Heh - our little roaming fast frig gang got butchered by a goonswarm fleet in A2- last night, and shortly before that we had seen many coalition capitals forming up in Gehi. It certainly was an enormous operation from both sides, and I think CCP dropped the ball by not reinforcing the surrounding systems as well.
I'd caution about your ranting at the player-cap though. There's two sides to this. If they don't cap the system, they get everyone jumping in and the server melts, as in JV1V, and the attackers seem get the priority when logging back in. OTOH, if the system cap is imposed the attackers complain because they are only filling out the few spaces left after the defenders were already in place.
You would propose that CCP kicks everyone out of the system, and load in a set number of attackers and defenders to represent the ratio of the total attacking and defending fleets, if i read you correctly. It's certainly worth discussing. How do they do this, though?
1. Do they get the Fleet commanders to sit down and go "I want him, him, her, him, all these capitals, that wing of battleships and that wing of tacklers"?
2. Do they randomly pull in x number from each side (and just wait for the screams of "omgwtfdevhaxploits!!eleventyone1" when the bob fleet contains all BS and there are a number of BC and cruisers in the coalition fleet)?
3. Do they pick certain ship types only (all the capitals and then the rest of the spots are filled out by bs's for instance)?
4. Do they pick an equal percentage of each ship type (say bob have 40% numbers, then 20% of their allowed members would be capitals, 60% battleships and so on, and the same ratios would hold true for coalition)?
Honest and open question - How would you do it, and how would it not just turn into some massive scale version of the caldari tournament ( :P ) ?
A few days ago a player owned station with a running production job which was so long that there was no doubt what they were trying to build there. A TITAN. The POS itself was owned by Band of Brothers.
It was set to come out of reinforced 20:41 EVE-TIME and both fleets had assembled massive capitalship numbers and support-fleets.
The stage was set, the BoB allied side had most of their numbers already in system when the first waves entered system.
What could only be described as chaos at first was a great deal of lag that was threatening to ruin this battle when over 100 capital ships faced off in an epic battle.
The anti-BoB coalition jumped into the system and started pounding on the POS. It's only mission was to kill the baby infant of a titan being built.
BoB was waiting with an equally sized (if not bigger) fleet of capital ships and support. But a steady stream of coalition ships kept jumping in. Many more unable to jump in to the system caused by apparant lag and jumpqueues.
A battle ensued which was won at the end by the coalition who achieved their goal to bring down the POS of the titan.
The Titan and the material used in construction was blown up. The goal was achieved but in the process 37 capital ships of the coalition went down to massive BoB gunfires. These consisted of 32 dreadnaughts and 5 carriers.
(These numbers are still being updated as of the posting of this article.)
The capital ships were appearently all insured while the BoB titan being built could not have been. (It simply cant be insured while building)
A massive amount support ships also went down in the line of fire. Inside the system and the surrounding.
Each capital ship will yield 100% mineral cost in return for the cost of 500mill and the t1 capital ship setups. It remains to see what the actual figures of losses on each side will land at.