Assembly Hall

The reason most ships are cookie cutter fits today is that they get bonuses to certain roles or modules, so you pick the ship according to what you want to do. You don't shoe-horn torpedoes into a Rokh (okay I know one guy who does...hehe) because there are better ships for torps, and you would be wasting the Rokh's bonuses with hybrids.

I think the solution would be more T3 ships, only with more balanced subsystems so they aren't as cookie-cutter as the current Strategic Cruisers. A simple change of subsystems and your ship's role completely changes. (tangent: T3 battleships might also be a good platform for bringing some balance versus supercaps) Add a second T3 cruiser, plus T3 battlecruisers and battleships, and I think you'll end up with enough variety in ship configurations that knowing JUST the ship composition wouldn't clue you in on the fittings.

More ships would be nice, 10 more in each class would be insane, and insanely awesome.

Would there be any use for ships that don't have any bonuses on them at all? Or multiple racial ships that share the same role but maybe a little different? Amarr usually armor tanks, but have a shield tanking class to make certain cross-trains a little more interesting to some people. I've always loved the Sacrilege, because while Amarr, it's a missile ship. That kind of thing could be a little more common maybe (only fear would be that it sort of makes races less diversified from each other?). So while there are ships that give a bonus to say Large Hybrid Turrets, you could break that up a little more to make a ship that specializes in Rails, and/or specializes in Blasters.

Another thought would be a battleship class that's specifically designed for bonuses on small guns, to act as some kind of multiple frigate role. I don't know if that would even be useful, but there are quite a few things you could make roles for.

An ewar battlecruiser or battleship class would be cool to specifically rip through ewar immunities on super caps too. There are more roles available, and nothing wrong with more variations on existing rolls.

Bring back mines and look into better mine mechanics and maybe create a ship that deploys mines on an active battlefield quickly and effectively, then a counter-role for disarming mines or something.

Maybe an anti-drone specific ship, can apply to counter carriers too based on ship size. Their specific role is to ewar drones/fighters?

T3s are great, love to see more T3, but damn they're ugly as hell, in my opinion. Bottleneck in teh art department? That and fail artists :P

I'm just spitting out ideas as they come to me, but seems like there is a lot of room for creative thinking here and a lot of possibilities. Additionally, if you make a ship fill a new role, that sort of gives you two, as you can make another ship fill a counter-role. Seems like there could be quite a few holes to fill, but it would take a lot of thought for initial balancing, rock paper scissors stuff, no doubt.

EDIT: I also was a fan of the idea to have multiple hulls of the same ship to suit different player aesthetic preferences. I think most of the ships in EVE are ugly, and with the new Scorpion and now the new Maller, all the rest of the ships are really outdated (JUST PLEASE GOD DON'T MAKE IT COST AURUM!). While maybe not offering more roles per say, you'd have more variations aesthetically, which may be pleasing to some, or not matter to most.

couse then there would be little veriety

although i am looking foward to a khanid BS specced for armour tanking and Torps

There are several reasons that could be given but I'll just provide a couple.

EVE isn't a gear chase game.

You'll find 2003 players climbing in rifters and hurricanes - things that a new player gets for free over to easily getting into within the first month or so of play. Show me the games where players WANT to use the "starting newbie" gear.

As such, all those concepts take a hike if they keep adding bigger, better, more powerful more ... Then EVE goes over to the gear-chase model just like WoW, LoTRO, SWG, etc, etc, etc. which cripples up those who don't have the "raid 6 days a week!" mindset nor time to invest. Right now they don't have to chase that stuff.

As for Caldari - their ships are very easy to get into and missiles either work or don't. They, like Minmatar ships, cannot be prevented from firing by gutting the power and both those races weapons systems are also top performers with far superior flexibility due to damage type changing. Neut a hybid or laser boat and their guns go off-line while they still suffer from the same assortment of blocks as the 2 non-powered systems.

ANY proposed addressing of the considerations I outlined above and the lynch mobs from the community would be breathtaking in scope. "MY caldari training - NO NOT MY TENGU!!!!" "my minmatar training - NO NOT MY PROJECTILES!!!"

As you can see - the balance is skewed a touch but any adjustments... Painful.

Introduction of more ships with more options to their roles and balancing problems will turn to nightmares very quickly. Whatever fixes they propose coming out with hybrids are going to **** off a lot of players no matter how small the adjustments are.

And you want them to toss in even more ships that are less thought out... I'd vote for letting them FIX what's messed up now, figure out how to properly balance what we currently have - THEN look at possibly adding a ship or 3 but SLOWLY so that we don't end up with messes like the Dramiel and super carriers.

They have said in the past that they will sell new looks for your ships with AUR... microtransactions yuck¡¡¡... this I am afraid it will stop developers to give us new ships models unles we pay for them :( sad but I fear that will be our future