Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Except who would fly without fuel...?

Not everyone is in a rush all the time. Someone who finds it relaxing (!) to mine ore might not see the need to go extra fast...

If the fuel cost for the fastest warp mode is a sizable portion of the potential profit of the trip you're making, then some people will think twice about using up expensive fuel. If you want to earn ISK, then weighing the time saved vs. the additional cost becomes a potentially interesting and important calculation.

The price point ought to be at a place, where people inclined to PvP (who are probably prepared to lose a certain amount of ISK anyway) or in need of fast but rare change of location are willing to spent the ISK, but people with steady, and somewhat localized routine, like a mission runner, would rather save the ISK.

It's not about warping fast all the time, that should just be painfully expensive.

It's about removing painful long travel times, that are painful long for no or very few important meta-reasons.

It's about corp mates deciding on an activity and possibly rejecting fun stuff (like an incursion 30 jumps away) simply because it's a big hassle getting there, because everyone only has so much time during weekdays... So some people might say, I'm itching for some action, and I've got only 2 or 3 hours tonight, so I want to make my time count. Others might say, I'm hanging out chatting with my buddies, that's what counts; there's no need to spend extra ISK.

Well, it would or lets say it should not merely be a kind of "extra speed taxation"...

Firstly, the fuel would only last so long and it would need resupplies once its used up, resupplies need logistics, which have their limitations. Plus, psychologically certain waiting times are more unnerving than others.

Secondly, certain ships might have particularly large fuel bays, that allow for long distance travel. Others might have small fuel bays, but very reasonable fuel consumption rates. Others ships might only be capable of very modest speed increases. Yet another ship might be able to push its warp speed further than most others, but at tremendous costs.

Honestly, I don't see the big exploit there. Caps already have 75% of a Battleships warp speed. My proposal aims at a relative increase in warp speed by a reasonable percentage yet to be determined. It's NOT a "lets make 20 jumps with a dread in 10s" thingy...
Supercaps can't jump through gates, so you're limited to dreads and carriers, which I believe are quite killable by conventional subcaps.

Even if you could turbo-boost your warp speed by 100% or even 200% (which probably would be waaay overboard anyway) and even if you provided a webber for every cap... You could bring 10 battleships or 100 (!) T3s instead of every dread in terms of fuel costs... A fleet of T3s would be easy twice as fast...

Plus a roaming mega-gang of capitals with a bee-hive of webbers would still need to go around high-sec and would need hours to get to the other end of the galaxy. This in turn would would sure as hell not go unnoticed...

Well, there are two points here:

First, I would be OK with certain PvP tactics needing "warp fuel" per default. As I said, PvPers are used to spending bundles of ISK, so no harm done here. Plus, I could imagine, that i.e. in wormholes with ships invisible to D-scan or stealth bombers or stealthy T3s this would not so much be an issue.

Second, I'm well aware of power projection, but the way I understood it, the key issues are hot drops from far far away and in general the circumvention of gates and bubbles through the whole jump-mechanic. Didn't CCP state, they actually WANTED capitals "to move on foot" instead of a long cyno+jump chain? All that faster warp-speeds do is reduce early warning and reaction times. I'm no expert here, but I would expect, that as long as those stay in the same order of magnitude (say within +/- 50%) things shouldn't change too much, should they?

Again, I'm not talking about enabling a "10 Systems in 60 seconds" raid. I'm talking about alleviating some travel times (not industrials) by a reasonable degree and for a price.

Not exactly.

They wanted to prevent the rapid deployment of forces across the map in general.

Because nothing says "**** you" to a bunch of nobody low-sec pirates like having their frigate fleet hotdropped by a battleship fleet via a Titan bridge.
Or two or three neutral cruisers doing a roam through null-sec and then being greeted by a 100 man fleet composed of people from all over a 30 system region via Jump Bridges... not two minutes after being spotted.

The point was to make travel across large distances VERY painful... forcing players to make more tactical decisions regarding where they live, where they move to, and how big a territory they can claim/control.

You idea undoes some of this by just introducing a "little fee" or "tax"... which is nothing more than an annoyance for someone like me. But very painful for a newbie. Or a player with limited cashflow. Or someone who doesn't understand that performance > efficiency.

Well, admittedly, as far as cap/supercap tactics/firepower/capabilities are concerned, I'm absolutely no expert for sure.

My question here is: The stats on paper say caps have warp speeds somewhere around 1.5 AU/s, which would make their max warp speed about 25% slower than battleships, correct? That is once they are finally aligned and in warp...

If one keeps all the alignment and acceleration stuff same as present and just gives all ships the ability to be somewhat faster, what exactly would be the advantage for capitals? Wouldn't they just suffer the same relative disadvantage to other ship classes as before?

Oh and one more thing, what if one would just exempt capitals from this proposed warp speed changes?

there are already mods to make you go faster the only thing that needs to be added are ones made to make you go slower in warp(not as a penalty)

then we will have all the variable speed we need

Arguably, it is a thin line to walk on. Making fast travel easy (but expensive) all the time is surely not the way to go. But you forget one little detail: The fuel is a commodity taking up space. Ships would have fuel bays with a limited capacity. Therefore it would be easy to restrict the distance/duration when a ship (even fine tuned to ship class or specific ship type) can warp faster. +X% more warp speed all the time might be too much. How about +X% warp speed for Y warps (or even better AU's) with ship class A and fuel type Alpha? For heavier ship class B nerf X and Y accordingly.... For faster high performance Fuel Beta nerf range/fuel consumption to a point where it hurts.

Wanna go really fast in your dread? Sure, just place a hauler with 50,000 m³ of expensive faction/T2/whatever special fuel in every system you go through. That's the kind of balancing I had in mind...

My proposal basically boils down to a mechanic, where there is no sharp distinction between a clone jump (instant travel but can't take anything with you) and travel by ship (travel a looong time, but take as much, as your ship allows), but rather a gradual transition. This would mean, that for a price shuttles could be even more convenient than today but their use cases are fairly limited. Industrial haulers need to be cost effective, going faster is NOT a no brainer for merchants...

Even battleships could go rather fast, but only for couple of systems before they run out of fuel. If there are enough refuelling possibilities along the way, you can restock and keep going, but for large fleets in hostile territory this is not an option. They would need additional dedicated resupply ships following them around. Which creates another interesting choice: Go slow, or take along a very vulnerable supply convoy? Ambushing a resupply convoy and having the other fleet stuck at the low default warp speed might be an all new fun twist...

Hell, you could even make fuel consumption mandatory, enabling ships to get stranded in 0.0 or WH space... Offer free low grade fuel resupply NPCs in high sec/low sec (with a steep waiting for the refuel ship timer, of course...) in order to keep newbies and casual player out of too much trouble.