. The penalty ensures that the groups that hold stations have a system of maintenance in place or they won't hold the station for long.

SimCity is over that way, Fluffer.

WoW got Mr T we gettin Sid Meier?

How unfortunate : )

LOL BT

I like it.

I don't always play well with others, but encouraging people to do so is a step in the right direction.

That Other Space Ship Game(tm) had something very similar to this in the form of Player Owned Structures and the fuels they require. Call it "morale" if you want, but the end result is that player-owned objects in space would require certain things in order to be functional.

In That Other Game, a POS requires a certain amount of each of eight or ten different items (like Oxygen, Starbase Charters, etc.) each hour in order to keep running. You could stuff enough of this fuel into the POS to keep it running for a couple of days, but you'd have to fly out to the POS with newly-purchased trade goods a few times a week or the POS would go offline.

Under that system, you had a specific list of fuels to bring, and knew exactly the rate at which the fuels were burned. And it was still a gigantic pain in the rear, and never resulted in players "working together". It resulted in one person, out of maybe fifty in your corporation, becoming the *only* person fueling the POS because no one else would do it.

I can't imagine a more complicated system, with VO's player base, being any better.

I kinda agree with atice, only the routes used to supply the station should be predictable in some way. Maybe set aside a few dozen npc names for deliverys headed to each station.

also once a station's "morale" falls low enough, you should be able to just fly up and bribe the defenders into handing it over.