[Baneblade]

My opinion of space battles is much the same as water based naval suggestions... takes too much from the ground game of planetside... which is the bread and butter of the game. Now don't get me wrong, I'd kill to steer a battleship on the ocean or a battlestar in space, but to me... just doesn't seem like it would be more than JTL was to SWG... a completely different game within the game that has little to no interaction.

Airships are the answer, they both add to and change the dynamics of the main game, and even if every active outfit had an OAC at the same time, those outfits would still have to earn resources to keep them, which means they have to either use it... or participate in the primary game to earn the resources.

Basically, OACs as suggested in this thread would force more conflict, even when there are a few of them already. OAC kills could even provide a discount for operating an OAC for a day or so, to encourage OAC fights to the death.

Not everyone will have them, and even if you don't have them, you can still destroy them.

Even the there-are-too-many-OACs scenario is not all that bad:

Let's say that you have 30 outfits, each has 100 members. 10 per empire. All 30 have OACs and their outfit members spend 100% of their playtime on their OAC. Now you might think this is the ultimate result of OACs, but it isn't sustainable. Your outfit needs resources, so your empire brings the OACs to hunt down enemy OACs, OACs die and they don't just come back. So now you have say... 1500 players with no OACs to play with, so they play the ground game.

This is a constantly rotating circle, they cost a lot to buy, they cost a lot to keep, and they are only truly cost effective when being used as intended: to kill other OACs. If that doesn't keep them in balance, nothing will. Hell the scaling of cost might even promote TKing of OACs.

And when an OAC is not engaging another OAC, there is nothing else for that outfit to do except fight as they did before the OAC. If the OAC gets attacked, everyone spawns back to defend it.

I really don't see any significant downside to OACs, because even if one empire dominates the OAC numbers, they still have to spend resources on keeping them, and lose resources by losing hexes if they underperform on the ground battlefield.

OACs add ownership, a naval aspect, strategic variables, win conditions, a leaderboard over and above the individual player, and a hard earned status symbol. Make no mistake, these are not GGs, not BFRs, and not I Win Buttons.