That's a good point.  We don't really know yet, but might as well offer some ideas on that too.

We can assume there are 3 ways of informing about a SAP activation:  None, Defender-Only, Everyone.

None would truly add spice to the game.  Attackers would have to be on the prowl or lucky, diminishing their resources in efforts to catch people.  Defenders would have to be on their toes in checking their SAPs consistantly.  Overall, people would have to be active constantly, and that's cool.

Defender-Only gives the large advantage to the defender, of course.  This would make it viable for a smaller corporation to hold an outpost longer than a few weeks.  But it would also make it really easy for a large corp to hold what they have, meaning they could hold it with less and use the extra people to move outward.

Everyone knowing at the same time kind of smacks of the current system.  Granted, no one would know until they activate, but the attackers would know exactly where to go, the defenders would know everyones coming, but not when.  This gives an obvious advantage to the attacker, and might be too overpowering right now.  Maybe later it would be cool.

Personally, I vote for the None option.

Hmm.  The problem before was that corporations were holding many terminals because they could effectively defend them.  With this change, corporations will definitely have to take a more active role in holding what they have, and that’s a good thing.   I almost want to say that it’s a realistic representation, but this is, after all, a fictional game.

On the matter of sniping, I think the players themselves will work out the repercussions.  If an entity gains a reputation for sniping, then they better have the resources to defend themselves, else they face destruction from the other players.  In the case that a large corporation decides that sniping is an effective tactic for preventing control of areas of an island, who’s to say that others won’t band together to teach them a lesson.  I look at this as just another mechanism for inducing competitive interactions, and that’s a good thing.

On the subject of alliances, I would say that this new system would discourage alliances that are of the type of mutual defense.  If you, and only you, can truly hold the outpost and maintain a relatively high efficiency (control) level, then forming an alliance for the purposes of defense—any defense—does not benefit both parties and thus no alliance will form.

If we take that idea a bit further, it does insinuate that perhaps you could purchase the services of mercenary groups…but then we are back to the “my corp didn’t technically win the SAP, so my control is lowered anyway”.  Could the player base find a way around this issue?  I believe they very much could, but it would be cumbersome, so why not build a mechanism into this from the start.  Perhaps something that ties in the allowed/disallowed docking list with groups who are allowed to take your SAP (which the game would consider as you having taken it).