Please guys, keep the immature flame wars and trolling to corp dialogue.
This thread is about PBS.

Balf brings up a good point here, we're discussing how the PBS will be implemented, but it maybe we need to take a step back.

Form follows function.

PBS _NEEDS_ a reason to exist first.

Right now we are thinking "Build it and they will come". And that may be true, but will they stay?

The energy credit system is something new. If you needed a player built device to transmit energy, that could only be built on a gamma island, that could be an incentive to build it and protect it.

http://www.hlswilliwaw.com/aleutians/Sh … 3-1945.pdf

To summerize, building an airbase on a remote island in the middle of the ocean. Technically, the reason for building this was to provide a forward base of operations, but the process is something that could be gamified.

Step 1 - Access the Island, some type of event would provide a long-range inter-island teleport, while another event would provide the location where the device would be deployed. The TP would provide a permanent one-way connection to the new island. Any one could access the TP once it was deployed. There would be (4) of these locations on different existing islands.

Step 2 - Build teleporter, once on the Island, there would be no way permanent way to return, although a inter-island TP could be used to get back. A PBS TP, built on beta and requiring a scarab to transport it's pieces (4 or 5 pieces?) that can only be deployed in a certain area that was terraformed. The new TP would then be freely available to use. The Island can support upto (4) TP points, built and/or destroyed, as needed.

Step 3 - Build 'temporary' housing, small outposts that can be built on beta and transported to new island for deployment. These PBS outposts have a large defensive value, allow docking by corp owner only and storage, but no services. This would be considered the 'core', and is destructable, but difficult; also requires terraforming.

Step 4 - Improve island, adding features, services, as determined with more PBS's that must be built on the island using gamma specific materials.

Tl;dr - Make taking and holding a PBS island a process, not a single click.

It was a long post

My 'reason' in the pdf example is as a forward base of operations, which provides a certain amount of stragetic and tactical advantage, but not any type of resource advantage.

What I'm trying to get at, is building something is fairly easy to motivate (for the reasons you have outlined), getting corps to maintain and defend something they have built is far more difficult to balance.

How much 'adversity' will a corporation over come to achieve something, how much will they continue to over come, to keep something?

If PBS was implemented on 1 island, I can see a whole lot of troops rallying to be the 'first' to build one, but after its destroyed, or easily defended and no longer 'new', what's going to keep them there?

Sand boxes are nice, but that doesn't mean there can't be an over-arching goal (technically achievable but realistically unacheivable) do motivate CEO's to build/defend/play in Nia.