Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Just look at the reason why the currently popular tactic of concentrating everything on a single target (be it for attack or support) would be incredibly stupid in RL.

If in an encounter of, say, 50 tanks vs 50 tanks one side would concentrate their fire while the other side does not, what would be the result? Now 49 completely fine tanks would face 50 damaged ones. Just in case you don´t even know that much: if -in RL- you belong to the latter group this is the moment when you make a "oh shlt"-face. And after very few salvos the damage would be crippling enough to decide the fight, meaning you have still -for example- 45 undamaged tanks left while the opponent that was operating with eve-tactics has lost all 50, 9 to 1 kill-loss ratio what began as an even fight.

However, in eve a ship will perform 100% even if its just 1 EHP away from exploding, meaning damaging a ship won´t do you any good, only sure kills will give you an advantage in fleet or gang fights, which means concentrating everything on one target is actually the most intelligent option for winning the fights.

If you want something more sophisticated tactics, you need damage to affect ships before they are destroyed, so that the side that leaves all the opponents ships unharmed just to kill one single target will put itself at a serious disadvantage. Same with RR, repping only one ship and leaving all the others damaged... not good.

It´s more of a rough idea right now, but generally i would go for the module damage approach to prevent the simple cop-out of active tanking replacing the buffer tank as FOTM. Structure damage would always cause module damage, armor damage with a certain probability (maybe influenced by the amount of armor left) and shield damage... well, maybe shield modules... that could be logically justified and prevent shield-tanking become too advantageous in comparison to armor-tanking. Oh, and as long the structure damage isn´t repaired, every further hit will always cause module damage, since the damaged structure will still receive strain by the hits, even if the damage is absorbed by repaired armor or shields. A ship that became so heavily damaged should require some effort and hull repairers to get it up to 100% efficiency again.

It sure would be still possible to repair all damage -as it should be, but it would require a high degree of effort and coordination, especially when not only one, but ten or fifty ships need attention (and they will need attention, because unlike now they won´t do you nearly as good until they are serviced). And i haven´t even started yet what possible developments in a fleet fight just come into mind, actually -if both sides are competent- such a fight would become quite thrilling and interesting
instead of an exercise of "accountants online".

Lag... well this would certainly be the main problem of the idea, the other stuff can be adressed by proper balancing, but technical limitations aren´t so easy to overcome. But it´s certainly worth to look into whether it´s technically possible to do without creating the lag from hell or not. By now you can´t really say that it would inevitably make the game laggy (because you can´t know how much additional load can be avoided by modifying the existing calculations).

I had this idea in another thread and decided to give it its own topic, first because i´d like to know if it would be possible and then if others might have ideas that improve this suggestion.

TL;DR: you´re too stupid to read more than two sentences, f.u.c.k you.

It's an idea that's been tossed around a bit and does get some warm-ish remarks... though strictly as an idea.

The real question is feasibility (i.e. will the servers hiccup and die if they have to calculate different degrees of effects for ships at different degrees of damage on a "large" scale).

btw... focusing fire IS a viable tactic in RL combat... especially in naval combat where heavily armed and armored ships can take a serious beating before being rendered "incapable" of combat... and even then, it's a good idea to keep firing until said ship is sunk completely so it doesn't get the bright idea of ramming into one of your ships.

I think this is best left to shooters or games where you can kind of 'call your shot'. In EVE you can't manually aim your salvo to cripple a ship deliberately in a certain area. If the day ever came where you could, then ship damage would be something I could support.

WORLD OF TANKZ!

getting damage meaning you have a chance of a module failing or working at reduced efficiency/output for some time seems plausible and adds more realism to the game, which is good. combar gets more chance-based. any way you could influence the effect?

enables and requires new tactics in combat, another layer of micromanagement, makes logistics more important because you cant rely so much on your own modules anymore?

someone ever seen hull reppers in combat? that would be cool too?

in pvp you need to see you have a big buffer to survive some time (hopefully longer than the enemy does), so that sometimes no reppers are fitted (for armor tankers). given those changes were implemented i would estimate the buffer is not anymore as important?

actually i feel the overall ratio of ships possible dps to their EHP should be decreased a bit (meaning globally lowering dps output or increasing basic hitpoints), meaning ships would survive somewhat longer.

sounds all complicated, technically difficult, game-changing. interesting to think about, hard to balance.

The real life tank battle comparison is not really relevant since generally one modern shell striking a modern tank will either destroy or cripple the tank. An air to surface missile or even a Javelin missile striking a modern tank will completely *anhililate* it's target. Same with air to air weapons. This would be like saying a titan fleet should focus fire its doomsdays on one battleship, obviously doesn't happen.

A better analogy would be ww2 naval combat, where planes and ships actually did focus fire when possible. The same holds true in eve, focus fire is not always strictly possible or even desirable, it depends on the situation.

That said I agree that focus fire is a bit more dominant than it should be. Random critical damage on modules might be interesting to think about. Also for large fleets the single point blob is not only visually horrible, its also tactically too monolithic. To resolve the bumping point blob issue fleet warpin layouts could be added so that each squad and wing warps together and lands in prearranged boxes in a grid like fashion. Such a change would not only eliminate bumping on landing (and look a ton better), but it would also spread the massive fleet out more than it is currently, thus ranges would differ to a larger degree over the fleet and would increase the likelihood that a single primary for the whole fleet would be a sub-optimal strategy. This would especially be true with the addition of time dilation.