Suggested Red Badge Structure
Anti-Orbital Defense Network
Size: 2, Artifact: 3, Research: 2, Invasion Defense: 1200
Cost: 88 Red Badges

Special: has a small (2-4%?) chance to debuff the attack of an enemy ship by 10% after each attack. Stacks. Lasts 30 minutes. Removed with containment cage.

Why? To provide players with some of the same incentive for disabling other ships that they get from NPCing and basing: an opportunity to improve their planets.

For most people, disabling an enemy player is more gratifying than one-shotting a Dark Runner, but from a pragmatic standpoint, NPCs are just a far more energy-efficient method of improving your production. Everybody knows players who essentially stop PVPing after getting their red and yellow modules maxed, players who begrudgingly wade back in to score some badges for scanning, then halc back up the next day. If a decent, repeatable arti structure were available with reds, you know at least a few of these guys would suddenly find disabling others less of a "chore."

"But I spend all my reds scanning for bases!" Choose your friends wisely (i.e. people who will share the burden of base scanning) and behave with just a little more aggression, you'll have reds to spare.

-1 to the use of red badges

IMO any planet structures need to be evenly obtainable by all persons who play this game.

lol

You can always reset!

I could, but then i'd have to quit, starting over from scratch from where i am these days just doesn't work.

You could always have your friends hold all your best planets and do the hyper-AP SSB build that all the cool kids are doing now! Just think of all the fun you could have running the (few) new players in GL out of the game forever in frustration as they pound away at your near-invincible ship in futility!

On a more serious note, I do realize you can only get badges off of 39 other players, many of whom are friends and/or sharing a legion with you, so I can definitely see the lack of appeal for PVP badge items. I don't know whether the best solution is to somehow expand the BT range at ultra-high ranks (rank 1501+? Maybe open up everybody on the rank leaderboard, as Tree suggested?), to tell people "Tough, that's what you get for autoranking too much!" or what, but I am aware of the issue and the annoyance it causes.

Red Badges: 2350
Blue Badges: 254
Yellow Badges: 727

what always amazes me is when folks who intentionally advance themselves out of the range of the game end up being surprised by the negative impacts. i saw the same thing happen with City of Blood, Dream World, Adventure World, Battlestations - all from different dev teams btw. if you get too far from the pack in any online facebook game, you are just asking to be marginalized.

as for the OP's suggestion - sounds interesting ... but a low chance of 10% atk debuff seems underpowered. how about it fires off a CM from your cargo ... can only fire once every 10 minutes ? and costs you a red badge of course

hmm ... maybe the red badge could be transferred to the attacker ?

Firing off a random CM would be pretty hilarious.

The idea behind the stackable debuff was basically to buy the planet owner a little time, since defense is (as has been stated a zillion times) basically worthless. Of course you can probably get around the debuffs with several bio-vaps, so still more of a novelty than practical defensive solution.

And of course, the real idea behind the structure was to create an incentive for disabling other players with a repeatable reward that provides arti at a nice rate (since the primary goal of this game is to grow your arti). So really: CMs, defensive bonus, even research % bonus -- I really don't care what else it does.