Player Features and Ideas Discussion

This is hardly an original idea and I have brought it up before, but I will write a more detailed proposal than I have made in the past here. I think they are needed to help close the gap between normal carriers and SC's. Additionally, ever since motherships got converted into dps machines, we've lacked a super capital logi ship. I think faction carriers can solve both problems more or less.

These ships would be focused on support rather than dps, just like the regular carriers. They would be available at all relevant faction LP stores. Price would be 5M LP for non-FW corps (2.5M for FW), one normal carrier (proper type obviously) and five admiral tags (or equivalent, the 5M isk npc buy order ones that are only dropped by npc carriers) from the opposing faction. In return you would get a packaged navy carrier, bpc options could also be done but I'm trying to keep it simple. Below are what I think would be appropriate stats for them.

1) Standard faction ship bonus of +50% shield, armor, structure and sensor strength.

2) 10% increase in PG/CPU on navy archon, +25% on the other three carriers (actually the other 3 just need more grid/cpu to begin with, but whatever).

3) 10% increase in capacitor amount, no change in recharge.

4) +1 high slot for 6 total.

5) Ship bonuses changed as follows: RR/cap transfer range bonuses increased to 75% per level from 50% per level (71km max possible range instead of 52.5km), +2 drone control per level from +1 per level. Other bonuses unchanged.

6) Drone bay capacity increased to 100k m3 (20 max fighters, no support drones with such loadout).

No other changes so fuel bay, jump range, ship bay and other such things would remain identical to the plain vanilla versions.

I envision such ships as nothing more than pimped carriers really, something analogous to a navy geddon vs normal geddon. Compared to the current lineup, a typical pantheon fit would be able to field 15 drones instead of the 10 a normal carrier would launch. However SC's would be launching 20, so it's exactly halfway between and no, they wouldn't get FB's. Tank wise they'll be pretty tough but not nearly as tough as SC's (SC's have 9x the base HP as normal carriers).

An added bonus is hopefully sucking up the huge quantities of LP floating around these days. The LP markets have taken a terrible blow since incursions came out and these super expensive LP items should help alleviate that. I used admiral tags for this proposal since I believe they are currently unused by any LP store items. Alternatively nexus chips could be used, but then we'd need a new capital nexus chip and that's just a layer of unnecessary complication.

I was aiming for 5-6B isk territory with it assuming 1000 isk/LP. I think that's a pretty reasonable price on it. Admittedly it would take a fair bit of effort to actually acquire 5M LP, even for lvl5 runners but that's part of the point. We need a major LP sink to help stabilize LP values.

You shouldn't underestimate the amount of LP farming going on out there. Yes 5M LP is a steep requirement that will limit their supply, but I don't think that's a bad thing. It actually isn't all that hard to farm 1M LP in a single weekend if you want to anyways. I've done 1.5M in a weekend on more than a few occasions solo running lvl5's. It wasn't an epic 16 hour run either, more like 2-3 hours of missioning each day.

Anyways, what do you think would be better for the bonuses? The only one that really sticks out to me is the RR/cap xfer range bonus but I did that to try to emphasize the RR role instead of it just being a poor man's SC. As proposed it would have the same RR range of logi cruisers, so it's nothing crazy imho. If I were to drop any bonus off it, it would be the extra fighter per lvl over a normal carrier. But I think it's appropriate to have that tbh since I am going for something between carriers and SC's.

This is the main thing I have issue with, since it turns the carrier into more of a DPS ship instead of a logistics ship. I would rather see something like 10-15% reduced fuel consumption (similar to how pirate POSes require less fuel). But don't give them a DPS boost over regular carriers, lest you obsolete the regular ones too badly.

I don't think the drone change would make them dps ships. Assuming no DCU's (reasonable for pvp carriers), they'd have 1500 dps instead of 1000 dps. That's not really anything all that special. It's higher than most BS's but it isn't that much higher and it's no where near an SC's 8000+ dps.

That said, I don't view it as a critical bonus as I see them primarily as logi ships. But I don't want to scrap that given their high proposed price tag without adding something else. I suppose a reasonable alternative bonus would be a +10% local armor/shield rep bonus per level while in triage. I doubt such a bonus would be very popular but it's the best I can think of at the moment.