Player Features and Ideas Discussion

You do know in real life even with point defences navies mix up the fleets, right?


Since you mention caps....a carrier does not launch all by itself. It has a fleet. Its called defence in layers. Elint ships, picket defence ships, fast moving responders (destroyers and such), backups....the whole 9 yards. Plus the carriers combat and ewar/radar planes. PLus the air force's awacs covering the space (you do know the air force doesn't go should we tell the carrier fleet there are 20 bogeys inbpound on them.....nah, screw em we are air force plus I lost 200 in the last army navy game...let em burn) . If close enough to shore the air forces's ready planes on the deck if needed. PLus subs under the sea. plus some guys in a special room somewhere looking over satellite pictures often. Hell if Marines being transported around it has their assets.

In short that carrier is doing anything BUT....floating alone and solo.

Funny fact is if the day comes the flagship of a navy fleet is attacked and uses its point defence while the gunner on that weapon will be the hero of the day that fleet commander and lots of other officers will have a nice little fact finding/witch hunt session as to how the damn missiles and/or migs (since a common plane amongst non Nato forces....Russians sold a few of them, communism wasn't free either lol) was even able to be a threat to the flagship in the first place. It/they passed a lot of layers of defence to reach the flagship, inquiring minds would like to know why.


In WWII..navies launched in layered fleets too. BS can't inspect and take care of pings too well. Ever seen one of those big boats turn? It takes minutes to do an extreme course change. Put more simply....BS can't handle sub contacts worth a damn.




Also as mentioned this is a game. Noobs fly the small ships. This makes them feel like they are more than just cannon fodder. They may be all the same crew depending....but they can at least be effective cannon fodder lol. Unlike my time in say world of warhammer where in tier 4 pvp which stretched from level 29 to max level at some point me running a melee dps witch elf was going so why am I here as the uber level uber raid gear tank swatted me away. I was just left to picking off easy targets If I could. Then I made the decision to reroll later in the game when I changed to a guild on the order side. On a server with heavy level 40+ population. +1 to the zerg basically as I had no easy targets and was just a number to push objective claiming. Not the most fun I had in that game tbh.

The idea with eve was make it so larger ships aren't the end game and to encourage fleet cooperation. If a battleship can just insta-swat a frigate and everything larger can too without even batting an eyelash then what becomes the point of frigates ? Same goes for cruisers and destroyers, eventually they serve no use and they simply stagnate and die.

Point defense only gives us:
- Laughably broken ship balancing
- Stagnation both in variety and market for most smaller hulls
- Reduced interfleet cooperation requirements
- lack of incentive to fly with others when your large ship starts to do more than it should

I prefer the idea of an EvE where if a battleship gets tackled by a frigate gang unprepared they pay the price for it, or carriers caught ratting by cruiser gangs. Sure they can fight back, sometimes win, but they shouldn't get a free pass to just swat down everything they have a few meters on in size.

In space war, and space relations, it makes sense to have a relative speedcap imposed on your ships.

If you shoot your ship to 10,000 km/s, you lose maneuverability, you expend tons of fuel to stop that ship, etc.

If you limit your relative speed to 500 m/s, you have reaction time for humans to do something in space when docking/undocking or firing weapons, you have much less fuel expended, etc.

It is entirely reasonable that speed limits in space for anything other than highly linear motion would be speedcapped.

How slow do you think space shuttles IRL go in order to pull forward and dock at a space station? That's relative speeds, and they certainly don't fly at 10,000 km/s towards a space station right before reversing thrust and docking.

if you think about it battleships in EVE are going down the same path of battleships in real life, going extinct.

speak about realistic

Ships today don't have big guns at all, there are no battleships in service at the moment I think? And it was back in HMS Dreadnaught days when the shift was made to 'All big guns' with a standardized (eventually Dual Purpose) secondary armament. Carriers made all such ships obsolete (much as in Eve!) and modern fleets are centred around the carrier and the layered defence (above and below the water) thereof. Aircraft and missiles are the weapon of choice for modern fleets.

Something interesting I saw the other day that surprised me was that the original 'battleships' were actually heavily armoured frigates. It took a while for them to grow and that was only because the weapon mounts for the turrets grew.

I would, and will argue the opposite.

- light drones can be killed, just like every other drone ever in the history of eve, this means small ships even solo can kill drones then focus on the big guy who cant hurt them now, like suspect baiting frigates killing mission running battleship all the time or small wings of torpedo bombers killing ratting battleships and carriers. Small ships can, will, and do defeat larger ships with alarming regularity. Why? Because they came prepared, fail to plan = plan to fail.

- Large nuets are powerful, theyre designed to be though, i mean how effective would the bhaalgorn be with small nuets? You cant argue that card really because its doing what its designed to do. Not to mention there are plenty of ways to overcome this issue as is, you could kite the nuet with long range tackle frigates such as the keres or garmur, you could jam the ship, damp the ships range down to less than the nuets range, you could use a cap booster, a vampire, the list goes on. There are and always have been ways to defeat certain modules.

-webs can be kited, jammed off, damped off, or you can overcome most of their effect with a prop mod, if you get scrammed and webbed and your a brawler then you cant complain because you knew what you were getting into, if your a kittng ship well then you need to improve your kitting ability if you got caught by a BS or bigger. if a little guy comes in to help the big guy, well thats not the fault of the large ship in any way

- and yes battleship size+ fleets are powerful, theyre designed to be, if they were wimpy and useless, then as implied, nobody would ever use them. This argument is rapidly turning into a "nerf larger ships because i didnt come prepared to fight them with smaller ships kind of deal.

yeah, that's the entire reason that the Iowa class battleships are kept mothballed but ready to sail at a moments notice, because they're the only American battleships with big guns and heavy armor. The rest are mainly missile launchers, torpedoes, maybe a medium gun or two, and point defense meant to protect against small craft or incoming missiles. For a somewhat hilarious example of how this point defense works in real life, there's a video somewhere of Somali pirates somehow mistaking a Russian warship for a merchant vessel. They opened fire on it with small arms, and the warship literally ripped them apart with a burst from a minigun in response (which they have for exactly such purposes).

Turns out this has happened several times. Here's the Russian one. you get an example of their point defenses around the 50 second mark.

Minigun versus Somali pirates

I'm lol'ing at both Christopher Mabata and 13kr1d1

Battleships are (respectively) stronger AND weaker than you are both making them out to be.


Any single battleship has the potential to kill a few small ships. Provided it is fit for such an encounter.
Saying there is a problem because min/maxed PvE battleships are dying to PvP-focused frigates (in high-sec of all places) is dumb. It's like saying a howitzer should not be vulnerable single soldier.
Also saying that webs, neuts, and drones are not that useful is a bit dense. Unless the frigate knows exactly who and what it is engaging and how it is fit, it can't be prepared for all those things at the same time. Fitting restrictions won't allow for it.

In addition... a fleet of battleships is not "wtfbbqpwnzorsauce." AHAC fleets proved this. As do bomber squads. And while it is rather suicidal, fleets of destroyers or frigates CAN cause some not insignificant damage to battleship fleets. They just have to be willing to die and hop into another ship... and another... and another... to wear down the battleships.
Goonswarm perfected this tactic. And they hold on to their space because of this tactic (along with some impressive diplomacy and rank loyalty).

Just to point out, the 4 American battleships that are left are only museum pieces now, they haven't been used since the early 90s and rarely before that. The ships would take years of work and millions of dollars to get back out to sea at this point, and that isn't counting the fact that they aren't very effective in today's sea conflicts, a modern cruiser would destroy them with very little issue.

On top of that the battleship wasn't very good at it's job when they were in their hayday (WW1 and WW2 for the dreadnaught style, the most commonly thought of battleships) because of the arms race at the time quickly making the advances that were applied to the ships obsolete by the time they were deployed, not to mention the number of time the things sank themselves without ever seeing combat.


As far as EVE goes, a well flown battleship can solo a large number of smaller ships if the pilot can set themselves up to fight that kind of fight. It works best with the missile ships because of the rapid launchers, but a blaster or auto cannon fit ship can be deadly if they have a tracking bonus and they can get webs on target.

Here's a video of a guy taking a Golem out to FW space, and doing very well against a large number of targets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYHdM0sqLDk