I was told about this thread, and logged back in to express my delight that UA bombing has been removed from the game.
Good bloody riddance!!!
You really haven't been paying attention have you
If you'd been watching the galnet report on bombed stations you'd have seen the list increase in the last few months from 4-6 up to 30+ - it was out of control.
And why would that be? Well, FD had added bigger CRCR, and then added missions that dropped the availability of MAs from Darnielle's to a less-than-stunning ... one. Yup - one. Basically FDev unbalanced the attacker / attackee balance, and then decided to pull the whole mechanism because.
Not a fan of UA bombing, but even less a fan of this method of fixing it.
Don't forget that there was also a cadre of players who made it their raison d'être to counter UA bombing of small PMFs that didn't have the player size to resolve the problem themselves.
We worked through the starport status list each week to determine which stations could look after themselves (usually PP based groups) and which ones couldn't (smaller PMFs). We then flew quantities of MAs over to reverse the shutdown.
When Frontier released the larger CRracks, I said at the time that UA bombing would explode. Looks like I wasn't that wide of the mark. And then reducing the MA limit from Darnielle's to 1 made it pointless to try and counter UA bombing any more.
So long The MA Team.
My main issue in this thread is the same than the one in PP related thread. People are talking about something they haven't play with, and learn how to use properly in attacking or defensive mode.
Just heard about it on forum but have absolutely no clue about its mechanics.
Since UA bombing has been consigned to history, here's how the UA/MA mechanism worked from my point of view.
I spent a lot of time working out how to counter UA bombing effectively because I found the mechanism so unbalanced in favour of the attacker. The numbers I quote are best guess, but the right general amount.
The usually rule of thumb I used to use was 1 UA per 20,000 population will cause a shutdown. Jaques Station for example was really vulnerable to UA bombing due to the low population in the system. So for a 10M population system, that would be 500 UAs, though that seems unfeasibly high. For a 100,000 population system, I've seen reports that 10 UAs worked, I've seen reports that 20 UAs worked.
Meta-alloys to counter the UA... Once upon a time it was about 20 MAs for each UA. Then roughly 10 MAs, and finally it seems like it was around 5 MAs to 1 UA. There was a rolling one month track of sales of UAs Vs sales of MAs and a ratio balance calculated as part of the BGS tick each day. If no MAs had been sold in the previous month, the UAs would have full negative effect. If even 1 MA was sold each month, the ratio was no longer 1:0 and the negative effect was slightly reduced. If the number of MAs sold matched the number of UAs sold, then the station would suffer a couple of services down but not a full shutdown.
If the MA sales outnumbered UAs by roughly 5:1, the station would stay up.
The nice thing was that it meant you could "preload" MAs in advance of UA bombing and offset the damage before it began.
The month calculation was an ongoing day by day process, but the shutdown/restart happened on the Thursday morning maintenance tick.
