Also if station population became a factor for raising these armies it would add a whole new dynamic to the game, and add mechanics necessary for planetary interaction. Station managers in 0.0 would have to seed their stations with settlers and give them time to mature in order for them to be able to recruit armies from the stations. With an over abundance of people in empire space station populations would not be a huge issue, and in some cases pod pilots would be able to recruit from nearby planets.

Army units could be handled similar to Blue prints are now. With the ability to train the unit to make it more effective, or to arm the unit with more advanced technology.

I think that overall station invasions should be much cheaper then traditional planetary bombardments. The scope and size of station invasions should be upped to be a lot larger then squad based combat. If anything squads would be the smallest possible unit of control. Your strategy would revolve more around sending which armies where. Whether they need to take the power structures, docking areas, suppress the local population, eliminate military resistance, or weaken the stations shields in preparation for a traditional military environment.

The possibilities are endless, but they will be very limited as game designers since they will be starting off with programing that is not designed for this type of fighting.

As I posted on the Eve-O forums earlier,

“Let’s say we come to the day where there are 5 million people on the server.

5 million capsuleers

Each inhabited planet in Eve has over 500 million people, and there are over 5,000 solar systems that are inhabited. Let’s go with High capsuleer numbers, to low population. So let’s assume only one planet on each solar system is sparesly populated.

You have then, say five million capsuleers, for a population of 2,500,000,000,000 (that’s 2.5 trillion people inhabiting the eve cluster) - so that would make for 0.00019999999999999998% of the population being capsuleers.

To put this in perspective, the 8,000 isk you started as a newbie was the remainder of a 10,000 isk family fortune inheritance that was enough to put you through school, and get you a basic frigate.

To say that capsuleers are Gods among men would be an understatement. We can buy and sell scores of mercenaries with the equivalent price of two capacitor boosters. Why in the world would we stoop so low to want to carry a gun and go shooting people in the face? The poorest of us can make any station manager tremble in fear of making us unhappy and having to report to his superiors that a capsuleer was unhappy with his service.

Even low-sec stations would consider being visited by a capsuleer enough to kick everyone out of the bar and put more security than God around to make sure that their capsuleer doesn’t get their boots dirty. On the off chance that you decided to tip them 3,000 isk.”

1 million isk would be more than enough to set a “commoner” up for life, ensure that all his debts are paid, make sure he can get a swell pad planetside, servants for three generations, and all his children living comfortably for a couple generations.

With that in mind, why the hell would we, as pod pilots, even bother assaulting a station, when we can just send several hundred mercenary units in for the price of one the “cheap” clones that you speak about.

I think this is part of the reason for the current mechanics of station capture, and one of the biggest barriers to FPS or AvA style combat in eve. Not just the mechanics of “how”, but the justifications of “Why”.

The resources we command, as capsuleers, are so far beyond the understanding of the “common man” - that you could probably recruit several willing armies for the cost of a cruiser.

As such, the idea of the pod pilot as a “grunt” in any capacity in terms of ground-warfare is laughable.

(where some guys pathways get scrambled during a bad resurection and he’s forced to live a ‘normal life’ for the rest of his life… until they manage to undo the mistake and a friend shoots him in the head to ‘force’ him to resurrect.)

Thus, people with pod implants can be brought back if they are killed outside of they’re pod.

It might have some side effects as death in a pod is generally much quicker than if you were to say… bleed to death by the hypothetical teaspoon scenario

How this works exactly I don’t know, but i’ve never seen any writing saying its NOT possible to be resurrected if your not in a pod, and several pieces of official writing say that it is possbible.

On the backstory about PODS it says that the BRAIN FLASHING technology is used in pods (more specificly POD IMPLANTS in conjunction with PODS) because usuage in normal vehicles like cars could cause someone to be flashed TO EARLY when he might not die (but flashing kills the user anyway :S), Or the system could flash him to late causing him to experience his death after the resurrection and thus have a very traumatic experience engraved in his memory.

The reason Pods use the technologie is because if the hull of a pod is breached theres 0% chance the pilot will survive the ordeal, and thus flashing a mind would be perfect at that time. 0% chance of survival, but not yet dead.

I hope that made sense.

Thus, your conclusion that one can only resurrect if one is killed in a pod is false.