Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Posting navy battleships when I wake up.

Still hoping for any feedback on the numbers in the spreadsheet, or even confirmation anyone has read it.

It's time.

Did anyone else see Hero vs PL in HED-GP? PL brought petes and 5-6 wings of bombers, while hero brough Domis, bombers, ishtars, and a massive ewar fleet. Care to guess how well the domis and ewar fared against the slippery petes?

60 bombers in one system and the battleships can't even shoot back against the tengus. They didn't even bother to bring logi.

OK, so far I've looked at a few fits with amarr ships and it seems like the most important changes that you've made are those to CPU and powergrid.

The apoc gaining CPU pushes it into a range where it's substantially less dependent on faction hardeners for a fleet fit, and could fit a 100mn AB in addition to a MJD using a few faction hardeners on a megapulse setup.

It also puts it pretty close to the territory where you'd be able to do a double plate, double EANM, MWD pulse fit and be able to run a large cap booster, which would be somewhat more suitable for small gang work. You'd have to use meta tackle, and a meta damage control, but it would still be doable, though you really wouldn't have enough CPU to include tracking computers instead of tackle. Alternatively it would be possible to fit sebos and a T2 damage control.

Tach fits would be at the edge of possibility for a few pve fits, but would require substantial fitting rigs, and the cap would be extremely strained if you tried to run anything other than the tachs. Moreover, given the lack of a damage bonus its performance would still be sub-par and it probably wouldn't be worth using.

The baddon gains the most, I feel, from your proposed changes on the amarr hulls. The similar slot layout to the apoc but higher overall fittings would let you fit some edge case tach builds that might be useful in pve, though in pvp, I think that the use of fitting mods and the high cap requirements would deter their use.

Overall the other builds would be similar to the apoc, just slightly easier to fit, allowing a player choose tracking computers and MWDs or MJDs more easily than the apoc, though at the cost of shorter range.

The geddon would be able to fit a full rack of meta 4 neuts, a cap booster and a prop mod without using a fitting mod, which would be nice, and would certainly help in some situations. Other than that, I don't think that it would be changed too heavily.

I noticed that you've made a larger increase to the rokh's EHP than other ships I've seen so far, which is nice, considering that all of the shield ships have anemic EHP relative to armor fleet fits yet still have very high sig rads. Even with the proportionately higher bonus to HP the rokh would still have low HP compared to armor hulls and would be, as it is now, very vulnerable to bombs and blap dreads.

The increased lock range benefits the hull, and with fleet boosts and a sig amp it would be able to project damage out its full 194km optimal range (with spike) and still be able to hit out to nearly 3/4ths of its falloff. Capacitor would likely still be an issue, though with your changes it might be more manageable by pulsing the prop mod when needed, fitting a cap booster would still have a big impact on the ship's tank, though.

For small gang work the changes to CPU open up a few possibilities and reduce the tightness of some active and dual ASB fits, but there isn't going to be a big shift here with the proposed changes. For buffer fits, the CPU and grid aren't very tight to begin with. As for sniping, the alignment speed changes help, but there's a great deal of overlap with the naga, which will still do the job better for cheaper.

The raven's changes won't make it into a fleet ship, the perception that missiles are inferior are going to keep it that way for a long time, IMO, but the across the board buffs would probably make it a bit more viable for small gang and solo activity. RHMLs aren't great, but they can be made to work, and when combined with a few active or dual ASB fist, which would be made more accessable, you might see ravens surviving long enough to reload their launchers.

As far as I've seen, cruise missiles aren't terribly popular in PVP, but in PVE they're about as powerful as any weapon system could be, and one of the limiting factors on hulls that can use them is lock range, so the buff would probably help mission runners and anom farmers a little.

I'm going to reserve comment on the scorpion for later, as I feel it deserves its own separate discussion.

As a general critique of your changes you seem to have identified the problems that most of the hulls face, and have tried to make changes that make sense to bring them in line with smaller competing hulls. I like that you've primarily tried to strengthen them through fitting options, and that you've paid attention in particular to lock range and scan resolution, I've felt for a long time that these attributes play a big factor in the perceived weakness of these hulls.

Scan resolution, I feel, plays too much of a balancing factor between larger hulls and smaller hulls, and should have it's curve flatted across the board. That doesn't mean that big hulls all need to see it increase, just that the ratio between big and small ships should shrink across all subcap hull sizes.

The majority of your changes to most attributes were quite close the the numbers I have come up with myself, and I think I've commented on what I like most in my specific criticisms of individual ships, so here I'll focus on things I would have added or done differently.

I think that the EHP numbers of all battleship hulls should probably be edged up more than you've suggested, instead of the 10-15% range I think we should see closer to 20-30%, with the edge going to shield hulls. Shield hulls should also probably see their signature radius go down a little bit, as with a full buffer tank most of them don't have enough speed to offset the increase in sig rad; not only currently do they have lower EHP than armor hulls, they also end up taking much more damage.

A few things that I saw either small or no changes to that I feel are worth taking a second look:

A few of your tweaks took into consideration the capacitor problems that many hulls face, which I think is something that needs more attention. The capacitor demand of battleship modules scales much faster than does the capacitor regen of the hulls, and even with other buffs across the board it would still be a big limiting factor for the success of some hulls. I would approach it by addressing three things: hull regen, cargo bay, and cap boosters. Most hulls should probably have in the range of the low to mid 30s at peak regen at max skills, while amarr hulls should be a little higher, considering the requirements of their weapons. Battleship sized cap boosters should probably have another size of charge for slightly higher over all boost (something like a 1200) and cargoholds should be increased to accommodate more charges after their increased size is considered. 1000-1100m3 would probably be sufficient.

Along with a higher base EHP, battleships should probably have battleship only plates and extenders, which may in turn require an additional rework of hull powergrid and CPU. The reasoning behind this is that battleships end up taking much more damage, even before force multipliers like webbing lokis or huginns join the field, and though they might have the buffer to catch reps, they still place more emphasis on the collective repping power of the logi on the field. Even if they're called 3200mm plates or some such, they don't need to have twice the HP bonus of the next smaller size, just enough of an edge to keep the overall EHP number of the ships they're fitted to rising consistently.

Along the same vein is the active tanks available to battleships. Active rep power is still low compared to the DPS hulls take, and should probably be increased by about the same proportion that EHP does after everything is considered. Smaller hulls employ a combination of signature, speed, and active tank when they can, but for battleships the only real source of tank is EHP/sec. This would probably require a rework or armor and shield reppers, and a discussion about how ancillary reppers would work at this size on battleship hull. Like battleship sized plates and extenders, reps could be cordoned from the smaller hulls by making their powergrid requirements high enough.

Another consideration is that battleships might benefit from more reserve drone space. As they're less able to scoop sentries, and more dependent on drones for fighting against smaller hulls, it might be worth thinking about increasing drone bays to hold more reserve drones. It's worth noting that with an increased cargohold players might be encouraged to hold a mobile depot more often, and carry reserve drones in their cargohold.

Lastly battleship sized weapons should be re-tuned. I think that without support, a battleships weapons should probably have a slight edge in effective dps over cruiser weapons, but with a longer range threshold. With the correct support from target painters, webs, and transversal manipulation the advantage should increase greatly. My own tinkering has led me to believe that about a 20% increase in damage (probably split between alpha and ROF to prevent alpha climbing too high) and about a 15% increase in tracking will put battleship weapons into a better state of competition with cruisers, while also offering a good enough increase in DPS that battleships might be a valid threat to supers.

A little more to come later, it's time for dinner.

The best explanation of cap recharge I was able to find was here: http://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtopic.php?f=222&t=30652

The gist of the post, if you don't feel like reading everything out there is that CCP hasn't released how cap recharge works, so a couple of people have used numerical analysis to fit a curve and produce a differential equation to try to show how it works.

dC/dt = (SQRT(C/Cmax) - C/Cmax) * 2 * Cmax / tau

...where:
C is your current capacitor level.
t is time.
dC/dt is your current instantaneous capacitor recharge rate.
Cmax is the maximum size of your capacitor.
tau is a time constant. Dust Puppy thinks that tau = "Cap Recharge Time" / 4.8, but I think it's tau = "Cap Recharge Time" / 5.0

Is what I've pulled directly from the post. That's pretty straightforward, according to them peak cap recharge takes place at 25% cap, so if you want peak cap recharge just plug in .25*Cmax for C.

Hes got a spreadsheet there too that I'm sure he'd let you use if you asked. I don't know if he's still around since the post was from 2012.

I'm not on the uni-forums, having never been in uni and having no significant contact with anyone able to get me into the uni-system other than as a student. Could you either mail me with the name of the person who worked that out or mail them asking to contact me?

On to some other things somewhat related

What sort of skills + mods should it take to keep lasers firing indefinitely on Amarr hulls in the minds of our lovely readers? Does this mean the return of the hated Cap usage bonuses as an added bonus, better normal cap stats or tweaks to the modules them selves as your preference.

Does hybrid cap use mean they should have better cap stats than minmatar hulls and non-gun platforms in the racial lineups, or should this usage continue to shape their cap budgets like it currently does with most battleships having almost identical cap statistics?

Now onto the 1M isk questions:
How do we make the scorpion viable without forcing it into an armor tank, gimping the hell out of it's EWAR or making it OP?
It already has the max number of mids possible, and still suffers from so much competition for the mids it has that its insane. Every slot wants about 3 things in it if you try and shield tank it, and 2 things if you armor tank.

Opinions on the relative weighting of the consumables and charging of weapons: Are the 10s reload + ammo equal to small cap use + ammo +5s reload equal to massive cap, unbreakable normal ammo and instant swapping? Which is the worst in terms of logistics support and continually applied DPS as you have flown them?

I think I love your insight and willingness to do the math.

My general thinking on the cap issue is to have gallente and caldari hulls with hybrid bonuses to have about half the cap usage of unbonused neutrons more than the baseline, with gallente selecting slightly for cap capacity and caldari for recharge and amarr hulls with about one third the unbonused cap usage of their weapons over the "base" line, and minmatar ships mostly falling at base line. Ships with bonuses to active tank would also have a slight advantage in cap vs. those without, as these ships would have been built to account for the expected draw of these cap intensive tank systems in any sensible world.

This would be one of the other places I would make a push to diverge the combat and attack battleships, with combat battleships with a max recharge baseline of ~30Gj/s vs around 22GJ/s for the attack battleships, giving combat battleships more cap endurance if going for stable setups, while the lighter and smaller powerplants in attack battleships just wouldn't have the same performance.

I've not flown logi in every possible circumstance, but I have flown enough to say that rokhs and meals are pretty tough to support with subcap logi. They just take so much dps that they just get chewed through unless you've got an oversized logi wing. If you take a few bomb waves its tough to get them back up in time before the next bomb waves. Domis are a little better, but not by much. Napocs are probably the closest to my experience with HACs, as they've got enough of a buffer that they can survive long enough to catch the majority of the logi wing, and have a small enough sig rad that bombs won't mangle them to the extent of the others. TFIs are in between napocs and domis, but I haven't flown with them in a long time.

I think that the biggest difference that I've noticed is that battleships take a LOT more damage than do HACs or t1 cruisers, even when force multipliers are taken off the field. For HACs, a good way of improving the efficiency of your logi is to target huginns and lokis early, and try to identify who, if anyone, is using TPs and primarying them. If people are broadcasting early, only very large gangs or alpha doctrines should be taking out HACs once you clear the field of webs, but this isn't so much the case with battleship hulls, which I still see go down fairly often even when catching reps. I haven't flown with them often, but every time I have, I noticed that this happened to 425 fit megathrons quite a bit. Megas can have a pretty good buffer, and an even resistance profile, but their average resistances are pretty low.

From the perspective of flying a battleship in a fleet, the best application I've had has by far been the dominix. The napoc can get excellent application at near max scorch range if you've got a few webs and TPs on target with scorch, though their range is similar to that of webbing lokis and they're easy to outrange for rail hulls. Other than that it's kind of a wash. Rail and artillery battleships get meh application across a very large range spectrum, megas do a little better than rokhs, but it's nothing like what the domi can achieve.