Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I was looking for a new set of ships for all races.

T1 carry around 30K m3 fully fitted.
Freighters carry at least 720k m3

There should be a new type of ship with a cargo between these two, considering warp time, speed, agility, resistance, etc.

like a T3 industrial ship. with lets say 200K m3 cargo or so.

I strongly support the idea to divide the Industrial tiers to different jobs they have to do. Each of the racial haulers may get more sense and not only cargo capacity rise.
In my humble opinion the racial haulers could be limited to 3 tiers per race. (This might be no problem, if any of the ideas below are used.)

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In the W-ORE thread I gave formed some ideas about. There it was slightly off-topic there.

So I mentioned "faction versions" or new skillable ships instead of additional racial ones.
Skillable means: NPC-faction Frigate IV -> NPC-faction Industrial V -> NPC-faction Capital Industrial
If you early in game decide to take a transportation profession, you can left the racial skills an take the faction skills. But they are handed out from factional NPC-corps to players with good or better standing only.
This means the factional frigate skills are not expensive but not available everywhere. Skill trading becomes more interesting.

It looks a bit like this:
Faction ORE - The Mining Booster
- ORE Indistrial: ore haulers with small common cargo bay and extended ore cargo bay (and others)
- ORE Capital Industrials (entering an Orca becomes easier (same as racial freighter skill status) but using role bonuses becomes a bit harder)

Faction Intaki Syndicate - The Smugglers
- Intaki Syndicate Frigate (fast secure transportation ship, hardened against cargo scanner, low power/CPU, only light weapons are fittable, but it can go faster cloaked by a Tech1-cloaking device -> smuggler frigate with about 500m³ cargo. Tech2 can warp cloaked with CovOps cloaking device and have slightly more healthpoints and speed.)
- Intaki Syndicate Industrial (Tech1 haulers, what can work like blockade runners but with less cargo <2.000m³. Maybe they could replace racial blockade runners. Tech2 have more tank and cargo capacity.)

There's no need for smuggler freighters. It might be hardly difficult to hide a capital ship.

Faction InterBus - The Transporters
- InterBus Frigate (maybe small busses or a relation to racial frigate skill, or extremely fast, small transport ships without rigs and with a low amount of slots, low power and CPU. Or they are the frigates with the biggest cargo <=1.000m³ and slower than typical frigates (220m/s, 5AE/s) but with great capacitor to go more than 100AEs without a stopover. In this case smuggler frigates (read above) may take over a fast transportation.)
- InterBus Industrial/Transportation (These may be "Micro-Freighters". They have no slots to fit anything, have a paper hull but a larger amount of cargo, than racial industrial ships. ~35.000-70.000m³ - no rigs, no slots, only skills to rise the capacity slightly.)

The last one also could be a faction hauler from Iteron Mark V type but available with an earlier skill level. Still without or nearly without slots/rigs.

A deeper view to the made suggestions can be viewed in the thread linked above.

Personally, I do not like the changes Alara proposed. In fact it would be pretty much a serious deterioration for me.

I very much like the versatility and flexibility the current design offers. Mammoth and Sigil for instance can both easily be fit for the proposed role of small, agile and fast transporter. I did some runs on the Jita-Rens route where I had no difficulty in keeping up with T1 frigate flying a properly fit Mammoth.

Why should I give up this flexibility? It would mean, that I have to keep tons of different haulers ready in lots of different places, just to have the right tool available in the right place at the requested time. This doesn't make sense. Hauling would become a lot more tedious than it already is.

Basically the same thing for the orca. I use the versatility of the ship besides mining for a lot of things, using all the different bays more or less equally. I consider this versatility to be a good thing.

And I'd have to be fine with that, since it's a mining support ship in the first place. Don't take me wrong.


I do get the point. Still I do not need hauling on the industrial level to become any more tedious, than it already is. I consider the ability to outfit a simple T1 hauler to efficiently do it's job to be an asset (freighters are a completely different story).


Cargo size usually is not what I look at, when deciding about which hauler to use. Slot layout is way more important. Though admittedly, in this respect the Mammoth is outperforming most of the other ships too. The extreme disparity of industrials between the different races is bad and needs to be adressed.


No. Then it is "have more than one of every type available at all your locations to do your job efficiently". The difference with haulers compared to other assets is, that you tend move around in them. Unless ofc, you're not doing the hauling yourself.

Again. Do not take me wrong. I absolutely support ship roles in general and tiercide is a good thing. I just do not think, that fixed roles fit very well with haulers. But ofc, that's just me.

Since I only live in highsec atm, I might very well decide, to mostly do the job with the armored hauler and go afk. I would never get ganked in that thing, because my hauls wouldn't ever be worth it. Then I would be playingy the game less actively than now. Bad thing in my opinion.

A lot of people will just choose a hauler for a location and keep it at one. Some people will have multiple haulers at their prime shipping centers, but many of us already do.

Also, your armored hauler won't carry nearly as much as the biggest cargo hauler you can fly, so there will be a drawback to using it to protect your cargo.

They won't have streamlined roles, but rather just a bigger variance. You'll be able to fit a tank to the big ones or jack the armored ones up for cargo, and thus adjust your load size vs. tank to your liking.

What about having Haulers designed for specific cargo? I know that personally, on my Mining Alt, that with Caldari Industrial 5, Transport Ships 5, and Mining Barge 3 that unless I want to completely Pimp out a Bustard, I am better of hauling Ore in a Mining Barge.

Now I don't mind that, but previously that was a large part of my mining "gameplay" (fill hull, dock and dump, haul to trade station for sales). The recent changes have made Ore Hold a much better "shipping option" pre-Freighter in most cases. My recommendation is to have some dedicated Haulers for various cargo. A "Ship Hauler" (large Ship Bay, small General Hold), an "Ore Hauler" (large Ore Bay, small General Hold) and a "Stuff Hauler" (current model of Industrials).

i thought it would be most logical to imitate the miner tiericide.


A hauler for dangerous space - most likely smaller and faster with extra warp strength and a small hold rather than heavily tanked. maybe even defences like drones and weapons. perhaps an iteration of this without defences could be the 'noob hauler'. i also like the idea of a hauler that has strong sensors that make it difficult to probe (something i think the skiff could use).

Bonuses: 5% max velocity and 5% reduction is sig radius per level
Role bonus: warp strength 2/3



An afk hauler - relatively tough hull tank and moderate capacity at the expense of speed. (hull HP's because it only takes a few slots to tank so u cant exploit with loads of expanded cargo holds. armour tanks would require so much grid that it could be exploited by over sized propulsions, so no. and shield tanks allow tanking and expanded cargo hold to be fitted simultaneously. plus, amarr haulers that shield tank? with some low slots it is still possible to use a few cargo expanders, but at a cost to hull hp, ur primary form of defence. risk vs reward)

Bonuses: 10% hull HP's and 5% cargo capacity per level
Role Bonus: 30% hull resists (note 72% across the board with DC II. why? cause role bonus gallore. nah this isnt needed but its an idea to focus on hull tanking)



A super hauler - that maximises hauling at the expense of everything else. massive hold, light tank but moderate speed for active hauling. lots of low slots and restricted CPU and Grid.

Bonuses: 10% cargo capacity per level (a double bonus rather than two bonuses)
Role Bonus: -50% speed and hp penalties to fitting cargo expanders.

PI and ship specific haulers sound cool, but what could they do that a super hauler couldnt do in hi-sec? or a fast hauler couldnt do in dangerous space? or an afk hauler couldnt do whilst afk-ing?

edit-

while im here, why not expand and add bonuses. thoughts?

For the record, I agree on ORE Haulers, that character is currently ~6 days from Ore Industrial 5 (when he is not mining he runs a Noctis behind me when I carebear).

Now all that said, while that is a nice boon to ORE trained pilots, I think that there should still be a T1 Indy per Race that is *at least* Ore Hold based, otherwise you are telling someone who wants to follow a freighting path that they need to train two different skills depending on what they are hauling, or worse, that if they want to be effective sub-Cap they need a skill that does not help them when they can afford to make the jump to Freighters and Jump Freighters.

I am going to jump in here for a quick comment on this (that and because this was burred about 15 days old, and some trolls decided to jump into mine (shamelss plug here) regarding industrials. But I will be specific on yours instead of hijacking this thread for my own concepts.

There is a valid issue with having a hauler that can hold 50,000m3 (or a battleship inside its hold). It is mainly linked with wormhole mechanics and how a C1 won't allow a Battleship inside (but would allow this ship with a battleship hull in it). We run into a balancing issue regarding this. The hauling ship itself would have to be set at the mass of a battleship in order to haul with no apparent conflicts with current game mechanics.

There is not enough of a difference between the Hauler and the Armored Transport (as the armored transport can hold more, have a higher ehp). The pricetag is not the best method of creating difference within the ships. The Fast Transport and the Armored Transport would probably be enough, instead of making a 3rd ship that does not quite cut it between the two of those.

As a complete newbie ship... I suppose, but it probably needs more in it to be more viable. What that can be, I do not know.

I considered the mass issues also, which comes again back to wormholes, as these ships would become the new wormhole closers (over a battleship mass, with the potential to fit a mwd on it and have a massive tank. It has to stay small in mass.

This is an oddity I haven't figured out as of yet. It would be a mess to setup restrictions for this ship.