Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The point of fax and their siege mode is to put a limit in the amount of dps a fleet can tank. Being swallowed by overwhelming dps is deliberate. Otherwise you can just scale up infinitely and have unkillable supers again.

If only there was something like that for sub-cap logi.

The way I can imagine a super capital logistics unit is some sort of mobile base.
They can move around like other ships of the same size, or "unpack" themselves and become a small citadel like structure that can be seen on the overview with greatly increased defenses, tethering ability and infinite (?) cargo hold - the stuff that doesn't fit in the cargo hold in ship mode needs to be jettisoned before transforming it back. It takes a minute to unpack the ship to a base and back.
The catch is their abilities to shoot back is limited to a few light fighter squadrons and have no reinforce ability, so they need active protection.
It would be interesting if these could move through wormholes to be unpacked there.

Well perhaps they have a huge enough tank but don't create greater repping power than normal FAX and have greatly reduced repping power on sub caps. So the main use is for repping Super Capitals only. Their main job is to not be alpha'd off the field. Once supers destroy Logi there is nothing that can pin them down anymore because HICs cannot be repped. So supers fly away. The trick would be to make a Super Logistical ship that does have a role to play but not to the point where large numbers make gameplay not worthwhile. You could limit the amount of them that can be flown in a fleet. Either way my point is that in large scale fights FAX get mowed down by large blobs of dreads and or supers. At least of a Super FAX gets primaried it won't die in a fire but may just outlive their tougher Combat variants.

Because a Super Carrier FAX would either be amazingly OP, or a terrible investment of resources. There's not a lot of middle ground here, since it's fairly rare that your actual limiting factor is the number of FAXes you can deploy, it's the survivability of those FAXes that matters. Even if you just gave them the repping power of a FAX and Super Carrier HP that would in and of itself be incredibly OP even if they had to use Triage.

Also it's kind of intentional that the smaller Capitals are the bulk of the ISK losses. They also tend to be the bulk of the ISK fielded in any fight where the results or the ability to evac Super Caps is in any way in doubt. People don't drop large volumes of Supers or Titans if they think they might die.



This is literally what FAXes are. They're limited in their HP, power, ect to prevent them from being overwhelming. If you throw a super-FAX on the table as well then everything else gets bent out of whack because currently Capital Logistics is based around the FAX. Not a FAX++.



Sub-cap Logi don't really have the same issues as Capital Logi because they don't have nearly the HP buffer that a FAX has, so at a certain point they just get alpha'd between reps or even in spite of reps. Especially if you use EWar to negate their speed and sig tank advantage. If you can land clean hits you can nuke most Logi cruiser fits with less than half a dozen arty Battleships. The trick is landing those clean hits.

At which point bringing Logi becomes a highly suspect maneuver because more DPS becomes more useful in many cases, or people will find a way around the cap instability. In either case you've done nothing particular good or fun with the meta.

Before Logi become common most fights were straight up slug fests and numbers won out over basically anything short of gross incompetence.

Anyone remember when spider-tanked BSes first became a thing? Never mind HAC fleets. Those were the days when small groups actually beat big ones, and to this day the only reason a large group loses to a small one is pretty much Logi and how they get used.

I'm really not sure why people feel it would be more fun to have support ships *not* be key to how a fight plays out.

It's not really the same issue though, because you don't need to shoot someone for them to cap out just from using their modules.

Having a ship cap out like this, especially in a short span of time, essentially makes it useless. In a small gang situation the fight will last far longer than your cap, so the benefit of bringing Logi at all becomes minimal.

In a larger fight the fight lasts a long time because you have more ships involved, and because you're basically just waiting for the Logi to cap themselves out quickly they don't scale well, so once again Logi becomes effectively useless compared to simply adding another brick of EHP and guns.

This could be potentially worked around by effectively completely rebalancing rep amounts and basically everything about remote repair, but at that point you're basically completely ripping up everything about remote repair and starting from scratch, and to do it you're likely going to have to make these modules worthless outside of a dedicated hull.

Personally I don't think any of these is really desirable.

As for EWar, it's very powerful as it is. The reason people don't use it is because it's at least somewhat situational, and it's harder to measure the impact of good EWar as opposed to adding more guns or reps, which are easily quantified numerically.

If you actually dig into the mechanics though EWar can be fantastically useful, especially against Logi. Even disregarding ECM throwing a couple of Rapier TPs and Webs onto a Logi ship turns them into a wet paper towel to Battleship guns. The problem is most people don't think in these terms and the skill required by the individual pilots to pull off a strategy like this is fairly high. So it's generally considered better to go with the more reliable, if potentially less effective, Logi+deathball strat.

Nope.

What OP wants is a separate hull in the same class as a Super Carrier but with bonuses focused on remote repair and support, similar to a FAX.

It's still a poor idea, it's just not the poor idea you seem to think it is after reading, I'm guessing, the title and two random sentences out of the first post.