With hours of flying around in space comes more EVE related thinking and reading.
I came across this set of graphs via Twitter the other day, which showed Citadel losses by type and system security, based on zKillboard data.
You can see the original’s here:
https://www.adam4eve.eu/stats_citadels_mia.php
Interesting enough, but it got me thinking. One of the key things I dislike about Citadels is the requirement for their defences to be maned. To my mind it is a big backward step from POS, especially for the Solo or Casual player. So I went looking at the data on zKillboard for Citadels and Control Towers. Now this is not scientific – there are obviously kill mails which would be missing, they don’t differentiate between friendly fire and what not, loss values are just approximations, and my maths is not the greatest. With that in mind..
The kill statistics for all Citadels is reported here:
https://zkillboard.com/group/1657/
The Monthly averages since May 2016
Citadels lost – 177
Attributed ISK lost – 731B (Assume Hull Only)
Attributed ISK inflicted – 64B
The kill statistics for the POS group is reported here:
https://zkillboard.com/group/365/
The Monthly averages since May 2016
POS lost – 1,083
Attributed ISK lost – 277B (Assume Tower Only)
Attributed ISK inflicted – 157B
Because the statistics for POS changed noticeably with the arrival of Citadels, I also noted the Monthly averages for all POS in 2015 for comparison.
The Monthly averages for 2105
POS lost – 1,447
Attributed ISK lost – 259B (Assume Tower Only)
Attributed ISK inflicted – 321B
So, even if these statistics are only rough estimations, they do paint a picture. It appears that Citadel losses are on average substantially more costly than POS were each month, while they inflict – both in outright terms, and more so as a percentage of their losses, substantially less ISK damage than POS.
Evehermit 
I’d speculate that the ability of the defender to dictate the time of the initial and followup attacks substantially limits the ability of groups to go after citadels in comparison with poses. I can attack your pos anytime I want, I have to log on in the middle of my day/night to attack your citadel.
To date, CCP has made attacking and defending Citadels community experiences – it takes a team. How they instantiate this is something CCP may want to think about, however. Currently, attackers, being attackers, have all the initiative leaving immobile Citadel defenders absolutely cooked without similarly sized defending team (especially in Hi-Sec with Citadels’ limited offensive options) since Citadels, compared to the mobile ships attacking them just aren’t that terribly powerful (especially in Hi-Sec with Citadels’ limited offensive options). This instantiation leaves out things like reasonably wealthy pigheaded soloish Citadel owners putting up a stout defense because the don’t have (or are unwilling) to assemble the required defending team.
As a reasonably wealthy pigheaded soloish player, Citadels’ current instantiation fails to generate much appeal to me. If CCP could find a way to balance Citadels to enable the asymmetric game play tossing pigheaded soloists and team players onto the same grid, I’d be enthusiastic about participating. As such a Citadel owner, I’d be happy simply giving as good as I got which, in isolation, Citadels currently aren’t able to do (especially in Hi-Sec with Citadels’ limited offensive options). This is a big ask however, since balancing Citadels around my pigheaded solish play style would probably turn them into overpowered monsters when utilized with defending teams.