I’m curious about this as well.
When online raiding, it gets quite a bit tougher to breach when defenders have repair hammers and construction hammers out. They can repair anything you don’t outright destroy and unless you blitz in (which can end in disaster if you don’t know what’s inside) they can simply replace.
We can talk about harvest rates, damage of explosives, health of building pieces, dynamic build damage (and other settings), and all the bits and stuff in-between. But none of that really matters when you’re talking about unmoderated gameplay.
When you play on a private server that does PVP with building damage on, and its a free building server (meaning its not preset arenas, or scenario based bouts). You usually see the rules of no offline raiding, and when raiding, there is no repair or replace for the duration of the raid (with various definitions of what that duration is).
The reason for this is the system is malfed up at its basic level. It can’t be fixed by adjusting numbers. The only thing that accomplishes is shifts the problems elsewhere.
This game is in a weird paradox. Its incredibly easy to level a base. And simultaneously impossible to breach a base when the occupants are online. Thus it requires an indept examination of how these basic systems interact with each other.
Things like repair and replace being blocked when damage has happened in x amount of time. Looking at building pieces on a whole and seeing how we want them used. Like the OP’s idea sucks for the current system as it wouldn’t stop anything. But when applied in a more dynamic way, it can have some merit. Like one of my suggestions in the past was to greatly increase building piece health by a factor of 10-20x. But keeping doors, gates, and hatches around the same. But then requiring a pathway to storage areas that goes through doors, gates, and hatches. Thus encouraging attackers to go for loot and not simply leveling everything. But that suggestion itself requires a look at resources used to build with and resources used to breach as well.
A conversation also needs to happen about cave and pillar bases having natural advantages that get exponentially increased in any system that has any sort of bias towards defenders. A cave base for example can easily take 1/4th the resources needed to secure it as an outside base. A pillar base takes the same resources to build as a regular flat ground base, but the resources to breach it are higher and the complexity of overcoming its defenses is higher.
These are things that can happen, but they do require much of the PVP community to swallow some hard pills in some areas, and it also means changing up how PVEers (to a lesser extent, but still a change) in how their building works in some cases. Though personally from someone who plays both, it wouldn’t affect PVE as negatively if approached from the proper angle. It might even cause more PVErs to try PVP (or go back) then would actually complain (just remember people are going to complain one way or another, even if it doesn’t affect them).
