The debate within BUGRY right now isn't so much whether the Citadels will be good or what they will do, but how much they will cost.
When you see the image below, you get the impression that the medium Citadel will cost 750,000,000,000 ISK or more.
I mean, that's a fucking Avatar there. Citadels are going to cost, like, at least five Avatars!
Well, probably not. Remember the POCO gantry and PI upgrade costs about 100M. The POCO is about 20km on a side. This is a "medium" structure. I wouldn't think that the Citadel will cost as little as the POCO, but I'd expect it to be in the billion ISK range, maybe up to a couple billion, five at tops.
"Five billion!", you exclaim in horror. Yeah, maybe. i would hope not. But remember, it won't cost fuel to run, and the cost of a tricked out large tower is about a billion ISK already, and that costs about 300M a month to fuel. So if you can foresee living in a Citadel for a year, you break even, more or less.
The other parts of Citadel life are less set in concrete, but are firming up like a stool filled with dietary fibre.
CCP seems fairly intent on having Citadel guns act passively, from the latest feedback. So you will have trollceptors come past and constantly reinforce your Citadel.
There is no certainty on the vulnerability window and influence of indexes on the gaping anusishness of wormhole vulnerability windows. We seem to be still heading for 16 hour vulnerabilities, with absolutely no concrete declaratons either way on this.
Space-hobbit cans seem to be the preference for handling looting of destroyed structures. Yay? I mean, it's irrelevant to me, but a lot of people persist with the fantasy of getting rich off POS bashing and will cry bittervet tears over this.
No concrete declarations about mooring, how it works, what can be moored to what, etc. Though, again, that there picture kind of suggests Mediums may allow caps to dock/moor/store. Probably not the Avatar though.
So, progress is being made. Certainly not enough, barring an Art Department allnighter bender till the 24th, for a deployment in the next patch. Which raises a very good question about what we'll get in the next patch?
More SKINs, certainly. Some fozziesov tweaks, probably. Maybe a soupcon of battleship rebalance, maybe something on Assault Frigates. Who knows? Looking like a patch on which to hit the snooze button and get back to bearing and hoarding shit ahead of Citadel deployment. You never know, it might actually cost 75 billion to build one, as CCP's way of effectively driving people from wormholes.
I hope you are wrong trinket, if they make them that expensive it could kill off alot of smaller 5-10 man groups and low class wh space pretty much.
ReplyDeletePeople would start to wear out their visa cards to get plex to fuel the pos.
Im not sure that would be healthy for the game although CCP might need the extra money?
I am not entirely sure, as i don't religiously keep tabs on the wallet balances of the guys in my corp, but I am pretty sure most of my guys could afford a 5 billion ISK medium each, all for themselves.
DeleteThe way I parse money in EVE is in man-hours at the Incursion rate. A 5B ISK Medium Citadel is 50 hours of Incursioning (also coincidentally the unit of time known as a "self-harm excuse"). For competent C4 bears, also 50 hours of grinding sites. 250 days of PI for people who get wormhole PI ticking along nicely.
So, 50 man-hours of grinding for a 5 man corp, you could raise the ISK via Incursions in a week, playing 2 hours of Incursions a night if everyone clubbed together. Same maths for the other ways of doing it.
That's not impossible.
Yes, it's a lot of money for a solo player, but...jesus, it's a fucking gigantic edifice for one person. But solo players accumulate ISK quite easily as it is, up to the hundreds of billions, via doing low-yield activities interspersed with high-yield bonanzas (escalations, etc) over long periods.
I think even at 5 billion ISK a pop they will be common as muck.
My only hope is that the game doesn't completely die out before these get implemented. I don't know why but POSes never felt all that cool to me. They've always seen like too much work. Of course I don't live in a WH (at the moment, might change soon). However, these citadels seem really cool. They seem like a real grandiose structure that makes me "COOOOOLLL!!!" Stations kind of do that but those are only built in nullsec and you can't really pay for one of those solo (AFAIK). It seems like they'd be easier to setup with the new fitting strategies and such which I like.
ReplyDeleteIf I have the money for one, I'll probably try and find a spot to plop one down and play around with it.