Player Features and Ideas Discussion

How about another idea to mining:
Create a whole different second way of dealing with mining by adding those 5 ships:

1. The "Belt Eater"
2. 4 "Towing Cruisers" (one for each race)

It would work as the following:
The Belt Eater has to go into a kind of "siege mode" to mine, has very short range (5k) but mines asteroids almost instantly. It is a capital like rorqual or orca and needs high sp (like exhumers + orca + additional skills). Now there is no point dropping the ship at a belt, mining the few asteroids in range and waiting out the siege timer, thats where the cruisers come in.

The towing cruisers have a special tractor beam that allows to "tow" or move asteroids. Each race has one and it needs a racial cruiser skill, ore industrial and a tractor skill (low sp requirements). Furthermore, it has some combat capability (like a t1 cruiser without combat boni, but a good slot layout). Those cruisers tow the asteroids to the Belt eater to give him something to chew. The racial differences can be in wepons, slot layout and number/range/velocity of the tractors.

Mining would then look like this: Plant the belt eater, have a group of low sp pilots tow the asteroids to it. There are different strategies for the towing, like building a chain and handing the rocks over or just flying all the way (that diverstity could be encouraged by different boni. Higher velocity and range for the chaining, shorter range but more tractors for the flying).

It would make mining a group effort (which is not necessarily the case today) and you only need one high sp char, the others can be combat pilots joining the op. Furthermore, as the cruisers have some inherent combat capability, they could deal with much more constant belt rat activity (some pew pew to not get bored).

In addition, the ability to tow asteroids can be used for additional features like moving an asteroid close to a pos or station, anchoring it there (by installing some equipment to stabilize it) and mounting weapons on it. This of course would mean that you need some rocks in proximity to the location as i dont see ships warping with a tractored asteroid. (could be funny to see mining ships in a combat fleet, destroying the asteroid on which the guns are mounted on to disable the weaponary ^^)

I didnt think that far. This would mean a whole new way of attacking structures too. I was more aiming at the structure of mining fleets and maybe some more belt rats to keep the mining fleets entertained.

The idea of integrating asteroids into base building was just an interesting addition. Making it into a siege weapon at the same time is huge. Altough, i like the idea of using the environment for the advantage not only of defeners but also attackers. This also means bringing Mining and PVP closer together, which is at least interesting.

More possbility of interaction with the environment is a desirable thing in my opinon. Now there are only "places" when you think of asteroid belts. If you can use them for your strategy in combat, be it offense or defense, it lets you see them as strategical ressources.

Thinking this through further, towing ice rocks could allow some unique combat tactics in systems with ice belts, adding more diversity to the strategy. Not every system has ice, so this tactic would not work everywhere. I could imagine igniting the reactive chemicals in the ice could be interesting or maybe some other ideas come up.

But i would also like to hear responses from the people running mining fleets if this could be interesting to the mining profession.

Minor (ish) tweak:

No towing cruisers. They are too restrictive, and thats a whole set of hulls that have one use only. Near pointless. Instead, have a 'towing' tractor beam. You could have restrictions on it so that it can only be used by industrials and/or mining barges, not fussed about that part.

The idea was to use a unbonussed cruiser class ship with a racial cruiser skill (almost everyone has at least one of those skills) and ore industrial (currently only used by the noctis, btw one of the ships with huge tractor boni ), which is easy to train.

I imagined it to be light on the sp of the towing pilots (to get new players and pve/pve players into the op easily) and skill heavy on the belt eater pilot (who needs massive sp in mining stuff).

Making it just another module that can be fit on every hull (not a dedicated one), would make balancing much harder. The reason for cruisers was, that they have the moving speed to tow something (not like a snail like bs) and some tank and weapons to deal with belt rats as a group.

Allowing industrials in general to fit the towing beams should be no problem, they are slow as hell and dont have much slots for them, so i cant see how you could abuse that. Noctis and some BC with 8 high slots are another story

However, that are details. Lets poke CCP with the asteroid towing idea

Mining is already worthless for anyone not in a mining capital ship, as it stands now it's going to be easier to make ISK if someone takes a few days training in PI, finds a quiet system and get to work on building their colonies, than spend several weeks mining high sec asteroids.

I think the problem with high sec mining is simple supply and demand economics, it's easy to get high sec ores and there is plenty of it around but you hardly use it to manufacture anything useful by itself so the prices are going to always stay low until that is fixed. Anything useful requires you to venture into low sec or 0.0 space which means of course you are going to get instantly ganked by people who are brave enough to go after a defenceless mining ship but not brave enough to attack someone who could kill them in return, so that means that the rarer minerals and ores will hardly ever get mined and that in turn means that you won't see the cheap minerals like tritanium getting used very often over all.

It's a nice idea that would make gameplay more interesting, but it wouldn't fix the major problems with mining.

It won't do anything to the price of ore, the person suggesting this is talking bollocks as are most of the ones who claim so whenever new mining ideas are put forward.

The siege mode of the belt eater is just a way to balance the new mining style to the old one. As the ship is held in place for some time, it needs the smaller ships to get asteroids for it towed into range. so aborting the siege cycle would allow to abuse the belt eater by warping it around in the belt even if it has a ridiculously low speed. A siege mode is the only way to make sure it works as intended. And aborting the cycle is not an option.

I dont want an uber capital miner that makes the exhumers obsolete, it should only give another "style" of mining. Not better (in terms of yield), just different. The yield of the belt eater does not depend on its own yield, which is incredibly high, it depends on how fast the cruiser sized tow ships can get stuff into range. So it depends mostly on how much cruisers you have, their number of towing tractors and the distance of the roids and the velocity of the towing tractors.

It should be balanced to yield a similar amount of ore as a same sized barge/exhumer fleet with a orca/rorqual booster to not make those ships obsolete. The options for using asteroids for pos/station defense and the other ideas are just a far reach what could be possible if movable asteroids are implemented.

Again, i dont want just an uber-mining-capital with which a single person could do the job of a whole fleet. On the contrary, i want to see a way of mining that only works as a group effort.

Why bother? It's either a ship I want (in which case, I'll BM it, take my current ride back to base, and come back in my egg to claim it), or a ship I don't. If I don't want it, I can either auction the BM to someone who does, or just blow the sucker up