The serco already feel disadvantaged in Deneb. Please give theme at least one station.
Actually you can make Deneb grey space. You have already set up stations each sides can take. Make it grey one station always Itani and serco near each the their worm holes.

That way Deneb will be all concurable, except the 2 worm holes

jb

Damn it's amazing no one though of this in the last 9 years

It's already planned to make the stations in Deneb conquerable. For some dumbass reason, however, the devs have insisted that this plan to change it someday is sufficient justification to leave it in its current unfair state for years rather than dropping in a Serco station in the meanwhile.

I may be wrong, but something tells me it's not as easy as just dropping in a station, otherwise they'd have done it already.

It may not be a "get it done in two hours" kind of project, but does it take long enough to warrant leaving things in an unfair state for years? Absolutely not.

There's no technical excuse to hide behind when it comes to doing something they've already done again and again and again all over the place.

Serco have the advantage in fleet position from the jump-in point in all skirmishes except Fighter.

I can't count how many times I've jumped in to a Medium or Large skirmish to find all of the NPCs clustered 3000m from the Itani fleet and the Serco fleet at least 7000m away, off the radar.

Often times the Itani NPC bombers never even engage the capital ships and waste all their ammo shooting at fighters. This can be a real problem in a Large Skirmish where players have to focus fire on the capital ships even after taking down their shields because you cannot depend on NPCs to hit them and prevent recharge.

This also allows Serco players to undock after reloading, jump out, then jump back in to be in a perfect position to bomb the Itani capships without fighters pursuing them on the way to their target.

"This also allows Serco players to undock after reloading, jump out, then jump back in to be in a perfect position to bomb the Itani capships without fighters pursuing them on the way to their target."

That's not true arf. There is equal danger to being attacked by Itani npc pilots when bombing from the jump in point as there is from the serco HAC.

And NPCs don't make a difference in Deneb - both sides are equally balanced. Human players make a difference in deneb.

Jumping out and back in means you spend less time crossing the sector. Then you jump in right at optimal distance to start a bombing run. That's several seconds less time that players and NPCs alike have to acquire target and head on an intercept course before you're within firing range.

I've played both sides too, Greenwall.

As for the NPCs, they're perfectly balanced in the sleeping-sector simulations, but when the sector is awake, the SCP bots tend to last a tiny bit longer than the Valks do. Not to mention that their Iceflare launchers are the super-shitty NPC-only nerfed version that does a piddly 400-minus-distance damage, so everybody can leave the "but Valks get flares!" argument at home.

At least the Teradons are equally stupid... :P

You might jump in to an optimal bombing distance, but you also jump in within closer proximity to the bulk of the itani fighters than if you were traveling through the sector from the serco HAC or connie or trident, thus the equal danger. In a small there is a bit more advantage for the serco in this regard, but an agile and skilled itani pilot can defend successfully regardless.

Honestly I think the jump in point proximity issue is a negative more than a positive if you are serco -- as it causes you to go into defensive and evasive posture more quickly than if you were itani.

If you're coordinating 3-4 bombers to take out a HAC (old-style with swarms or stingrays), being able to stage everyone out-of-sector and jump in all at once with a perfect lineup is huge.

On the Itani side, being closer to the bulk of the fighters is a major drawback when trying to stack Avalons, since the reverse is true. Optimal bombing distance for them is as close to your own fleet as possible, which means the NPC fighters have less distance to fly to hump your face with neutron blasters.

Fact of the matter is, there's far more to it than just "waah no stations in Deneb." There's a large sparse asteroid field in Deneb O-3 that gets in the way of jumps, whereas the Serco have a clear shot to the wormhole followed by a clear jump in an empty sector. Unless your computer is godawful slow, those don't take all that long.

Still, +1 to conquerable stations in Deneb. :)

Good lord ARF it's like you are being paid by itani nationalists or something to post biased assessments of the Deneb situation.

1) Even if the Serco somehow came to understand the concept of coordinated bombing, you don't jump into a sector at the same exact point. So your distances (for coordination) will still have to be adjusted AFTER you'd jump in. Yeah, maybe they save a tiny bit of time, but not much, and again, they still have to dodge all the fighters swarming around them.

2) Having more fighters around you while avalon bombing is only a drawback if you don't have significant capship turrets covering your six. Otherwise I personally saw no significant difference between the two sides.

3) At most Itani's have to travel 5000m to jump after dying. At the LEAST, Serco have to travel 6000, plus an extra jump. You can't debate this fact. Serco have a longer travel time to the skirmishes. That said, it's more of a psychological impasse -- since in reality it just adds about 15 seconds over the comparable Itani journey. In very close battles with several skilled human players on each side, those extra seconds might mean something. But more often than not they are inconsequential.

Also, don't forget that the Serco have no turrets defending them in Geira or in the Deneb side of the WH. So Itanis can camp them out and mess with them before they even get to the skirmishes.

All together the serco have to just seek therapy and get over themselves -- it's not that big of an issue at all. Placing a serco station in Deneb (not a conquerable station) would go a long way to giving the Sercos some of that therapy. If you make it a conquerable station, the complaint will be the same re: travel time (unless it's at the WH)

Yeah, there should probably only be conquerable stations in Deneb if all of the stations are conquerable.

It takes longer than 15 seconds to traverse the extra distance to geira, but whatever the actual average is thats per pilot per trip and it adds up to whole minutes across the course of a battle. Even in a small skirmish this is significant.

It's not, nor has it ever been a huge obstacle in actually winning a deneb campaign. Like most other content here, whoever no-lifes 24/7 at deneb will carry the team home.

The problem is that players who want to actually play deneb know about the difference between the two sides. Even if its a purely psychological impasse, the inconvenience on the serco side is enough to skew the bias in numbers in favor of the itani. Week by week you see more participants on the Itani side, more UIT picking the Itani military instead of the Serco. It's that unjustifiable and indefensible gameplay inconvenience that makes deneb so stupid.

ARF? A partisan politician full of rubbish on the forums? NEVER?! How could you possibly think such a thing Greenwall. His defense for one issue is always some Itani contrived issue that has no bearing on the former. He really needs to take a debating class or something or record his own voice reading this stuff and play it back to him.

Absurdity.

TRS complaining about psychological issues. Nothing new here.

I was replying to the discussion, the complaint is your inference.

2) Having more fighters around you while avalon bombing is only a drawback if you don't have significant capship turrets covering your six.

Those turrets kill me more often than the enemy fighters do.

I would partially disagree with the psychological effect reducing Serco participation. It certainly does, but there are also generally twice as many Itani players active at any given time just glancing at the active players screen.

Further, the active roster of Serco- to my perception- seems to cycle more dramatically than for the Itani. Ie. ITAN is still a relevant guild where Serco has cycled through multiple guilds as old players return and try to re-invigorate their side- just in the few years I've been playing. By comparison, I still see the same names fighting for Itani that I did several years ago.

While I personally consider the 2 jumps a nuisance, I have enjoyed playing in Deneb in the past. What I find more frustrating is, and maybe this has improved, the luck required in managing the Teradons and lack of decent rewards / drops.

Heck, if the capital vessels just dropped a big ol wad of SSS instead of scrap I'd be all over it, much less some fcp or ffsa. Or even Samo as the VO wiki seems to suggest but I've never seen.

What Serco guilds? There have only been two active Serco guilds in the four years I've been playing: [BR1] and [RED]. (Note that [BR1] is [ONE], they just changed the tag.)

I'm not disputing you about the roster though; the Serco do have fewer characters who stick around -- for the reasons already stated by TRS in the other thread.

Aye fluffy... cool drops would make a huge difference and has been suggested before