Player Features and Ideas Discussion

There is current a problem with the balance of caps. Carriers are dirt cheap and are extremely versatile ships (logistics, sub caps fights with sentries, repping, ratting) while dreads are really only good for shooting towers or at best dropping on other caps if you want to lose a ton of ISK. Dreads were suppose to be a good counter for supers and other caps but really when you drop enough to kill a super and the support cap fleet that shows up in minutes you at best break even on isk and likely lose out. It's just not economically viable to do on a regular basis.

The solution is very simple and could easily be introduced in the next patch. Switch mineral requirements between carriers and dreads (as suggested by Elo and agreed upon by several other Null alliance leaders). This would make dreads cost effective enough to use in their intended role as an anti-cap ship and at the same time put some risk in defending everything in null with a ball of carriers. It would actually become viable to drop 20-30 dreads on a carrier swarm that doesn't have support and actually come out on top isk wise. it would also provide a much better counter for supers as people wouldn't be as afraid to commit their dreads to dropping on titans/supers that run without viable support fleets.


Discuss...

Your solution is terrible. Your clear lack of capital warfare knowledge is written all over your post. Learn to fly the the ships and fly them in combat. Once you have done that and understand just how balanced Capital ships are then come back with a real idea.

Post with your main and I would be glad to point out just how terrible this idea is.

Don't you only lose a couple of hundred mil on an insured dread?

Assuming he has a Naglfar, he could very plausibly say "Hey all you noobs, come undock and I'll show you my Big Brown Tower of Power™". Would such a scenario be totally devoid of awesomeness?

Frankly, every capital in the game should have its cost raised by about 50%, and I say that as a capital pilot. Capital proliferation is ridiculous - when corporations drop caps (or supers FFS) to kill a lone battlecruiser, it says a lot about the state of the game.

By the same token, they need to be balanced in relation each other, something which hasn't happened (to my knowledge) since they were introduced. They have been through several OMGWTF nerf passes, and the results are pretty plain, especially with Titans.

What was that? Dropping legions of capitals to fight capitals isnt economically efficient?

No, who'd imagine dropping giant spacedicks to fight an even larger space-wang would wind up not working out too well?

Hint, you dont drop a hundred dreads or so to be "economically efficient", you drop 10 dreads because you really want that capital to die in a fire, you weigh your risks.

In another way, if you enough control of the field to actually WIN the fight, you wouldnt ahve had to drop the dreads in the first place, battleships would have been fine, the fact that a subcapital fleet was on its way sizable enough to incur severe losses on your capital fleet that you RISKED dropping, is justified.

You make a tactical error to ensure a kill, by commiting more to the field than the target was worth, of course youll come out in the negative, you would have been better off disengaging, not bringing out your capitals, and let the opponents capitals live, that way they may not have incurred huge losses, but at least you didnt either.

Im tired so i probably didnt explain **** well, but it basically comes down to, you shouldnt commit caps to a fight unless you know you have otherwise secured the field and at least a justifiable "victory", commiting a large capital fleet without reinforcements to a figth where you are not sure of the enemiy's reinforcements, is a tactical error that should be punished.

[Titans were never meant to be "cost effective", its a huge ****. - CCP Oveur, 2006]

As noted above, a fit dread loss costs around 1.5B out of pocket after insurance.

2.5B for the hull
~500M mods
600M plat insurance

3.6B Cost for a standard Dread

2.1B current platinun insurance payout

I have this sort of feeling that the construction requirements for motherships and titans haven't been reviewed ever. I might be mistaken, of course. The economy now compared to the economy back then are two entirely different things, with minerals (and thus cap parts) being much easier to acquire. I'd be willing to bet that CCP only ever figured there would be five or six titans in the whole game at any given time; that would explain why they had the kinds of powers they did in the beginning. I suspect motherships were intended to be the flagship/centerpiece of the fleet instead, although probably still being reserved only for particularly wealthy corporations/alliances. The fact that individuals can now have their own personal motherships probably says something about super-capitals being too easy to acquire in the modern economy. It's why Motherships have been nerfed to the point of being bigger carriers - and renamed as such - as well as Titans being scaled back to the point where people start comparing them to being bigger dreads. That's a terrible place for these sorts of ships to end up, but a necessary one given how damned many there are.

I'd go further and say that when a lone subcap will be hotdropped as a first response instead of the hotdrop coming after both sides have called reinforcements, the population of carriers and dreads is a bit high as well.

Equalize the cost between dreads and carriers a bit, with the mineral cost for both being higher. For motherships I'm not sure 50% is high enough. Titans should easily cost at least 100% more to manufacture. Once the proliferation is in check and their numbers start to decline, it will be easier to consider the notion of balancing them around each other by intended role instead of balancing them around how many of them there are.

Not that I'm sure anyone at CCP knows what a Titan's or Mothership's role should be.

A capital fleet should be at a distinct disadvantage against an equal size sub-cap fleet. They need to have support to be effective.