As many of you may have seen, the elections for the Fourth Council of Stellar Management are currently in the voting stage. For those who are not aware, the CSM is a group of EVE players who are elected by the EVE community to represent their views and raise the issues they and those they represent have.

Every ship needs its niche, a specialized role at which it excels without too much overlap from its closest relatives. With multitasking behemoths like the Capital ships, such balancing becomes a very delicate matter considering the sheer scale of their power.

CCP Chronotis' previous blog on Dominion's new Sovereignty system gave you a broad overview of the available upgrades and the system that enables them.  Today we are going to delve a little deeper into the inner workings of the upgrades of space available to you through the new Infrastructure system in Dominion and the various factors surrounding them.  Let's start with answering a few of the more common concerns that have arisen from your feedback so far.

I thought you were getting rid of ‘Sov levels' but now I see there are five of them?

Think of them less as Sov levels and more as time-based indices.  These are needed in order to preserve the game play centered on your commitment to your space.  Another point to be clear on is that these time indices are applicable only toward Strategic upgrades.  They have no bearing on your Military or Industrial upgrades.

I want to take my enemy's upgrades but I'm forced to destroy the Infrastructure Hub.

So you want to be a pirate, eh? You want to work for those crusty dogs roaming the high seas of nullsec? You want to turn your back on the Empires – or at least get yours at their expense? Say no more! Now's your chance to earn some cred with those scalliwags of space: the NPC pirate factions.

We have two new epic arcs on the way for Dominion, both centered on pirate factions, namely the Guristas and the Angel Cartel.

The Slartibartfast team has been hard at work, both on our tans and on the new In-Game Browser (IGB). This is rather tough, as you might imagine: there's little sunlight in Iceland at this time of year, and the demands of web development are ever-changing.

Of the many changes being introduced in Dominion, there was none more thoroughly subjected to scrutiny than how ownership of star systems will change hands.

While the basic mechanics have remained the same, the actual flow of how conquest works has been under constant revision for weeks.  This speaks highly of the solid work done on the Infrastructure system and how it will allow us to continue improving this aspect of the game in future releases.

To arrive at this point we have walked the design past all of our designers and discussed the various aspects at great length.  Most importantly, we delayed finalizing this part of the design because we wanted to maximize our interactions with the EVE community.

The 3rd Quarterly Economic Newsletter for EVE Online is now available.  This issue has the standard economic indicator of population, ships flown in space, price level reports and market snapshots.  The specific topic this time around is the latest news on "Unholy Rage," the Anti-RMT operation that has been ongoing for several months now. 

The EVE economy is doing well with constant growth throughout 2009.  As we see in this issue, the biggest changes to the economy have come either from operations against Real Money Traders in EVE or due to game design changes.  When large external events like these happen they of course impact relative prices within EVE but the robustness of the market quickly allows prices to reflect these changes or shocks to the market.  This might be a good lesson regarding our real life economies, showing that if we allow markets to adjust without intervention from governments they correct much quicker than when we try to steer prices to the "correct" level - given that the rules of the market are clear and that information flows relatively freely between agents on the market.

There are a lot of people that contribute to the QEN.  The research and statistics team does most of the data mining and data analysis.  The graphics team does the entire layout and provides us with the beautiful EVE pictures that are included in this volume.  In addition, we get input from different units for our special session, this time around from the Law and Order unit within customer support.

This blog will provide an overview and details on two parts of the new sovereignty system in Dominion.  The upgrade system which unlocks resources or the ability to anchor strategic structures and the upkeep system which is the fortnightly bill your corporation will need to pay for each solar system you are managing on behalf of your alliance. 

The Upkeep System

The Upkeep system is the fortnightly (14 days) sovereignty bill each corporation will receive for every solar system they are managing and replaces the role of starbase fuel costs in our new sovereignty system.  The base cost is currently 20 million ISK a day and mirrors the approximate current daily operational fuel cost of five starbases fuel cost.  On top of this base fee is an additional fee for the infrastructure hub and any strategic upgrade (the upgrades which allow you to anchor the current or future sovereignty limited structures).

This boils down to the table below when projecting your future bills:

Current Summary Upkeep Costs per Solar System

These values including the names are very much open to further changes!

When is upkeep paid?

You must pay your first bill whilst the Territorial Claim Unit structure is being brought online.  If the first bill is not paid during this period, the Territorial Claim Unit will not come online.  You will then need to pay for each solar system every 14 days after that which will be listed as the 'sovereignty bill' for each solar system in your corporation wallet.

What happens if we do not pay our sovereignty bills on time?

Your Territorial Claim Unit structure and Infrastructure Hub will go offline and therefore all your upgrades as you will effectively have lost sovereignty.  It should be noted that assembly array jobs will pause, not cancel, if the starbase or capital ship assembly array goes offline now and any sovereignty dependant structures will similarly go offline like cynosural jammers and the like.

A note on the automatic payment of bills improvement! 

Many of you are aware of this addition on Singularity but to draw attention to this enhancement to the rest of you since it is appropriate we mention it whilst talking about bills.  It will be possible with Dominion to have your regular rental bills of various sorts (office rental, alliance maintenance, sovereignty bills, war bills etc) automatically paid if you choose.  This is setup in your corporation wallet > Bills tab.  There you will see two new tabs: Automatically Paid and Automatic Pay Settings.  In the latter tab, you can select which bills you would like to be automatically paid and for all bills which wallet division you would like it paid from. 

Any current or future bills which you have setup to be automatically paid will then appear in the Automatically Paid tab as opposed to the regular Payable tab you are used to.  In there you can see which are queued for payment and opt to manually pay them anyway if you desire. 

The new system will try to pay the bill two days before the due date and then every four hours after this point.  A notification mail will be sent to the accountants in the corp that you do not have the funds available to make payment with each failed payment attempt so that you have a chance to transfer money between divisions for example in time.

Figure 1: Screenshot of the new corporation wallet tabs for autopayment

Upgrading your space!

If you have an infrastructure hub online in your solar system, you have the potential to install new infrastructure upgrades for that system.  The upgrade interface is accessed through the context menu of the infrastructure hub when in range.  There you will see a window detailing all the possible upgrades there are - the ones you have unlocked and can install if you so choose, the upgrades you have already installed and the upgrades you have not unlocked yet.

Installing the upgrades is easy, if it is unlocked, you can install it by being a station manager and dropping the upgrade from your cargo onto the upgrade in the menu as directed.  You will get a classic "are you sure" confirmation and then it will be installed.  If the upgrade is online, then it is providing the appropriate effects.  If the installed upgrade is offline for whatever reason then it will have a red offline indicator.

Figure 2: Screenshot of the Infrastructure Hub Management window showing where you can monitor and install upgrades to your solar system

Three flavours of upgrades!

There are three types of upgrade linked to the index which forms the biggest part of their pre-requisites to unlock them:

 - Strategic - allow the anchoring and onlining of the current and any future sovereignty dependant structures like jump bridges and cyno jammers

 - Military - allow your systems to have additional anomalies and other exploration dungeons within your space such as encounters and complexes and wormholes

 - Industry - allow your systems to have additional hidden asteroid belts and mini-profession sites

The three development indices!

You can see in the sovereignty dashboard and infrastructure hub that the three indices all have five levels.  The pre-requisites to installing any upgrade require that you have some level in one of these indices much like how the skill system works. 

Sovereignty Index

The sovereignty index is one you should all be familiar with which is identical to the current sovereignty level system you have now and is based on days you have held sovereignty for according to the following scheme

Lvl 1 = sov held for 7 days

Lvl 2 = sov held for 21 days

Lvl 3 = sov held for 35 days

Lvl 4 = sov held for 65 days

Lvl 5 = sov held for 100 days

The levels at which each strategic upgrade is unlocked is the same as the current sovereignty level limited structures.

Activity Indexes

The industry and military indices are activity based, where the level you reach and the rate you reach it at are based upon maintaining a certain activity level within your solar system.  It does not matter who performs the activities in your space though we do show in the sovereignty dashboard who the top contributors are.  These index levels are required for the Military and Industrial upgrades so if you are looking to increase the resource levels within your solar system then you need to be performing the related activity to begin with.

If your activity rate decreases or stops then the activity indices may decay to the point where some of your upgrades may go offline as you no longer meet the prerequisite activity level.

The election of the fourth CSM in EVE has drawn to a close, and the application period has now been concluded.

Following are the results from the candidacy application period.

The statistics.

• We received 60 applications.

Now, where did I put that fleet?

One of the features that I am personally most excited about for the upcoming Dominion expansion (well, not counting the new browser, the sovereignty changes, the awesome new graphics...).

Let me try that again: A thing that I'm reasonably excited about is a cute little feature that we call the Fleet Finder.

What's even cooler is that we took the opportunity and worked on the overall fleet UI and some of the basic fleet functionality like the broadcasts.

This is something we've been iterating on for a while and it‘s running on Singularity as we speak.