We have found our way in to a siege, as kind of interested bystanders. As with all things in wormholes which involve sieges of POSs, there has to be a damn good reason, even if the defender has not done a particularly good job of defending their towers. In this case, the attacker's tower screams to me a troll tower to bait out the defender's Dread.
I mean, I basically invented bait POSes with Operation Zebracakes, in the early days of wormholing, back before many people had even figured out they could build caps in wormholes, and certainly before people had figured out that leaving them floating free was a bad idea because people would come looking to troll them out with a POS.
I can tell a good bait tower, and an obvious bait tower. Because obvious bait is obvious, it never works. In this case, 3 online neut batteries is obvious. 21 hardeners is obvious. ECM saturation is obvious. 4 dissy's is obvious. I mean, how obvious does it have to be?
So, having ascertained that the siege was, in fact, just a badly structured trolling exercise, I advised the defenders on what to do next, given they were half in shock at the intrusion and weren't experienced with the whole process.
There are some strategic philosophies you can use to deter and defeat people who are attempting to evict you.
- EHP walls. You need to put as much EHP between them and their objective as possible.This can buy you time in order to defend yourself.
- Win by boredom. EHP walls by themselves don't win anything, but you have to remember that structure grinds are terrible gameplay and so the problem for the attacker becomes one of motivating people to continue. How many hours will 30 guys have to put in to maybe snag one dread killmail? Will they persist in doing this?
- Deny them a good fight.
- Pursue diplomacy.
- Hardeners, times 21, for your large POS. This will provide a "nominal" 83% omni resist profile (or whatever if the display is borked, max it out). This can put a hundred million EHP in front of your foes. That's hours and hours of grinding and addresses Objective 1 and 2, above.
- Beef up your POS EWAR. This will deter smaller groups from attacking and, if your attacker lacks members at any time, it will prevent them from getting going with a small gang.
- Import POS guns, by the dozen. As fucked as it is, you can anchor and online guns even while in a reinforcement period. Dead guns don't prevent this either.Keep jackin guns up until you basically create enough of a PITA the enemy will avoid attacking you anyway.
- Evacuate your candy, if safe. If your attackers are motivated by greed at the idea of looting your SMA's, nothing defeats avarice better than removing.
- Import stront. You'll need at least 2 loads of stront if your defences hold.
- Import RR ships, even Scythes and Execqurors.
Your biggest threat is getting podded out in your entirety, or trapped out one by one as your foes roll you out of your statics. Once your enemies have 250M EHP in front of them you won't have a great sense of urgency.
Denying a good fight may not prevent you from getting sieged, and it certainly won't resolve your roblems, but it does set a precedent for your enemies for next time. If your CEO says "hey guys want to blow another week and a half grinding through 250M EHP of structures only to have our enemies evac all the shinies and logoff the dread, and you kill almost nothing in this time, and make no money yourself?" your enemy CEO will eventually find things begin falling apart.
That's not to say you shouldn't fight, but don't make it good. Just be pricks. Use the POS guns, use POS ECM and slip alpha nado's out of the shields to snipe at logis you've got neuted/ECM'ed/webbed to hell. The less likely you are to provide them a good fight, the less likely they will stick around or call in batphones.
Diplomacy can take the form of asking your enemies what their objectives are, even if they act like teenagers and Reddit trolls, and even if the information gained is unhelpful. Being polite and decent prevents it turning into a grudge match, wherein your enemies will siege you out just because you are a douchey fuck. You might very well be, but act like a decent person for one week in your life, hey? Just imagine what real adults would say, and say that instead of some whiny self-entitled Q.Q which exposes you as a crybaby carebear neckbeard afraid of losing his toys.
Regarding your toys, if it's too late to deny owning the Dread which they are so pathetically trying to toll out with their oh-so-obvious troll tower, then you have two options. Option 1 is a bonfire. if you have decided to light a match under the thing, make sure your enemies see it happen, and gloat in the insurance payout.
Option 2 is, ten seconds before downtime, change your POS permissions and password and get yourself flung as far from the POS as you can, then log off for as long as it takes to get the siege lifted or, if your POS is going down, for the trap POS to be dismantled. Keep an alt in the hole, and sell the hole to recoup some money. When the new buyer sets up and gets comfy, just log your fucking dread in and siege them out. This, at least, will pay its way.
As a fairly new resident of a c5, how are we in the last 6 months of the golden age of WH? Is it the changes to structure machanics? It does seem that PVP is becoming harder to come by, like it was in low/null which is what prompted the move to WH space in the first place, and everyone is so risk averse, which just blows my mind. I hate the idea of losing a shiny proteus or deimos, but the point of having it is to use it and put it on the line, right? I don't own a POS myself, and now I am thinking I might just want to stay in the corp tower a while longer eh?
ReplyDeleteif you read the previous couple of posts about the proposed Sov and POS mechanics, you will see why I think they are a Bad idea for POS ownership.
DeleteWithout fully repeating some of my posts on the forums, consider the effort required to build and stock a POS in terms of ISK and time, and consider whether it is vulnerable. Under the new system of entosis links, it could be made vulnerable in 10 minutes. So you spend months building a corporation and some cunt destroys it in 10 minutes. That's fucked.
The sov blog speaks of entosis links being used on sov structures and stations. There's no mention of using it on non-sov structures. I'd made the same assumption, too, and was ready to quit, as if entosis links do end up working on all of the new POS structures, that will kill w-space.
DeleteThe problem is that the blog intimates that entosis links will not work on POSes, there's enough of a hole to raise a big question mark.
I have talked with a few people who have attended Podcast discussions with Fozzie. He is apparently quite aware that people have concerns, and some of the concerns have been things he hasn't considered. So, the question really is whether Fozzie and Rise and CCP are fully committed to an attention-based sov system and POS / structure system, and whether they consider the problems with that are better than the current swathe of problems associated with POS's and sov grinding.
DeleteSo, the real important thing is to deeply drill down into the mechanism (not the symptoms at the surface) of the current POS system and look at ways an entosis mechanism can replace or supplement things, where needed.
The problem is that few people really seem to actually understand the mechanisms and systems at play, in my egotistical opinion. You now, the majority of people are low-level users of POSs - they don't put them up, they dont manage them, they don't fuel them, set rights. They live in them but someone else keeps the lights on and organises the mexican gardener to trim the hedges.
As far as attacking and defending, again, most people just get a mail with a date, time, ship comp. They turn up, spend 0.25-8 hours (depending on cap support), shooting shit, and don't think about why they are using the ships they are, why it's taking so long, or what could be done to speed the process up. They experience the symptoms of the problem, but don't consider the cause, or the cure.
So along comes Fozzie with an entirely new disease. Most low-level POS users will experience different symptoms although the experience of living in a new POS will be much the same. Lights are on, hedges are trimmed, shit functions. Attack and defense for the low-level users will be simpler - turn up, entosis, set timer, play undocking games for 2 days, POS destryed/saved.
For the high-end crowd who build, cart, pay for, fuel, maintain and manage the POSs, the game is vastly different and the impact of this is much greater.