I propose entry permissions for city bastions.

The majority of players live in cities – casual players, hardcore players, and those in between. Most players, whether raiders, nefarious NOX (!!!!) or the evil WP (!!!!), desire to invest in a successful city and they are where most of activity in the server is generated. However, it’s really sad that a conflict over a few saddles can turn two groups against each other and decimate month’s worth of building up wealth and player activity of each other’s cities within hours. Having to break a bastion for every other newfriend house they want to pillage is discouraging, and thus will better preserve cities.

This does NOT include claims or vault bastions. Making entry permissions for vault bastions would change the fundamentals of defense in ways that would make it unimplementable. Entry permissions for claims bastions would restrict the free movement of people throughout the map to the point to where it could get ridiculous and massively abusable.

On the topic of abuse, city bastions with entry permissions could be abused in a couple ways and I wish to address them.

1) City bastions interlaced with vault bastions in the vaults. Solution: don't allow city bastions to be placed within x blocks of vault bastions. EZ PZ. One of the hopes with entry permissions for city bastions is that it encourages oppositing forces to attack the enemy vault rather than their city, although they may want to attack parts of the city that are fueling the war.

2) The placing of city bastions on unprotected settlements to raid them, locking the people out or glitching those who are already within it. Solution 1: Those who are already within the bounds of the city bastion when it was placed can operate within the city bastion field until they leave it. As for the "locked out" thing, this could be a new dynamic for raiders who target unprotected settlements - if you are one of these people who lives off in the wilderness in an unprotected settlement, this will give you more incentive to protect your shit or move to a protected city.

Please raise concerns with my logic and propose solutions. I deleted a similar post before discussion could even start because I looked at my arguments and saw they were majorly flawed.