I would like to solicit suggestions on what to do about low level base kits. The problem is that on the one hand, we want to limit the number of bases in a galaxy so that 1) it doesn't get too laggy, and 2) it doesn't become completely invincible, but on the other hand, if a team can just fill up all the slots, then there can't be any BvB, and BvB has become extremely important in Star Sonata.
I'm pretty sure that anything we try to do along the lines of "the owners can have X slots, and other people/their enemies can have Y slots" won't work, because people will just make alts or fake enemies and fill up all the slots anyway.
There are 4 possible ways to address this that I can think of, none of which is completely fleshed out, but I would like to hear other suggestions as well. Here are the ideas I've thought of so far:
1) Eliminate all low level base kits - make tech 9 the lowest one in the game. This doesn't really fix the problems, but at least it's more expensive in terms of slots to fill up everything in your galaxy.
2) Change the way base slots work so that each base, regardless of tech level, takes up one slot and each character has something like 5-6 total slots with bonus slots that are account-wide. Same as 1) in that this doesn't necessarily fix the problem, but it makes filling all your slots in much more expensive. (We are going to do this change eventually, just haven't gotten around to it and don't really want to do it mid-uni.)
3) Remove the hard cap on base slots in a galaxy, but make additional bases after, say after 10ish, cost increasing amounts of slots. For example, the 11th base could take 10% more base slots, the 12th could take 20% more, up to the 20th takes double slots and on up. (Number subject to change and refinement, of course.) The cool thing about this idea is no hard-caps, so it maybe seems less arbitrary, and also there's a balance between attack and defense. The defenders choose how many bases to put in their galaxy and they will have an increasing cost based on how many bases they lay, but they can never make it impossible to BvB. But they essentially make it more expensive.
4) Allow temporary increase in the number of bases per galaxy, but any bases over the cap have a time limit. For example, if the galaxy is all full of bases, you can still lay more bases, but your new bases will die in 1 hour unless you clear up some slots for them by destroying existing bases. This option would allow some truly epic BvB going on, but of course, since the bases decay after an hour, we won't end up with galaxies that permanently have ridiculous amounts of bases in them.
As I said, still at the brainstorming phase. Please submit any other ideas or possibilities that we should consider.
EDIT:
5) Add a 5 minute per-player cooldown on deploying bases.
Edit2:
6) Add 2 extra base slots for a specific team per bordering owned galaxy. If that team owns multiple bordering galaxies, it gets 2 slots for each.
7) (alternative to 1 and 2) level 0, 3, and 6 base kits all take the same number of slots as the level 9 base kit. So f2p's can still deploy a level 6 base if they only have tech 6 station management.
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