Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Dust 514 and Capital Warfare in EvE Online

First and foremost, the ideal Dust troops for this will be experienced mercenaries, as they are defending/attacking valuable assets, but it's up to the capsuleers' discretion to hire whomever they like, for better or worse. Defence must be A LOT easier than assault

Dust marines would be hired to defend/assault capital ships in the middle of fleet fights, or in a gank on a lone capital somewhere. It has to be easier to defend than to attack, this is debatable as eve is an unforgiving universe, but for now, Dust soldiers attacking should have 5-10 dropsuits with them each time they are dropped in a capital, this will give them a few lives to do some damage, but won't be overkill and allow you to just die and re-spawn reinforcing the attitude that CCP has with EvE and Dust, death matters

A capsuleer would carry a limited number of dust troops (10?) to 0 metres away from the capital at which point they automatically spawn at a location inside the capital, the transport ship would be flimsy in order for external defence being a front line defence for the capital ships being assaulted.

Once on-board the dust soldiers would have until their last dropsuit is destroyed to cause as much damage as possible to the capitals' structure, These include;
The Triage Module on Carriers; which will be able to be overheated with a timer, started by an enemy dust troop, reversible by allied dust troops and can be delayed by the use of nanite repair paste if the module isn't active and none of it's neighbouring modules are overheated.
Drone Bays on Carriers and Supercarriers; if opposing Dust troops deal as much damage as the drones/fighters/fighter-bombers have hitpoints, they are destroyed, but first they must breach access to the drone bay, an explosive that must be equipped to the dropsuits can be used for this, which is consumed upon use, starts a timer which can be stopped by an allied dust troop the charge isn't refunded
Turrets and Launchers on Dreadnoughts; same idea as the triage module, starts an overheat timer reversible and delay-able in the same fashion
The Doomsday Module on Titans. same as mentioned for the dread turrets and triage module, with a longer timer

On top of this, if the attackers gain a foothold in the capital, they can start lowering the resistances of the capitals shields/armour. to gain access to this, Dust troops must breach into an inner area of the capital by shutting off certain shields. Only Dust troops fighting for the owner of the capital itself can pass through these shields normally. To breach the shield, attacking Dust troops would use a 'shield destabilisation matrix' (that can change, made it up the the spot) this would use the same slot as the explosives on the dropsuits. these matrices would be attached to consoles outside the bays themselves and would have to be hacked to stop them functioning, re-enabling the shields

You must breach through 2 stages of shields. The 1st to access the 4 resistance control bays for the shields, each has their own shield that must be breached. The 2nd stage to access the resistance bays for the armour, again each with their own separate shield.

Once a resistance control bays' shields are breached it would be possible to hack the console. This would start slowly reducing the resistance of the affected bay's associated resistance by a static 1% per minute, until the resistance reaches the ships base level for the related resistance or until the hack is stopped by an allied dust troop, at which point the resistances will start increasing back to their original pre-hack values at an increased rate

For defence, I propose a similar module to the clone vat bay, but its only use will be as a spawn point for friendly dust troops. troops will re-spawn as soon as they can, the defending dust troops will also be able to destroy dropsuit capsules belonging to the attackers

Different sized map for each size of capital, I assume this would be obvious.

tl;dr
Dust marines could be hired to defend/assault capital ships in the middle of fleet fights, or in a gank on a lone capital somewhere. A capsuleer would carry a limited number of dust troops until they boarded the capital. Once on-board the dust soldiers would have until their last dropsuit is destroyed to exploit 'weak-points' in the capitals' structure. new module for defence, similar to clone vat bays, only used to spawn dust troops. Different capital size, different sized map. Defence easier than Assault

No.

It's MY cap, if something is going to affect it then I should have a DIRECT ability to counter it. 'lol buy you can hire dust mercs!!1' is not direct.

On top of that, how are some guys in a boarding craft going to get through my shields and armour? Properly set up, a carrier can tank a doomsday, so don't give me any of that 'they can cut through your armour!' nonsense either.

CCP eventually want to link DUST directly to EvE oh and by the way, how do you think dust playees feel right now when they get blapped by destroyers let alone in the future when titans will be able to doomsday them, as I said, it will be up to the ships pilot to responsibly choose the best mercenaries for the job, it's EvE oh and you're in a cap you can afford the protection don't give me any of that bull, and if you want something that can directly counter it, use muninn's they can insta-pop destroyers. reinforcing the idea that external defence is the primary defence against the dust troops



but to give anything a chance to intervene with dust troops being transferred as a destroyer can go quite fast, the destroyer should have a module it needs to activate that makes it immobile and starts dropping the dust troops 1 at a time starting after 15 seconds and dropping 1 every 5 seconds, to the limited maximum number

and to the how do they get in, how about through the drone bay?

I support this idea, looks like a fun thing to do for DUSTies and another way to make supercaps less OP then they are already are being immune to ewar and the like...

Kinda also would like to see a way to actually steal a super cap this way by bassically making the dusties able to Ejec the capsuleer by force out of the ship, and maybe have a friendly capsuleer insert himself into the ship and use it against it's former allies.

well make the capital owners cry as much as we cry with our regular subcaps, no ship should be immune to violence.
as for locking it due to differnt ship, well yeah i geuss, but still capturing the thing would take ATLEAST an hour or more plus quite some dedication from both DUST side and capsuleer side to take the thing.

I wouldn't take the chance and would rather self destruct my ship right at the start (it takes only 2 minutes). I'm pretty certain most capital pilots would do this too if their only other option was to hire DUST players (I am NOT hiring CoD players to protect assets I worked hard to gain... if I'm boarded, my ship is as good as lost).

I also don't think that DUST players would be very enthusiastic to fly on a barge that gets blown up a few seconds after it launches... over and over again... hoping they get lucky (there are already grumblings by some that the long respawn and game entry is a PITA).

It's a bad gameplay idea all around because it it's too easy to make it one sided for one side or the other.

Also...
I am an immortal demi-god whose brain is hooked into every sensor and switch in the ship. If I detect unwanted stowaways in my ship (how'd they get inside anyways? I can tank nuclear warheads and antimatter plasma shells the size of Volkswagon cars with a minimum of 16 meter thick energized armor plating), why would I NOT seal off, cut power to, and depressurize the compromised sections of the ship, open them to space, and vent plasma through them? Sure... I lose some crew... but I have several thousand of them on my battleships (tens of thousands on carriers and larger) and they are all a dime a dozen.

You are missing my point entirely.

If I don't want to be hit by some stupid laser thing, I don't go to the planet. If I don't want to be boarded by a bunch of fourteen year old ADD COD players, I...

Oh. I can't do anything about that. I get hit by them, I lose my full HP capital no matter what I do or don't do. There is absolutely nothing I can do to prevent this.

WHY is that a good thing?

In an ideal world, I would want to be able to pilot my own ship, by standing on a bridge with an NPC crew. And in the event I have Dust stowaways trying to cause havoc, I want to be able to fit up some armor and side arms and show them who rules this flying scrapheap, 1 deck at a time with a PC version of WiS. Naturally, this gameplay should be extended to capsuleers as well. And if Dust ties into Eve, then Eve ties into Dust. So I'd like to be able to take that character down and run around a dust map/installation, causing as much damage as I could without my spaceship, or with it. Whichever pleases me most.

I am not 100% fond of this manifestation and I will probably read it over a few more times and then slowly compile more comments on this OP, but until then, put me down for an uneasy +1.

So during a raging massive battle with tidi doing its best to mess everything up, I'd have to fire up a playstation ( which i would never own, i dispise sony for costing me pieces of hardware with their audio CD malware, and insert endless gripes about sony) and fight twitchy dustbunnies to keep control of my own ship, while firing on primaries on the computer? There would be an end to options to defend yourself by fight or flight, and clever fitting.

What you propose takes control from the eve players and puts it in the hands of FPSers. They're not paying my monthly sub fees, they're not flying well fit ships, in well organized fleets. They're not risking ships "you can afford to lose" that may be replaced by reimbursements, or in most cases, not. They're not really eve players, and should have no part in a fleet battle. Dirt eaters should only have their gaming on planets and leave the internet space ships to internet space ship players. They want to be in the fight? Get an eve character and pay the sub. keep the t-bagging off my ships.

no, you'd have a force of dust troops onboard your cap defending it, besides read what Asuka said, a way to defend from the PC platform. besides in a big fleet fight if you had anyone one your ship, you would ahve a huge force of friendly dust mercs at your disposal, they could all just instantly spawn, kill the attackers, and their Limited CRU, the cycle timers on all the things affecting your ship would be pretty significant, each main shield would have a 10 minute timer, the overheating cycles about 5-10 minutes, the titan dd would be 15 and the explosives cycle for the drone 10 minutes as well if not longer for all of them, thus giving ample time to get your dusties on board to defend, this is assuming you don't neglect the fact that this whole idea will be implemented after dusties can fight in null-sec and have allegiances with null-sec alliances