How do you defend a Gravity Well?
It's a question I've been circling for a while. In previous devlogs I talked about the Major Structure Slot and how every Gravity Well becomes a fortress, a mine, or a factory. But "defense" isn't a structure you build. It's a system. And the interesting part is how the pieces fit together depending on what you chose to build there.
The armament gradient
Structures in The Outer Line sit on a spectrum when it comes to self-defense. At one end, the Military Station. Heavy laser turrets, ion cannons, thick shields. A Military Station III in a Gravity Well is a fortress, genuinely dangerous to assault head-on. It's a structure whose entire identity is fighting. Three tiers of increasing firepower. The enemy needs a real fleet to crack one open.
At the other end, the Mining Station. No weapons at all. Just shields. If a raiding party drops into a Gravity Well with a Mining Station and no fleet defending it, that station is in trouble. This vulnerability is intentional. The Mining Station exists to boost your economy. If you want to keep it, you have to protect it with something else. The Mining Station won't help itself.
The Shipyard sits in between. Light self-defense weapons. Not enough to survive a coordinated assault, but enough to make a pair of raiding frigates think twice. It's a military shipyard, after all. It would be strange if it didn't have at least a turret.
And then there are the smaller structures. Academies, Supply Depots, Listening Posts, Supply Nodes. No weapons, minimal shields. Soft targets. An enemy force that slips past your defenses can burn through them quickly. The Listening Post that was supposed to warn you about incoming threats gets destroyed first, because the attacker knows exactly how valuable early warning is.
This gradient creates a clear picture. Some Gravity Wells can take a punch on their own. Others crumble the moment you look away. Your job is figuring out which ones need help and how much.
Defense Platforms
This is where Defense Platforms come in. They don't occupy the Major Structure slot. You can build them anywhere in a Gravity Well, regardless of what else is there. Two variants: the Sentinel (light) and the Bastion (medium). Each one is roughly equivalent to a ship of that class in terms of firepower and durability, but fixed in place.
That trade-off is important. A Defense Platform doesn't eat Command Points. It doesn't need orders. It doesn't retreat. It sits where you put it and shoots at whatever comes close. But it can't chase a retreating enemy, it can't reinforce another Gravity Well, and if the fight moves somewhere else, it's dead weight anchored to empty space.
I find myself placing them in a few patterns during testing. Around Supply Nodes on exposed asteroids. Along the border of a Gravity Well, where a Jump Drive arrival is most likely. Screening a Mining Station that has no weapons of its own. Sometimes I cluster a few Bastions near a Listening Post on the rim, turning the early warning station into something that can actually slow an attacker down while I scramble a response.
How the pieces fit
A well-defended Gravity Well isn't one structure. It's layers.
Picture a Gravity Well with a Military Station. The station anchors the center with heavy firepower. Defense Platforms guard the Supply Nodes scattered across the asteroid field. A Listening Post at the rim detects Jump Drive signatures from further out, buying extra seconds of warning. Maybe a small garrison of frigates that can intercept before the enemy reaches the station's guns. This Gravity Well is expensive to attack. The enemy has to commit a serious force, and even if they win, they'll take losses.
Now picture a Gravity Well with a Mining Station. The economic engine is humming, Supply Nodes boosted, income flowing. But the Mining Station can't fight. Defense Platforms help - they slow down raiders, force the attacker to deal with them before hitting the Supply Nodes. A Listening Post gives you time to react. But if a real assault fleet jumps in, the platforms buy minutes at best. This Gravity Well needs a fleet to survive. Without one nearby, all that economic infrastructure is a gift wrapped for whoever shows up.
The contrast is intentional. A Military Station Gravity Well is something the enemy respects even when your fleet is elsewhere. A Mining Station Gravity Well is something the enemy targets precisely because your fleet might be elsewhere.
The trap
Here's the thing I keep bumping into during testing. Defense is seductive. Every Gravity Well feels important when you're looking at it. The Supply Nodes here, the Academy there, the Shipyard in the back that's building your next Battlecruiser. You want to protect all of it.
But every Defense Platform costs Supply. Every frigate sitting on guard duty is a frigate that's not at the front. Over-defending is a real problem. I've caught myself in games where I built Defense Platforms everywhere, garrisoned small fleets in three different Gravity Wells, and then realized I didn't have enough ships left to actually attack anything. I was spending resources to protect resources, and the enemy just... built a bigger fleet.
The player who defends everything defends nothing. Or at least, that's the theory. I'm still not sure the cost curve is right. If Defense Platforms are too cheap, the correct play is to spam them everywhere and you never need to make hard choices. If they're too expensive, nobody builds them and every Gravity Well that isn't a Military Station is defenseless. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, where you can afford to defend some positions but not all of them, and the ones you leave exposed are a calculated risk.
I'm still figuring that out. A lot of it will come down to playtesting.
What I'm watching for
The thing I want to see in playtests is the moment where a player looks at their map and decides: this Gravity Well gets Defense Platforms, this one gets a garrison, and this one? This one I'm willing to lose if the enemy comes for it. That decision, accepting that you can't hold everything, is where I think the strategy lives. Whether the current numbers create that moment, I honestly don't know yet. But the framework feels like the right foundation to build on.