Ships & Modules

This post is meant to introduce a possible new fad in fleet warfare. The potential for this doctrine is there but yet rather unused. If realized now, the chance of future weapon system buffs and adjustments will have less drastic results than what happened with the surfacing of sentry assist doctrines. Sentry doctrines were there and were employed when I started playing in 2008, but only recently their power became common knowledge. The suppression fleet holds a similiar potential.


Suppression fleet means a fleet utilizing split weapon gankboats to spread out damage by categorical target calling.

The basic principle is this: if you have enough dps, splitting it so that the fleet won't waste any time focusing overkill on targets is the most efficient way of using the fleet. Here "enough dps" means fleets numbering in hundreds of pilots. Ships like typhoon get the most out of this.

Picture these three examples:
• A small fleet of alpha ships focuses on one target at a time to kill it. This is focused damage.
• A fleet of 60 dominixes splits sentries to two target callers, because using the focus fire would just be overkill and inefficient (most fcs do not realize this)

• A fleet of 200 gank typhoons uses suppression damage:
FC calls out shiptype and "by name". This means the grunt targets a ship closest to his alphabetical name, by ship type as called by FC. For example, on "celestis by name" i would shoot celestises close to E in alphabet with my 900dps cruise missiles. So would the others. No target calling fuzz, no margin for meaningful error. This is the suppression damage.

On top of the overwhelming suppression damage the fc has sentries to blap weakened targets with.


The suppression damage combined with blapping forces stuff out of field and logistics into breakdown. The more powercreep nullsec sees the more prevalent the suppression fleets will become, because they also hurt capitals and structures. Typhoon with the low sig radius is a quite good candidate to work suppression against capitals and sniper fleets.

The risk we now have is too rushed missile overhaul and similiar changes not taking into account the suppression, or categorical targeting potential. These could spawn a new FOTM that feeds from numbers alone, shifting subcap warfare even further in the favor of blobs.

I think I need to paint my F1 butan red. Maybe that would make a fleet fight like that interesting.

Wholly inefficient outside of theory and weird scenarios.

A typical ship-of-the-line in a fleet has between 120k and 180k EHP in its primary tank layer. If you have your dps ships "free fire" on a called ship type, it will take forever to really pressure enemy Logistics and moreso to remove hostile DPS from the field. During that time, the enemy fleet is focus firing on you and popping a ship every one or two gun cycle. Remember that most fleets rarely have more than 7 or 8 ship types, with a majority of the fleet numbers between 2 types only.

In scenarios where the DPS ships have high volleys like 'nados, maelstroms, etc, smart FCs already call multiple targets at once and/or have their fleet members split their guns in more than one group to bring down primaries faster and reduce overkill.