For those of you who have read my grand “Planetary Control” proposal, I have a few more thoughts and follow-up ideas on it. Please add any ideas or suggestions here as well, I’d be curious to see what others might be able to add or see from their perspective.
Having that cool down time of two days to think over the initial proposals, and seen some of the other player proposals, I have already thought of some changes I would make to my initial proposal or areas I would refine further. But first I would like to say I was somewhat surprised how different my proposal was compared to a number other players proposals. I guess it was the way I interpreted “Planetary Control“, in that what first popped into my head was the resource/access aspect of controlling a planet, not the military/conquering part. Also my thinking seemed a lot more along the line of current game mechanics and how they could be extended/expanded toward planetary access, perhaps my “extension” line of thinking due to all those years I spent designing & developing software.
But perhaps the nice part of my proposal is really, much like in real life, the planet and its ground remains neutral to all those pesky life-forms and their grandiose plans. Conquering in this particular case, would simply mean the ability to maintain the largest Planetary Control Tower around a planet and keep all other players/Corps/Alliances from putting their own PCT around the planet. There would be no “Official” this planet now belongs to SnikPocks Alliance and if you look on the “official” map, the planet is now SnickPockers official mauve alliance color!
In fact, I think more depth and flexibility would be added to Eve if planets really became yet another new major area of exploration in Eve. The thought occurred to me this morning. Much like wormhole systems were added to New Eden to the tune of several thousand new systems, I think that once interactivity with planets is introduced by CCP , it would be a good idea to open up yet another large area of exploration for Eve players to spend their addicted time upon. The beauty of planets … much like the wormhole expansion – is that they’re everywhere, and new players in hi-sec all the way down to the vets in null-sec would get a piece of the action.
My planetary gridding/sectoring idea I proposed, I think works well in this regard. Except that I think now I would increase the amount of sectors for each planet considerably than what I originally proposed (i.e. forty/fifty small, a few hundred large). I would now suggest scaling up the number of sectors on each small planet to several hundred, and the huge planets to several thousand. That would provide a-lot to explore on a single planet, and a lot more to explore in Eve the universe, and also provide more flexibility in future CCP expansions.
I would also refine further planetary probing. Probing would be the first stage of a corp’s planetary interaction, followed by deployment of corp assets & then maintenance/growth. I mulled around the idea that only if a corp anchored a PCT around the planet would they be able to probe it. But this would be a little too restrictive. Players would have to spend excessive resources and time just to get a peek at a planet that may or may not be of value to them. In addition, it would reduce the potential of other players discovering the value of a planet, and thus creating less player-to-player interactions for planetary resources.
Planetary probes then should be available not just from a PCT, but also be available to be launched from ships having the right equipment and capability. These ships would have to warp into a certain range from the planet, launch their probes, and using the current scanning UI now available, receive back Planetary Sector data. And similar to what is now demanded for w-hole systems, sector data would be at first general and would become more specific as the player increased scan resolution and narrowed the range of the ship’s planetary scanners.
Variables could be selected by the player prior to scanning. For example, if the player was aware another corporation had already deployed on the planet, then the player could first scan for Droid-bases, get a fix, then increase resolution on the sectors where Droid-Bases were deployed. This would provide him some intelligence of what another corp was doing on the planet. Of course, it might be nice to have the other player know his Droid-bases are being scanned … he might want to do something about another player snoop’n around the sectors he’s operating in.
Another scanning variable would be to search for certain SCC (Sector Classification Code) sector types. Depending on the skills, type of planetary scanners used, etc. the player would receive back scanning information on say SCC Wildlife IV class sectors, 20% present on planet … with more scan resolution etc, he would discover these sectors are located in the Northern polar portion of the planet … sectors 1-50. If he is really good at scanning, and has some real specialized T2 or T3 scanning abilities, he might even get a range of levels of the Wildlife IV sectors present (each SCC includes a level of the resource from 1-30, higher means more rare and/or more quantity).
The main thrust behind scanning is not to make it a simple, click your button and 2 minutes later you have all the information you ever need. Or one click and the entire planet is scanned. It’s a planet for God’s sake. I mean, humans have been on earth for thousands of years, and we still don’t know everything about it. So why should some Eve player in a ship come right up, click a button, and know everything he needs to know in 2 minutes? And besides, where’s the challenge or fun in that?
So scanning I propose should be a continuous process. A planet can be scanned from a ship within a certain range of the planet but certainly not in as great a detail as a Corp who has anchored a PCT and installed a Planetary Gridding Array. But once a PGA is set up, and sectors are discovered, I suggest that some sectors much like w-hole space might have hidden additional granularity. That is, probing a planet should not be a once over affair … that a player can make planetary probing an on-going activity, probing high probability sectors that might open up to rarer resources or high reward resource quantity, given more effort over time. In addition, a planet with hundreds of sectors if not thousands would make this a wide-open exploration in Eve, not for just one corp, but all corps interested in a given planet.
I also suggest that while ships would be able to launch planetary probes like a gridding array, only the PGA would be able to launch and deploy droid bases to the planet.
I also have some follow-up thoughts on my idea of planetary ship building array. I really like the idea that larger control towers would be anchored at planets, and you would be able to build Super Capitals using a range of resources including the new Planetary resources. I had also mentioned in my proposal augmenting current T2 & T3 blueprints (maybe T1?) with a new optional Planetary Bill of Materials (maybe just another tab added for the UI) and that if a manufactuer used the optionals Planetary resources, there would be additional bonuses for the item created.
I sorta threw in this idea near the end of my proposal but actually like it more now, since it extends another area of the game for those who enjoy Industry, by extending further blueprint capabilities and choices. However, to make the new expansion of PCTs more valuable, I would restrict the manufacturing of planetary resource augmented blueprints to PCT assembly arrays only. That is, you could only use this optional section of a blue print if you have a Planetary assembly array set up, and the required planetary resources (and of course player skills). With that, I think there would be enough incentive for players really to want to go out and build one of these things and/or explore planets more.
What do you think? Any further ideas to add? Comments suggestions. Like I said, I feel my proposal is sort of laying the groundwork of potential. The idea is to create a big and “fun” sandbox for Eve players to continually explore and build in.
jamenta