EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Barely over one month to go until Dominion releases, and at last - amidst the flotsam and jetsam of post-Fanfest flus, hangovers, and developer chit-chat - at last we have some hard data, real numbers, and SiSi patches to pore over and analyze. When at Fanfest, the most jammed round tables were those for 0.0 and capital ships - with good reason, because these two areas are bearing the brunt of the patch changes. At the time, we had general information from the devs, but no numbers. There was still a few obligatory Fanfest 'big reveals': CCP at last disclosed how outposts would be captured, and demonstrated the new Doomsday graphics for Amarr. But it quickly became apparent that the main utility of Fanfest (from a gaming perspective, not to speak to the much more crucial drinking and hijinks) was the opportunity to have a say while Dominion itself was still being created, to make an opinion heard. Those looking for finished products and hard data were disappointed.

Here is what we know about the Sov system now, based on Fanfest discussion, dev blogs, and Sisi.

The first point is that control of a system with an outpost is tiered. In order to sieze the system, first you need to take the outpost, then the upgrade hub, and then finally 'sovereignty'. Confusion will result because we currently think of 0.0 as all about Sov, but in Dominion the concept labelled 'sovereignty' will be an afterthought for the real contest over outposts and hubs. To take an outpost, you must siege its shields, deal with a reinforced timer, then its armor, and a second reinforced timer before control is taken. At Fanfest, the concept bandied about was adding an element of randomness and removing 'stront timing' from the equation; from the point an outpost is sieged, the timer for shields or armor will come out +/- six hours of the siege time. This adds an extreme element of unpredictability to the classic timezone war. This mechanic alone, in whatever final form it takes, will be the deciding factor of if the defender or attacker holds the advantage in Dominion. We do know that outposts currently have 150m hp and 100m armor, so they will require the deployment of a dread fleet to siege effectively, and will be large enough targets that single-cycling an outpost will be nearly out of the question.

After the outpost is taken, the 'upgrade hub,' a separate and new station deployed at a planet like an outpost, must be taken. Presumably these also have randomized reinforced timers, like an outpost. This is where your system upgrades live; the big design question is if upgrades can be destroyed after a siege, or if it will be possible for an alliance to seize a 'prize' system built up painstakingly by the efforts of their prey. Once that's done, the now-famous 'sov disruptors' can be deployed on gates to render vulnerable the 'sov widget' which holds sov. A major change on Sisi, different from the Fanfest version of the sov system, requires that these sov disruptors be deployed only on a majority of the stargates in the target system, not every gate as before. However, since we know nothing about the upkeep costs of the new sov system - none of them had even been drafted by Fanfest, it seems, it's impossible to predict the ideal territorial size of a Dominion alliance. CCP wants to eliminate sprawling 'afk empires,' but how far they will go is a mystery.

At the moment it seems like alliances are heading for a smaller, denser, more heavily outposted setup which favors the defender slightly, but not as much as Sov 4 does now. Removing endless POS upkeep will lower the bar for 'entry-level' alliances, since as it stands currently only alliances with a core of expert logisticians can handle POS war. To limit the impact of randomness in reinforced timers and take advantage of the 'capstone' nature of an outpost at the top of the new sov hierarchy, alliances will probably begin creating more outposts - and if jump bridges are only allowed in outpost systems, this will become a necessity.

The upcoming changes to capitals have now been hashed out on SiSi, with great relish. On a recent weekend, everyone had their characters adjusted to max skill and hopped in Titans and motherships to play around.