POS Polishing

The Winter expansion juggernaut of announcements rolls on!

Today we have some news of a revamp to POS's.

If you have to deal with a POS or two then after reading the dev blog you'll be saying stuff like "Holy Crap!" and "OMFG!".

First cab off the rank is the introduction of Fuel Blocks for the four races as seen below.

Jello shots for POS's

Now looking at that image I don't know which Fuel Block is for which race, so spending thirty seconds in The Gimp I came up with this...

Mmmmmm yummy Cherenkov radiation!

Much easier, moving on.

"Setup/Takedown Timers

The current timers for anchoring, onlining, offlining and unanchoring structures are suboptimal from a player-experience perspective, so we optimized them.

Here are some fun changes:
Jump Bridges now take 30 seconds to anchor (but are otherwise unchanged)
Cynosural Generators now take 10 seconds to anchor and unanchor (but are otherwise unchanged)
Cyno Jammers are unchanged
CSAAs and CSMAs now take 30 seconds to anchor, 3 seconds to online/offline and 10 minutes to unanchor
Turrets, launchers, EW batteries and hardeners now take 5 seconds to anchor/unanchor and 120 seconds to online/offline
Every other structure not already mentioned in this list now takes 5 seconds to anchor/unanchor and 3 seconds to online/offline."

One of the biggest pains with a POS is setting it up, changing the setup etc etc, apart from being able to queue the changes (which you cannot currently do and is not planned at this stage) these timing changes will make the process much nicer.

"The CPU and Power load will no longer have any impact on your fuel needs - all towers now need the same amount of fuel, regardless of configuration."

This is also a great help as the POS will use the same amount of fuel whatever is on, pretty much a high security space buff as corps/alliances can just leave the guns online outside of war decs, and then if you attract a war dec you don't have to online anything, another time saver.

The fuel cost to run a POS will be about the same or a bit less than it currently is.  Initially we'll see the typical cost spike as the supply chain gets into gear but later on it'll calm down.

One of the issues at the moment however is the implementation for the more pimped out towers like a Dread Guristas small/medium/large tower.  Previously those types of towers would use less fuel than the T1 options and thus be cheaper to run.  Come the "Winter" expansion (give it a proper name already!) they will not be cheaper to run, but will have a larger fuel bay so you'll be able to fuel them for perhaps 45 days instead of 28 days.

This solution is sub-optimal and needs to be changed, one suggestion is to also increase CPU and power for those sorts of towers.  We'll see what happens.

One item I didn't mention so far is the removal of passwords from jump bridges and relying on standings, a common sense change that was long in coming.

To wrap this up.

This is a positive change, the math is pretty sound though some people on the forum need to double check their figures before rage posting.  I'm concerned about my Dread Guristas tower regarding the fuel cost/usage but considering it's sitting in a hanger at the moment, and has been for a year or more, I can't be too upset.

I'd like to see the Fuel Blocks be a different colour like I illustrated above, this would avoid the situation we had for years with BPO and BPC confusion.

It remains to be seen how the rabble will accept the change but for me it's mostly a good solid move forward.