DevBlog #709 — Dominion Sov. Warfare

[Update on Dominion, by way of DevBlog.]

The good (yes, there is some):

It's a well-written one, much more didactic and less confusing than average. In fairness, if it could make sense, despite the material at hand, it would.
Read it, it even has a nice flowchart — Seleene Mark Abathur seems really fond of those.

The bad:

Well, the mechanics are still an open-invite for blobfest, with zero restrictions on the number of factions, ship classes or total head count that can pile up over hard-timed singular hotspots tackled in succession.
Not that I expected it to change for the better, despite well-meaning and cringe-inducing statements like:

"Most importantly, we delayed finalizing this part of the design because we wanted to maximize our interactions with the EVE community. By reading your forum feedback, speaking with the CSM and listening to you at FanFest, it is reasonable to say that this feature of Dominion has had more influence from the players than any other we've done."

I've been there before, so I'll just sum it up:
It is still a death sentence for the small/medium alliances, there's still no potential (even limited) immunity for critical infrastructure like Capital Assembly Arrays on POS (since the removal of Constellation Capital Immunity), and that's just the pure warfare side of things, no going back to the larger territorial dynamics.

The ugly:

Wether CCP is unsure about that bit and puffing smoke to dodge the issue, or they've made a decision and it's just a fumble in the writeup… anyhow, that part is confusing:

Offensive structures (SBUs)
Vulnerability states
SBU(s) are vulnerable while being anchored and onlining.
Once an Outpost and/or Infrastructure Hub is reinforced, the SBU(s) enter a parallel reinforcement cycle. That means that the SBU(s) are invulnerable as long as there are no vulnerable structures in system.

• If the Outpost and Infrastructure Hub are vulnerable, so is the SBU(s). 

• If the Infrastructure Hub is vulnerable and the outpost is not, then the SBU(s) are vulnerable.

• If the Outpost and Infrastructure Hub are vulnerable, so is the SBU(s).

I reckon • 1 and • 3 above are not supposed to read the same, but there's no way to make a safe guess on what line 3 should be. Most likely it should start like this, to cover all three positions:

• If the Outpost is vulnerable and the Infrastructure Hub is not, then the SBU(s) are…
• vulnerable ?
• invulnerable ?

…your guess is as good as mine. Considering the two descriptive sentences before this breakdown are contradicting each other, it could go either way.

No worries,  though: just ram everything in sight with 800 ships and you'll have plenty of time to check during the reinforced timers if the SBUs feel ticklish or not.

Damn, and I almost wrote a real post on Commandeering. Next time, I suppose.