Player Features and Ideas Discussion

As i see it, the current method of waging war is to blob it up... Ultimately 'the guy who has more always wins'. Aside from tidi, there's not a single penalty or consequence for simply blobbing it up with as many people as you want.

This feeds directly into a game mechanic which was planned but not yet implemented: Fleet formations. However, there hasn't been any direct gameplay mechanic attached to it other than 'looking pretty', which is why we don't have them yet.

And this in it's turn feeds into my suggestion: Make weapons dependant on line of sight. If there's something in the way, you should hit that object, not the object you're targetting. This would count for all weapons.

The problem, of course, would be server load, though i believe it should be possible to do this with a simple vector calculation. As the current physics engine uses very simplistic objects anyway this should be all you need to do.

I believe tidi would remain roughly the same in the end, as fleets would, by necessity become smaller and more dispersed as fleet formations and positioning would suddenly become incredibly important. No longer can you just fire through 15 of your buddies and only hit your target. It would reward proper tactics a lot more than is the case now.

Just imagine the possibilities - Smaller ships zipping through enemy lines and causing some friendly fire, using asteroids and POS as terrain obstacles where you can perform a dance of death with an enemy fleet, or just doing the Ender's Game thing to protect larger ships.

That last thing could also mean that, if line of sight is implemented, supercaps can be changed to be less tanky, as there is less need to tank with a proper fleet.

I'm fairly sure everyone can imagine a lot of cool stuff you can do with LoS. The only people who would really lose are the lazy fleets and FC's playing the game half-afk and only following in warp and f1'ing their primary.


As a side effect, this could change doomsday guns aswell - the Amarr one for example dealing damage all along it's path on the grid, instead of just it's target. Titans would be used a lot more simply for that kind of destructive power, it would also force the fleets on the defensive to be very smart about how they approach one...

Line of sight, following the introduction of the ship acceleration-to-warp changes, would be the best thing that could happen to eve. Tactics would suddenly become imperative on the battlefield- you could hide behind pos, asteroids,etc; small ships could be shielded behind larger vessels as they close on the enemy; frigates fighting inside a fleet of larger vessels would become something from a Star Wars fight scene - you would even mix the fleets deliberately to avoid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_6OEjtD5Ps

This, for me, is the Holy Grail.

Of course i was talking about the rank and file fleet members, not the FC's :)

The hisec issue can be circumvented easily by an option for pilots to 'prevent friendly fire', just like the current security options warn you before going into 0.4 or lower and stuff like that. It would be enabled by default for new players, obviously.

Also, as far as UI goes for this: When targetting something and having it selected, you see a line between your ship and the target. When there is clear sight, the line is white, when it is blocked, the line is red. Just throwing this out there.

This would devolve some of the fleet command down to wing commander and even squad commander level, that would have to be a good thing.

For each player the line of sight marker could be left on screen (same as a repair os scram effect is displayed) to allow the pilot the choice to cancel firing if friendlies get in the way. Would mean pilots being more vigilant in fleet ops and actually having more stuff to do.

The "avoid friendly fire" option could have three settings - Avoiding *all* other ships and just avoiding gang/alliance/blue+, and lastly the fully off setting. I think that having to micromanage friendly fire in the way you mention might be too much with everything else that's already going on :)

Have you seen missiles try to avoid stuff? They pass through things all the time still.

Also, it's not "one vector calculation" because you need to perform this vector calculation for every turret and against all objects in the scene.

This would actually make missiles more effective in fleet ops as they can still hit targets without direct line of fire as long as the target is still in range after course deviations (which could just be roughly approximated as a trade of for minimizing server impact)

I don't think the server load aspect is very important because even if it could be done, it shouldn't be done.

The problem is you're thinking in small terms. You are stuck on the idea of 1 ship firing its weapons at 1 other. When fleets are fighting, every ship is firing its weapons. And that means your simple little linear vector operation has to be done for every ship in the scene, and is no longer a linear operation as far as efficiency is concerned. And this is before you even consider shadows.

Nobody is arguing that for N=1 this would be fast, the problem is whenever N > 1.

And if by "more tactical" you mean into a turkey shoot in which you are basically rushing across the no man's land into the next trench, then you are correct. You would be effectively putting everyone against a wall of gunfire and you will see even less diversity in tactics because the kinds of ships that give you tactical options, like frigates, interdictors, and misc support ships, are going to die horribly.

You're just going to see lots and lots of carrier fleets.

Wait a second, this would have to apply to drones too since drones use turrets as well, now all bets are off as server performance goes.

EDIT: And you can't do "the visual" client side so the server does less work! "The visual" will be literally be the same ray of intersection that was found by the server's collision testing code. You have to find that ray if your LoS idea is going to work, so why would you waste even more time by telling the client to recalculate it?

Linear operations like these should be easy to do parallel, so up to a given point it should be doable, especially with tidi involved. Also, i'm fairly sure you don't have to count every single object in the scene as the vector between ship and target is already there, i think you can optimize it to such a point where only objects near that vector have to be calculated.

As for thinking small - I think you are imagining that people still blob up and that is the reason why certain ships may not be usable anymore. However, as you have to spread the fight out they might become even more relevant, depending on positioning - They don't have to be caught in the crossfire if you split the fleet properly, that's where the positioning comes in. Frigates especially could be used to goad fleets into tactically unsound positions if done properly, for example.

Using only carriers would not be very efficient either... And yes, drones are also subject to this for consistency's sake.

With the visual i only meant that for missiles, not turrets. the server could simply calculate a possible path length and have the missile detonate after a set amount of time on the designated target. How it actually gets there visually can be done client side.



How would it not fit in the game? So far i've only heard one non-technical argument against it and that is a highly speculative worst-case scenario - Which interestingly enough results in exactly the same situation we have already. Why would it be frustrating? Right now most fleets just end up in following primaries and pressing F1....