Ships & Modules

Sure, in EVE Online the RTS game we can do this. My micro is pretty good, I know all the keyboard shortcuts and can psi-storm marines like mad. Oh wait, Sony hasn't released that game yet.

In EVE Online the MMPORG game our 15 arbitrators didn't fare so well. See, by the time all the coordination was done they missed a couple titans, which blapped them with their remote sensor-boosted lock times and tracking-linked guns. This freed up some more titans to insta-pop one of the 13 rifters holding him down, letting the Titans escape before their support fleet could even put their shoes on and jump in.

**** this thread I'm going back to play starcraft.

Fair enough. Is the ineffectiveness of EW in these situations something that there's a potential easy fix for? It's a decent on-paper solution to the problem, and it'd be nice if we could make it scale properly. If not, oh well, we look at something else.

Show if a target has a type of ewar against it and how many on the overview and make the ships that do ewar not instapop to just about anything.

Perhaps down the road you could add more EW battleships for other races.

Fair enough, shelving that idea for now, then. It's something we might revisit in some form when we get round to looking at EAFs, but that's out of scope here.

Changing subject and following up an earlier discussion, we were knocking around the possibility of damage-scaling based on unmodified sig radius, so you couldn't affect it with TPs etc.

This leaves open some questions of the details but seems a reasonable solution.

Edit: If XL turrets are changed for their damage to scale like capital missiles do, there is no problem and don't even need to worry about target painters. If, as the earlier charts showed, an mwding battleship takes on the order of 2000-3000dps(pre-resists) while triple webbed and triple target painted, this is a very reasonable amount of damage that subcapital fleets can cope with, without being able to ignore it.

When webs and target painters AND a dumb pilot who doesn't turn off his mwd(but has time to) need to be combined for titans to blap battleships, the titans run into the same coordination issues as the ewar pilots we were talking about before.

Without discussing this with my esteemed colleagues at length, I think the only way you "easy fix" this is by making it much, much harder for titans to kill ewar and subcap ships, which is what you're trying to achieve in the first place. It becomes a circular argument. The steps are like this:

-- Titans are so good at killing subcaps
-- No subcap can do all that much to tackle them or (hypothetically ewar) them
-- So, allowing more tackle and more ewar most likely won't solve your problem
-- And it certainly will only lead to people bringing more titans so they can take advantage of...
-- [Back to top] titans being so good at killing subcaps

So basically, you can't make ewar really very useful against a ship that deals thousands of DPS to subcaps without first fixing...the "thousands of DPS to subcaps" part. Which is what the ewar thing is intended to fix.

Titans need nerfs and it all goes back to their DPS. Damage per second is the king stat of any MMO, and titans have it in spades, with no downsides.

The kind of game mechanics an MMO needs to make "more DPS" not the right choice are pretty heavy handed stuff. To illustrate this, I'm going to take an extended look at dreadnoughts, who have very high DPS but remain balanced. Observe what it takes to balance a dreadnought:

1. To deal high DPS, dreads need to give up massive amounts of locking speed, half of their tracking, and go down to 2-3 max targets.

2. In addition, dreads cannot move while sieged, nor can they leave. They tackle themselves and cannot (due to the above) most likely clear their own tackle before leaving siege. A dread is committed to either winning, winning while dying (attrition), or dying in a huge fire. There are few situations where a dread fleet loses a battle and then escapes intact.

3. Dreads have a limited number of EHP, between 2-3 million. This is a lot of HP, but relatively trivial for a subcap fleet of any size. In addition, their repping power is STRICTLY limited by their capacitor battery and they physical numbers on their local reps. They simply do not scale beyond a certain point. This means that a dread fleet facing signficant opposition is committed to some level of attrition -- some of them will always die if the fight is anything like equal.

You see how titans have none of those drawbacks. And really, no drawbacks at all other than cost -- which isn't a drawback since titans so rarely suffer attrition except in cases of massive strategic error.

In my opinion there are two ways to balance titans before you look at giving them an actual coherent role in the game.

A: Nerf their damage, especially against lower-class subcaps like dictors and cruisers but also signficantly against battleships. The originally proposed nerfs were a great step in the right direction because of the dreadnought-like combination of locking-speed/target caps and tracking nerfs. Electronic warfare vulnerability would also be a good addition to this method.

B: Nerf titans' EHP severely and also create diminshing returns on remote reps in some way. A titan with 10M EHP instead of 40-60M is going to be a much different choice on being deployed or not, because 10M EHP would mean that it is still vulnerable *even if you have 50 other titans* in the fleet. This would mean that "should I bring a titan or some other ship" would actually be a choice again.

Mate, listen. Fooling around with silly numbers wont fix titans. You need the following:

- sub system targeting
- multi char ships
- hyperspace
- in ship hangars
- non binary sensor systems
- timescaled sustained damage

Good luck to you. You gonna need it.

how would the eve map look if supers would not exists?
would there be more fluctuation?

would it be possible that newer alliances do have a chance and dont have to be renters of pets of pets?
(i dont mean 5 man nub alliances from highsec)

CCP that should be your first task, analyze what would be best for the game
and then decide what to do with titans

and not doctoring around a problem you cant solve just to keep 1000 "endgame" players happy

It's removing the sig radius choices from one of the only areas where they matter. Removing ewar immunity would allow newbies to completely lock down even numbered titan fleets while also making their job even easier if they take advantage of the sig radius lowering effects available in game.

To be clear, both solutions would be a step forward for the game and both are more effective than the originally proposed nerf. I would vastly prefer the base sigradius change to nothing being done at all, and it's also better than most of the suggested changes so far.

However I think the ewar immunity would be even easier to implement and would nerf titans just as much or more vs a thoughtful foe while also creating more interesting gameplay choices.

Regarding the application-of ewar problem.

First of all, I don't have the practical experience against Titan fleets to back up my theorycrafting, so as Goons have noted, my input may, er, not be useful here!

Yes, matching ewar with targets is tricky. But the quote above comparing 50 Arbitrators against 50 Titans misses two points, I feel. Firstly, it won't just be 50 Arbitrators, I think we can assume that the number of ewar mods would outnumber Titans in a realistic engagement, possibly by more than a factor of two or three. So there'd be plenty of "spare" TDs to allow for imperfect application.

Secondly, TDs are effective enough on unbonused hulls. A TD on each of the few score Drakes that are commonly seen in fleet means that it's plausible that the number of ewar mods would be several times the number of Titans present. In short, it's easy to bring even a badly-skilled ewar mod on an unbonused ship, it's difficult to bring a Titan.

If each ewar-equipped pilot applies his ewar to a hostile Titan whose name starts with a letter close to the initial letter of his own name, then a reasonable degree of spreading of ewar can be achieved even by unskilled players, considering that the number of ewar modules would likely outnumber the number of Titans by a factor of 2-3.

Another point is that it's good if it's hard to coordinate ewar. It shouldn't be "trivial" to neuter a Titan, and Eve mechanics should reward skilled, trained, coordinated fleets. People sometimes criticise the "call primary, F1, kaboom, rinse and repeat" element of some fleet engagements. Well, here's the opposite mechanism, where skill, communication and coordination would be required and rewarded.

As I said, I don't have the experience here, so all this may have been tried and found simply not to work. But was that with old lagfests? TiDi promised that all modules and effects should work in laggy fights, and its very nature offers more time to set up the required coordination.

Edit. It's clear that this round of balancing is about finding a quick and easy fix before Titans can be properly balanced. We shouldn't forgo an "okay" solution simply because it's not perfect or difficult. Ewar vulnerability may have problems or be difficult to apply in practice, but is it better than the current situation, or the other quick-fix ideas?