I do see alot of people with the opinion that gamma should only support one type of PvP: seige warfare. This is generally serious PvP that recquires a large ammount of upfront time investment (much like building the gamma base). Even an increase in population won't change this. Lets also establish one other fact, gamma removal can be tedious and tiring. Much more so than just sitting in one space shooting something. Factor the lag that would be caused with a large number of players and the current building spam into it and it looks even more ugly.

Even with an increase in population, this type of PvP will still be few and far between and will be long and tedious.

We need something to drive fun PvP whether its on gamma, beta, or wherever because all that is going to happen when "super serious pvp" is all thats happening is people are going to burn out.

Tux: Should gamma only be all out siege warfare? It seems right now its very "all or nothing". You either go full siege or you don't do anything at all. I don't think siege bots would change that.

Should gamma simply be 100% safe carebearing outside the possibility of siege?

If it is, that's fine but  the high rewards of gamma turn into just "ok" rewards as they become a commdity since acquiring them is so safe. Risk vs Reward naturally works itself out when the risk is low regardless of how high the reward is via inflation / market flood.

If gamma is working as intended then we need some sort of conflict driver bringing people out of their fortresses to take risks.

Definitely some valid points.

One thing I might add is obviously those base restrictions won't do much if teraforming is not included in them as far as deploying forces to islands goes. But you also have to be careful with that. If you overnerf teraforming we could potentially lose a big part of its emergent game play element during sieges as well as the ability to literally construct a city.

There should be a balance between complete safety and risk to being attacked even on gammas. We can't go too far in either direction or there will be no mining/industry or there will  be no PvP (when there will be a population).

Correct me if I am wrong / this changed but aren't the best NPC spawns still on beta2? You are spot on about the epriton though.

Which light combat bot is viable for anything an assault can't to better? Or were you talking about light ewar?

I have run in assault bot / light ewar composition squads before with both velocity nexus and ewar nexus setup for stringing out larger bots and ganking them as well as any tackle, it worked quite well. I am not talking about niche setups and compositions though, its generally viability for normal game play being discussed.

Yes, the Troiar mk2 is good for what it does. That doesn't mean that the entire light/assault class of bots is balanced in a sensible way though.

Yep, there must be a way to give these bots some sort of role in fleet fights (and in smaller skirmishes where bigger bots are involved) besides cannon fodder.

Some basic questions:

1. Why don't small bots have a short and long ranged option like their larger counterparts and why are there no small weapons that shoot farther than medium weapons when configured a certain way / with a certain ammo (ie +50% range -50% damage ammo)?
2. Why are there no mechanics allowing for speed or size tanking (evasive mod is not enough) of smaller bots?
3. Why does the basic light combat bot only have 3 slots?
4. Why are lights / assaults barely any faster than mechs (10-15kph in most cases when both LWF fit)
5. Why do Perpetuum's aggression timers favor larger bots catching smaller bots waiting their 5 minute aggression timer after making a kill?

Fair enough Tux, but don't act like there are huge differences outside a couple individual systems

EDIT:

BTW I subbed for 3 months

PvP stopped happening with the drop in population and the start of walls / impenetrable fortresses of doom. Another factor in it was over reliance on vertical progression in terms of bot size, small bots simply have no role or viability in Perpetuum generally speaking (besides some of the mk2 ewar lights and dedicated detector bots). You either go big or go home, and no new group of players is going to go big.

Simply speaking each race has 3 viable bots for PvP (mech, hmech, ewar mech) and the mk2 variants (don't act like these are different bots they are simply vertical progression). There is no possible option for casual PvP for new players to have "fun roams" with any chance of killing anything even before you consider the low population. Obviously all this leads to PvP wise is stagnation and people leaving for greener pastures.

EDIT:

o/ Arga sorry for being a broken record after all these years in perp

Glad you asked that question, let me explain for you

Its a game that Perpetuum is highly derivative of (so much so that you might as well flip that sentence around) that takes even longer to travel from end to end than Perpetuum yet has a 24h cool down on its "spark teleport" because of the absurd amount of power projection it would enable.

Some time in the past AC balanced things around a decent number of people playing the game but come the time of walls/spark teleport/gamma that changed to keep the last remaining players in game.

So yeah, terribly broken mechanic and the only justification for it is basically "game is dead till steam might as well leave it in there so all 10 of us can PvP"

Solution to imbalance:

NERF ERP.

We have already seen what happens when you allow people to do this.