Remote cybernetic link
Cost 10 base ability points
Requires 3+ hackers

Sends out an legion wide alert on the top damagers on the base. Number of damagers alerted is = to number of hackers in the legion so if you had 5 hackers it would be top 5, 8 hackers top 8 ect.

Just something that I feel would make base battles more interesting, the ability to retaliate against those who are shooting at your base

And 95% of the time (or more), those top X base hitters would smush your ships into little itty bitty pieces if you so much as think about tossing even a CM or DB at them. There's a reason why stronger legions attack weaker legion bases, they are energy efficient. Generally, the members of that legion are they, themselves, significantly weaker as well. Welcome to Farmville 2 (days).

Not to mention what legion has hackers... let alone 3+... let alone a good enough number of hackers to stop an onslaught of probably 20+ people smashing your base... let alone something which costs 10 ability points.

-1

maybe if it gave your legion an alert from a random planet that each of the top three hitters controls.

definate NO!!!

Remember the "this is your brain on drugs" egg commercial? You're Over-Medium right now...

maybe if it was hackers and zolazin (like lazuli fixer, being a zolazin hacker wouldn't count twice)
I know that personaly It would take more than a couple of high ranks to smash my ship up and most half decent ships can defend while online so I dissagree that legions would just get steamrolled by the attackers as soon as they started to hit back

Yes I suggested 10 ap because look at it this way, you take out of action the top base hitters if you spam their ships with artifacts constantly, drasticaly reducing their attack and can cm them to remove any buffs. You have the alert sent to your entire legion, it isn't to tough to imagine that you could colaberatly try to stop the attacking ships in their tracks.

At the moment base combat is literaly just, Dimensional decoy, Auxilary fortification, Repair, Repair, Repair, Repair. There is no legion wide effort to try to prevent your base from going down. It would add a new dimension to base combat when you have to deal with the attacked legion fighting back, even if only on the top few at the time the alert is sent. The mechanics shouldn't be to hard to implement, just send a legion wide alert on each of the players who are in the top X damage on the base.

I actually really like the concept, but as is, it would be OP for any semi-active legion with enough Hackers.

Even a lot of formidable battle groups have fewer than 10 committed, hard hitters.

• A semi-crunchy "easy" level 6 target is locked by a stronger legion. They have 9 Hackers.
• Base waits for signs of a surge, sends out smoke signals to legion via FB page, asking them to be online
• At surge time, base uses Remote Cybernetic Link to alert top 9 damagers
• The 15 players who are online begin harassing those top 9 players with a stream of CMs and Disarming Bombs, forcing them to waste loads of time caging, rebuffing, etc.
• If any of those top-9 players squish the defending players, so what? They can just repair and begin harassing again. And if they disable them down to 0 disable actions, guess what? The attacking players can't even retaliate when the next wave of arti spam occurs!
• And what about legions full of players who aren't afraid to spend limited artifacts or GP for a race/profession change? Last time we were locked, at least 10 people (conservatively) went Aerlen Fixer. Can you imagine going up against a legion where your top 20-25 hitters are alerted and getting spammed the entire time? This wouldn't just change base combat as we know it... it'd kill it completely, except against the weakest/most inactive legions!

It would change things. For one thing, the price for Disarming Bombs would go way, way up, so traders would looooooove it. Second of all, after time, CMs and DBs would no longer be virtually "unlimited and worthless," and the mid-level and lower legions would start facing shortages. Finally, the largest, smartest battle groups would surely adapt -- perhaps sending in their 2nd-stringers against the base first, in order to have them get alerted, while the bigger hitters wait for the Link.

A few things to consider:

1. Reduce the number of high damagers alerted per Hacker (2:3, 1:2. or even 1:3), and/or cause it to be from a random pool of players (like the top 10 or 20 hitters) rather than top down.
2. Limit the alert time to 10 minutes, tops
3. Give the ability a 60 minute cooldown between uses
4. Make it so that spamming/attacking ships and retaliating ships are removed from each other's logs once the Link Alert dies.
5. (Optional) Defending/Spamming ships have their links broken if disabled while Alert is active.
5. Lower its AP cost to 3

This, if used cleverly, could be fairly effective and spice things up, while not taking heavy hitters out of the fight completely. In theory, you could seriously reduce the damage done to your base for up to 70 minutes of a lock for only 21 AP!

That being said, until Dan fixes the "you can arti spam with 0 disables remaining" issue, I'd have to give a -1 to it (even with the changes I suggested), regardless of how much I like the intent behind it.

+1, that's 10 less AP of repairs we have to go through. It will save a little energy and give some appetizers all at once.

There is a tendency to reject change because it upsets the status quo. My colleague Darth points out you would open yourselves to retaliation on a galactic scale. From the flip side of it, I think alerting the top group would just make things more difficult period from either perspective. You get a bunch of crews to jump a top flight base - when those 5 are alerted now they know several of the legions involved which means they are going to be cm-ing more than just those alerted. Makes difficult bases a bigger pita to take out just as much little bases... and honestly once you hit the 1 million mark its sort of tedious as it is killing a base.

So i'm rejecting it not because its new, but because bases are tough enough as is I think.

I do like the effort to get variety though.

LOL tell ya what - 2 AP - data analysis effect for X amount of loyal hackers. Gives you the damage list for the base excepting the names and legion(s) of the players involved so if you want to get an idea how many involved.

That right there is how you start a war, which I would think is a lot worse than having your base disabled.
A simple way to make base fights tougher would be to add base modules that improve upon the existing abilities.

For example, say the next scruuge thing Base Mod upgrades to:
Scruuge Fortified Bastion 2.0.
Increases Hull by 20% and increases the effectiveness of Emergency Repairs by 1% per fixer, per Module.
So you get both of them, and each fixer suddenly adds 5% to repairing ability instead of 3%.

Or maybe it improves Auxiliary Fortifications, and adds +2% per fixer, per module, for a total of +14% hull per fixer.


Or Chromatic Warp-Space Teleporter.
Increases defense by 9% and increases the effectiveness of Dimensional Decoy by 1% per Aerlen, per Module.
7% per Aerlen, rather than 5%.

Either of these idea would work well in slowing down and potentially stopping attackers, without crippling the game or pissing people off enough to start a war.
Thoughts?

Nothing is stopping you from tapping through the ships on your BT until you find the people hitting your base.
Unless you can't get close to 10k scan but I'm pretty sure that isn't hard these days.