[Cowch]

Ship losses on both sides are indeed what I'm after. I also want to encourage risk taking. So I want to create a system where there is incentive for both sides to accept losses, but some risk of not reaping the rewards. Under the current system, if the defense doesn't win outright, they just run and hide and it's very dull. A kill based xp bonus system that provides resources could create incentive to land and to defend despite losses.

In order to get good battles, it is important that there be an incentive to def yourself, even without help. Although it should always be better to get your allies to def you and force a recall, I want to increase the frequency of battles where both the attacker and defender fight even if there are losses. We should use xp as a better incentive to solo defend at the same time we encourage the solo attack.

That reward of xp is more meaningful if xp is able to be converted into resources. As it is now, xp doesn't really help smaller planets catch up since their value remains crap. Allowing xp to be converted into resources that contribute to value would instantly increase the incentive to defend, and the incentive to land.

One of the things that I like about having xp create a temporary % bonus to your roids is, it retains, but mitigates, the element of risk in taking losses. The attacker can crash some ships for roids and the xp % bonus, and, although you're not guaranteed to regain all the value you lost, it's more likely that you will. If I did the math right, (I probably didn't) losing 100k fleet for 100 roids currently takes about 320 ticks for those roids to pay back the resources - less, depending on government and finance centers. With an xp % bonus, it could be shorter and you would be less averse to landing, so you're likely to take the risk more often, or to land or more losses.

Similarly, if a defender earned the xp bonus, it would create an incentive to take losses. A defender could take losses and earn a % bonus sufficient to recover his own ships and more, provided he doesn't lose more roids before the bonus is finished paying out.

Finally, for this to be fun, the xp bonus needs to be at lease partially based on killing ships, especially for defense since they don't cap roids. The problem is, the current main beneficiaries of xp are cath, and cath doesn't kill much. Ziks don't necessarily kill either, but stealing often already provides its own incentive to stay. So, although using a kill based xp bonus system could make battle more profitable, and therefore more frequent, we need a way to make it work for caths.