Conquerable station access shouldn't remain statically unchallenged just because other human players don't want to challenge them. There should also be a mechanic that requires they defend against Hive incursions as well.

Proposal:

After a station has been held for more than 24 hours, a potential for a Hive attack is introduced.

The Hive attack would be characterized by 8 swarm queens and escorts (a la static queens) who attack the turrets / defenses / everything non-hive and continue infesting the sector until they are defeated.

Retaking the station (from oneself) would reset this timer.

+1 Also have them and unrats invade normal stations as well.

-1. Is someone conquers a station and no one cares to take it back, let them keep the station. The stations are entirely player-controlled and should remain so.
Also while I would like the hive and unrat infestations to expand to more systems if unchecked, having them conquer stations is too much. Cuz running stations needs supplies. Then you have unrat/hive convoys and need an unrat/hive standing as well, which doesn't make sense when unrats/hive kill everyone.

Just to be clear (since my title wasn't) -- it's not that I think the Hive should conquer stations (and remove docking privileges), more that it should try to attack the sector and in effect "conquer" the area and not allow trading/hauling traffic.

I'd change the title if I could now... :(

I'd rather see new turret models than this, not to mention the whole turrets dodging energy weapons and zooming off into the sunset could still happen. (That last one probably got fixed but my memory is a bit fuzzy)

Suggestion is allright that said 24 hour is too frequent would make plenty of sense to make it happen on 1:10 at a random time every 24 hours.

Just needs to be one queen and a bunch of prosus bots that said I don't see this being implemented for a long time given how special conq station sectors are.

There should also be a mechanic that requires they defend against Hive incursions as well.

I was actually working on a version of this some time ago, but we had to switch tasks and do other things. I'm not against the fundamental idea, although I wasn't going to trigger anything quite so often.

Cool, less frequent makes sense.