Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Much discussed - without further ado, here is another idea how this effect could be changed to avoid the frustrating (sometimes frustrating for the jammer as well) "all or nothing" mechanic:

Make ECM target not whole ships, but single target locks.

Example:
A Battleship has sensor strength 20 and can lock 8 targets.
Someone applies one ECM with strength 10 -> The Battleship will be able to target only 4 targets from that moment on.
With each cycle of the ECM the 4 "lost slots" are determined randomly.
So if the BS had 3 targets locked, there is a 50% chance for each lock to get lost.

It would still be possible to permajam a target if
a) the jamming strength is bigger than the target's sensor strength (target will lose ALL locks)
b) you apply so many ECMs to a single target that although it could in theory always lock something, the chance is near 100% that in the next split second this specific lock is lost randomly again to an ECM cycle beginning just then.


Option for scripts (similar to other E-War):
a) lower ECM strength, lower cycle time - target will not lose that many locks, but it will change more often which ones. Could be useful to prevent focus fire of DDs
b) higher ECM strength, higher cycle time - may be good vs Logistics as it cripples their ability to switch targets. Note: the status quo should be equal to the version with this script to avoid balance issues with permajamming.

No.

Everyone hates being jammed, but I'm not sure reducing your number of maximum locked targets will matter too much when you only need to shoot at one. Though it could make ECM less viable in small scale PvP while keeping it useful as a fleet asset.

So:

Yes

not an ewar guy but even im gonna have to say no jam means jam no targeted offensive can happen from jammed ship

TBH it's not that there alot of ECM fans out there, it's more the fact that ECM pilots know how hard it can be to jam a ships.

Now i am not saying that ECM could not be revamped in some way, but your suggestion would mean that any ship that is jammed would use one of it's remaining target's to lock the jamming ship and destroy it.


What would be more 'realistic' would be that at extreme range of the ECM that the jamming ship would be the only ship that is completely unlock-able, but it would break all locks and reduce the sensor strength of the jammed ship and therefore increase the lock time of said ship. Conversely though you would have the increase the chance of jamming the target ship the closer you get to optimal range.

This would give small fleets a fighting chance against an ECM fleet, but would mean that if the ECM pilot has the can get in to optimal range would jam out a small fleet.

Remember there are plenty of counters out there that can stop an ECM boat from being that so called 'I WIN' ship.

I think the only problem with ECM at current is that the 20 second cycle time is unfair to battleships who take longer to reacquire a target lock, though it's harder to jam them anyway.

First off, I don't think that this is the way to fix ECM (such that it needs to be fixed, which I am not sure of anyway), however you are incorrect.

I study electronic warfare for a living in RL, and the way that active targeting sensors work usually means that an active jammer against a targeting sensor will prevent a single sensor from being successful.

In real world navies, a single targeting system may be jammed while others may not be jammed. Also in real life, ECM is never an all or nothing thing. It is always some degradation based on some probabilistic function... its just not a simple physical phenomena to understand.

I am for a more graceful application of ECM that more closely resembles the way ECM works in real life, but what the OP has suggested is not any better and in some ways much worse than what we currently have.