Most of us are familiar with how bastions work. Many of us coughauroracommonwealth have experienced how out of balance block grief is in the civ world. One guy with a few stacks of obby and iron can cause a medium sized town to quit the game, or cripple a large city for weeks. Bastions are expensive and people often don't budget for them.

Here's the suggestion. Rather than having bastions remove blocks placed in their radius by unauthorized players, have obby be non-placeable by default and require a special block with an area of effect like a bastion to be placed and mature for 1 hr. After an hour, obby structures can be built in it's area of effect. This removes the burden on players to defend against an unbalanced game mechanic and instead puts the burden on griefers who will have to wait for the block to mature before placing obby grief, move the block to a new area, and wait before griefing again. The area of effect should be large enough to allow the construction of bunkers or vaults without too much moving of the placer block. Perhaps these blocks could even be limited to one per player and only affecting that player so that grief could have to target specific infrastructure because the 6 attackers only have one placer block radius each to work with so they are limited in the scope of their grief extending longevity of the server while maintaining some ability for attackers to grief.

The core antagonism mechanic in civ is currently prison pearl and maybe a bit of citadel. If it was all about the blocks, there would be a bunch of plugins and this would be like a game of bacterial cultures spreading across the land based on rules imposed by the plugins. But we're supposed to be playing with more than just blocks and Prison Pearl rightfully keeps the attention on the people.

I'm interested in hearing any objections and also any better ideas that use this as a starting point.