Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I'm on the fence about an overall DPS or EHP boost. Something that can help battleships define their specific role would be better as a balance point. Perhaps greatly improved ECCM, not to the point of capitals but somewhere so that a single falcon cannot change the outcome of a 10v10 fight.

I'm not going to lie and say that I haven't entertained discussions about power creep on these forums, but I do agree with your sentiment that the fixation on it is overblown. I'm still not completely sure that power creep as it applies to EVE, at least in every case, is a real phenomenon. Another, probably more useful, way of looking at it is that ships that have been subjected to repeated buffs have instead been made into what they should have been in the first place.

It's useful to look at what's good about the classes that do what they're supposed to do well, and how they fit into CCPs balance progression. I think that right now the state of balance of cruisers and down is overall pretty good. There's a reason to fly most t1 and t2 ships, and most of them have roles that they excel at, even if they're a little bit niche. Of course there are outliers, t3s come to mind as well as the cloaky force recons. Some tactics aren't as strong as others, but I think in time these issues will be evened out.

I think that the issue lies with the perception that power creep is somehow a negative phenomenon and hurts the game over time. I don't think that in the case of EVE that this is really true. As dumb as it seems to write it, and I hate doing this, I think that it comes from games like WoW, where repeated expansions and the need to differentiate the comparative strengths between old and new content, leads to tremendous, exponential stat growth between expansions.

Now, when the discussion turns to the poor performance of battleships, people are reluctant to see changes based on their expectations of what will happen with power creep, and are averse to the kind of numbers that battleships will need to make them competitive with other classes of ships.

Good stuff BTW, glad you posted and I enjoyed reading it.

Bullet dear,
while I do not know about other games, the very same discussion was held a while back in the old forums.

Your observation might be right, though in my case, I have never been active in another forum but EVE. Years back when "the old" cruisers were in dire need of something that would make them worth flying, EVE was infected with rule breaking bots that broke the economy.
Battleships and battlecruiser were not that different from the earlier days. EVE was in a meta and at a breaking point into a wasteland. As far as the forums goes, pilots were talking about powercreep very early on.

While powercreep is not even a bad thing, it was associated with a bitter taste over time. EVE was so very different than it is now and nerfs or buffs came maybe twice a year.

Some of you might remember Apocrypha and the pirate ship balance. The Sansha ships were up to this point the goto pirate-solo-bbq-ftw-pwn-mobiles so to speak.
With Apocrypha they were nerfed and the rest of them buffed in a way that left Sansha ships so far behind that is took them "only" about six years to fix them.
This is where the "bitter taste" comes from, here and even from other games, which I cannot comment on.

EVE didn't have the numbers from today and when TQ was showing about 5000 people online at Europe time zones "prime time" and soloers and small numbers of pirates in lowsec had a blast.
Back then, soloers, videomakers and lowsec pirates that wanted to be in space for longer durations took battleships or battlecruisers into space depending on if they wanted some increased mobility vs firepower and tank.
Smaller ships didn't have much firepower and the number of people you were engaging in where not a large thread to your ship(s), so you could bust a gatecamp in your battleship and tank them all for quite some time.

Battleships, like you said, were not as expensive as today and the income you had was measured in how much level 4 missions you could make.
Another "bitter taste" comes from exactly that, the price. While some currency manipulators will not like what I am about say, the close to 100% mineral increase in a battleship bpo production didn't help battleships and battlecruisers either and that is what the prices are coming from.
Thing is, the increased "price" does not even compare in the slightest to the raw performance in- or decrease as a whole.

While battleships and battlecruisers between themselves can deal with each other, all of the smaller ships were given so much more power that the bigger and less mobile ships can no longer deal with them.

Modules like those asb shield boosters didn't help the game either. What they did is that they allow smaller ships to field battleship-like tanks and left battleships much further behind.

A bit of history of ships - Pre 1950.

Small Craft - PT Boats, and other small fast craft. Typically armed with torpedoes or deck guns, they did far more damage for their size than anything else. Of course a machine gun could take them out of the game. Super fast and hard to hit. Zero armor, and no redundancy. People who crewed these ships were the bravest of the brave.

Submarines - Up until WWII - submarines were surface ships that could hide just below the surface. The advent of the snorkel and better hull design meant that submarines could truly disappear from the battle field until they struck. More ships were killed with the deck guns of the submarines than with torpedoes because they could carry more rounds for the deck guns than they could torpedoes. They forced convoys to exist in WWI and WWII.

Frigates cover a wide range of sizes, from a very small ships to ships of the line. Frigate was one of the most common names applied to ships pre-1900. In the age of sail, almost any size ship could be called a frigate. Frigates have come and gone in the military, Many of today's frigates are larger than light cruisers were in WWII.

Destroyers - small, fast ships, with little or no armor, small crews, and far more weapons then a ship that size should have. Living on a destroyer was horrible, they had a very poor ride at sea, great acceleration, and weapons that could track and down almost any smaller vessel. Cruisers in WWII learned that a couple of destroyers ruin their whole day. They ended up being used to hunt submarines because they were expendable and cheap to build.

Cruisers - The original escort for larger ships, cruisers were the leaders of smaller ships (destroyers), they acted as the "flag" for a group of smaller ships. Cruisers came in light, medium, and heavy. Heavy cruisers mounted 8 inch guns in WWII, and were an equal to almost anything at sea. They tended to be slower than destroyers (and surprisingly most battleships). They were the largest ship that a commander of a fleet could easily write off - sending them into harms way more often than not. Medium cruisers disappeared and heavy cruisers got bigger - not to support more weapons, but to support more command staff and sensors.

Battlecruisers - designed to get around a number of Naval Treaties, the Battlecruiser was neither a battleship nor a cruiser, rather it was a ship designed to bend the rules of the treaties limiting the number and size of battleships. Battle cruisers died the day that the treaties were no longer in effect. While they were still used in WWII, no more were built once war was declared.

Battleships - the queen of the sea, until aircraft carriers came along. Battleships could take the rounds from any other ship at sea, and could one shot kill cruisers and destroyers. Air power relegated them to shore bombardment and the time to build meant that carriers took the docks that battleships used to be built on. In fact several carriers were finished on battleship hulls. Battleships were FAST, Tough and heavily armed. Not only with the main battery, but with large numbers of secondary batteries and anti-aircraft batteries.

If we look at this history then some mapping can be done:

(EVE) = (Naval History)

Bombers = PT Boats or Submarines - there is no T1 equal to these classes of Navy ships...though the Rifter might be considered a PT boat.

Frigates = Frigates

Destroyers = Destoryers

Cruisers = Light and Medium Cruisers

Battle Cruisers = Heavy Cruisers more than Battle Cruisers

Battleships = Battleships

Having served on almost every class of ships listed above in my career, I can tell you that Eve's idea of a battleship does not even begin to match what a real battleship was. There are no secondary batteries to keep small ships and aircraft off the battleship, there in no where near the sustained speed of a battleship, while a frigate or destroyer in the navy could our accelerate a battleship, over a few miles the battleship's higher top speed won out. Battleships are tough, while a destroyer, cruiser, or frigate would be seriously hurt by a cruise missile or a kamikaze, the battleship had no issues continuing to fight.

In short Eve has something today that no real battleship sailor would recognize.

Key characteristics of a naval battleship:
1) High endurance - a fully fueled battleship could sail 1/2 way around the world with the food, crew, ammo, and fuel on board
2) Redundancy - 4 engine rooms, 4 propellers, 2 bridges, 2 combat information centers - in short the ability to take hits
3) Multiple batteries - not just the main guns but secondaries, anti-aircraft and more
4) Top speed - You can water ski behind a battleship at flank speed, without any issues
5) Slow acceleration - something this big and heavy takes time to get up to speed
6) Time consuming and expensive to build - years to build - not the days that it took to knock out a destroyer at the height of WWII
7) Complex to command - so many things going on that it took a real pro to get the most out of the ship
8) Tough, Tough, Tough - There are hundreds of pictures of Kamikaze's hitting battleships and sliding off the side, there are pictures of torpedoes going off next to the hull with no issues. Several of the battleships had dents in the armor from where they were hit during WWII

Maybe it is the Dreads that are really the battleships of EVE, or the Titans, who knows how CCP thinks - but if the battleship is the namesake of history - there is a huge amount of work to do to make it live up to the name.

It is the last bit that really has my attention about the comparison to wet navy ships.

Mostly:
3) Multiple batteries - not just the main guns but secondaries, anti-aircraft and more
7) Complex to command - so many things going on that it took a real pro to get the most out of the ship
8) Tough, Tough, Tough - There are hundreds of pictures of Kamikaze's hitting battleships and sliding off the side, there are pictures of torpedoes going off next to the hull with no issues. Several of the battleships had dents in the armor from where they were hit during WWII

It would be cool, but admittedly hard to balance giving most battleships and the combat battlecruisers secondary batteries. Already pushing the Battleships needing more EHP, and with more native buffer, resists will tend to go up for as given number of slots devoted to tank. Also, the complexity of command would be the low scan resolution in part, as rather than one person running sensors and getting you the information, you may have dozens.

Neat out of the box solutions I wish I could figure out how to balance:
Secondary batteries
Straight up E-war resistance
Nine possible slots (only on the scorpion as things sit)
A decoupling of top speed and warp entrance speed
Multiple effective turrets (A dual heavy electron blaster, or dual 250 rails that really are 2 250mm rails in one high slot, etc,)

Rokh
- switch a lowslot to an extra mid so it has 7 like the raven
-buff cap
-buff shield HP

Abbadon
- drop 2 turrets and launcher
- give it a double damage bonus
- switch a high for a lowslot
- buff cap

Geddon
- lose a high slot
- gain a midslot
- reduce neut range bonus to 5%
-change drone bonuses to 10% damage to Amarr heavy and sentry drones

Yeah, unfortunately, while interesting, the post has no real relevance to the current discussion.

Quite seriously, if you want to give the battleship a role comparable to it's historic naval role, it needs to be at least part capital ship, if not comparable to the dread in overall power.

This assumes, by necessity, that the carriers, supers and titans are all completely off scale to historic naval ship types.

We need a Bismarck type, as the larger example of a Battleship.
Link here

I believe this would be a capital ship whose entire purpose would be to dominate sub caps, rather than deal with anchored POS or outposts. I refer to this as a capital ship due to it's size being comparable to a dread, not because of skill requirements.
The requirements, I believe, would need to be equal to other T2 BS hulls, in that it would likely have self jumping capability along with expanded turret / launcher mounting options.

Quoting an earlier idea for reference:


Long story short, I believe the BS class needs a quality that cannot be duplicated by smaller classes.
Whether it be the ability to effectively mount multiple ranges of weapons, or other details.

And the napoc doctrine took a little bit of a nerf today, not a bad one really, but they didn't need it.

THe dps boost does nto need to threaten smaller ships.

Jsut make it as I said earlier.

Change the guns. Make the current second strongest short range gun be boosted to current strongest short range gun DPS ( example the dual 650mm to the 800mm level). Now boost the previous strongest one (example 800mm) with some 15-20% more dps, and increase the signature of the weapon to 600-700meters. Now they wil be VERY powerful agaisnt capitals and imoblized battleships but very bad against smaller ships.