Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Over the past few years, drones have replaced most other weapon systems as the primary doctrines used by numerous alliances and coalitions. Ishtars, Dominixes, carriers, and supers are solidly on top, and have been for some time. The most recent attempt to nerf the ishtar, as expected, has fallen short of the mark. My opinion on why drones are so popular, is the lack of available counters against them.

Remote sensor dampeners have been used to great effect against long-range fleets in the past. By limiting engagement range, enemy DPS is reduced significantly while your own closer range dps can be used to slaughter the enemy should they close in. Tracking disruption is used also to great effect against ships relying on gunnery against fast relatively fast targets. Jamming is also effective at reducing enemy DPS in pretty much any situation. The kicker is though, that against drones, all of these possibilities are useless. Assist functionality can be used to counter any or all of these methods, allowing drone ships to counter all current forms of EWAR, even when the ship in question is an Ishtar and not an Aeon.

I suggest the following 2 modules, which can be used to reduce enemy drone control range or bandwidth:

Drone Range Inhibitor: Fittings similar to Remote Sensor Dampeners. Does not use scripts. Reduces enemy drone control range by 15-30% depending on skills/item meta, and subject to stacking penalties.

Drone Control Inhibitor S/M/L: Fittings similar to similar sized MWD with low cap usage, limit 1 active per ship with meta levels increasing range. Reduces enemy bandwidth by 5/10/25 Mbps.

In the interest of also impacting the power of supercaps and producing a larger role for subcaps on the field, I would also suggest allowing the large module to get through super ewar immunity. I would also suggest that all applied modules beyond 20 will reduce a super's bandwidth by 100, due to their very large total bandwidth. In this instance, 1-20 large DCI's would reduce the number of fighter-bombers controlable by 1, 21-25 by 2, 25-30 by 3, and taking 86 battleships to totally eliminate a super's ability to launch fighter-bombers (though honestly at that point, better off picking off the drones than using this ewar -so maybe tinker with these numbers a bit if this suggestion is considered valid).