Blockade = Instadeath

I want to talk about blockade for a second. Why does blowing up a ship without blockade allow for escape pods, while flipping a switch on a capital ship suddenly gives you instant death at your fingertips? There’s no lag, there’s nothing except a random GNI broadcast about 10 minutes later saying the planet was blockaded. The ship doesn’t have to move into a specific position and there’s really nothing at all to counter it. So, as the sub-forum title says, lets brainstorm on it some. Unless I’m the only one that believes it odd to have an instant kill be that easy, in which I’ll just crawl back into my hole if that’s the case.

Just to clarify for you, blockade does allow for escape pods, but not eject or auto-eject. If you are fast, near planet orbit, and/or your attacker is being lazy, you can pod out with relatively little difficulty. If you are in a ship that doesn’t have escape pods, shame on you. Just kidding. I know some people prefer small ships, but I almost never fly anything that doesn’t have escape pods because I’m always super paranoid.

Blockade is pretty overpowered in that sense. I’m not really sure of how to adjust it though.

I have to admit that dying in a blockade is one of the most frustrating ways to die. It takes absolutely no skill to kill someone like this though it does ,admittedly, take a huge amount of patience. There are workarounds. Like Kirash said, escape pods can get through the blockade and hit the surface. Ejection, however, is instant death.

You make an interesting point about the instantaneous blockade switch. Perhaps it’s time to make blockade require a preset amount of time, much like several other time based skills in the game. Realistically it would take time for all the ships to get into the proper position to cover the perimeter of the planet anyway. This would force early use of blockade and generate GNI warnings.

Blockade is powerful, but I think it is an important mechanic of the game. There are already ways around blockade, though they can be extremely risky. I think a time delay on blockade would be a good starting point at trying to nerf the power of blockade without going to the extreme.

Probably an echo about ships moving into blockade position and having it take about as long as a course setting would be a pretty big improvement on the whole instant situation.