Aegis Sov: Working As Intended

Our realistic goal for the new Sovereignty system is that a very small group of players in virtually any ship types should be able to completely conquer an undefended system with a few ~10-30 minute sessions spread across a few days.

- CCP Fozzie, 3 March 2015

Yesterday the number of concurrent users peaked at 29,953, the most activity since the 31,462 accounts logged in simultaneously on 7 June. But the increase is not a result of the last major assault on the O-EIMK constellation. Instead, the increase is due to the massive evacuation of the former PAPI forces evacuating from Delve and The Imperium's effort to make the withdrawal as painful as possible.

Within hours of the publication of this article, Imperium forces will destroy the final Test Alliance Please Ignore infrastructure hub in the regions of Delve, Querious, Fountain, and Period Basis. Afterwards, I'm assuming that the Brave Collective systems in Querious are next on the list, although The Initiative. is working hard to clean up Fountain. The five remaining Federation Uprising iHubs in the region are reinforced and could all fall tomorrow.

Status of Querious iHubs, 1730 UTC on 9 August 2021

As I watched The Imperium wipe TEST off the map in such a short period of time, I remembered how in the previous sovereignty system alliances that had totally collapsed still held sov on the map months after a conflict ended. I was sure that one of the design goals was to ensure that didn't happen again. Looking back at the rollout of the current Aegis sovereignty system, a dev blog from 2015 showed my memory is not completely faulty.

Goal #3: Minimize the systemic pressure to bring more people or larger ships than would be required to simply defeat your enemies on the field of battle.

One major flaw of the current Dominion Sovereignty system is that the use of structure hitpoint grinding forces players to use huge numbers of players or colossal capital ships to fight over space, even when they would otherwise prefer to work in smaller units. This also creates an artificial floor on the size of alliances or coalitions that can be successful in Sovereignty.

A new Sovereignty system should not attempt to artificially determine the size of groups that can operate within it, either by forcing larger fleets or by forcing smaller ones. Instead, players should be able to work with numbers of friends that they consider appropriate for the situation.

Rather than trying to enforce some arbitrary limit on how many friends or allies you have, this system is simply designed to give organizations and players more freedom to choose the size of coalition that they prefer.

Bringing more players will always have some value, as it will provide advantages in direct fleet combat with your opponents. But a system that allows small numbers of players to conquer space as quickly as larger numbers ensures that if your fleet has the capability to win the fight, you automatically have enough people to take the Sovereignty objectives.

Goal #4: Drastically reduce the time and effort required to conquer undefended space.

Directly following from the goal above, it’s extremely important that we minimize the total player-hours required to take undefended and/or unoccupied space. The large time investment required to grind structure hitpoints under the current system allows alliances to effectively use fallow space as buffer zones and to wear down the will of an opponent through sheer boredom.

With our new system we intend to reach this goal by tying the defense of Sovereignty directly to the actions of players, through both combat fleets during attacks and active residency gameplay in peacetime. Our realistic goal for the new Sovereignty system is that a very small group of players in virtually any ship types should be able to completely conquer an undefended system with a few ~10-30 minute sessions spread across a few days. On the other hand, evicting an alliance that actively uses and defends their space should be a very difficult task indeed, which leads us to the next goal.

When CCP gets back from its summer vacation, the meetings involving losing coalition leaders like Vily, Gobbins, and progodlegend should prove interesting. Hopefully though, they won't complain about a buggy system. Aegis sov worked as intended.