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Titan changes - update

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Bouh Revetoile
In Wreck we thrust
#481 - 2012-04-01 18:03:59 UTC
About the tracking formula.
I think the best solution in the thread for this problem is to move the sig ratio from the tracking member to the range member.
But infact, it depend on what we want the sig ratio to be.
When I read about it in some guide, here is the picture I saw : http://eve.mondespersistants.com/images/images_art/2581.jpg
(french pic sorry; green is turret sig res, blue is ship sig radius, black are shot)
So the sig res is the area where the turret cannot distinguish anything and hence its shot will land anywhere in this area.
Signature radius is the size of the ship.
Considering this definition, we understand that any turret shot on a smaller target than its sig res have a chance to miss, hence the probability to hit we have.
However, if this model is right, the tracking formula is wrong. Indeed if sig res and sig radius are area, then, for a turret, it is given for an optimal range. Hence, in that optimal range, sig res and sig rad would give you your chances to hit, but these chances to hit would reduce while the distance increase (I don't know how to call this, but it's a story of point view enlarging with distance). Therefor, the sig ratio should *also* apply to the range member for our model to be good. And here we come to the falloff ! After some drawing, I think the sig ratio should simply be applied to the falloff.
So what about the tracking member now ? Does the sig ratio should apply to it ? I think the sig ratio have nothing to do with the tracking member. Tracking represent the angular velocity a turret can move to align a target. Whatever the size of the target, this member is supposed to determine if the turret can follow it's target to shoot at it.

In this model, the formula would become something like this :
Quote:
ChanceToHit = 0.5 ^ (((Transversal speed/(Range to target * Turret Tracking))^2) + ((max(0, Range To Target - Turret Optimal Range))/(Turret Falloff*(Target Signature Radius / Turret Signature Resolution)))^2 + (Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius)^2)


But this will also extend our virtual falloff if the target sig radius is larger than the turret sig res (what which could make sens). If we don't want that, the formula become :
Quote:
ChanceToHit = 0.5 ^ (((Transversal speed/(Range to target * Turret Tracking))^2) + ((max(0, Range To Target - Turret Optimal Range))/(Turret Falloff*(min(1, Target Signature Radius / Turret Signature Resolution))))^2 + (Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius)^2)


The tranquility tracking formula is this one :
ChanceToHit = 0.5 ^ ((((Transversal speed/(Range to target * Turret Tracking))*(Turret Signature Resolution / Target Signature Radius))^2) + ((max(0, Range To Target - Turret Optimal Range))/Turret Falloff)^2)

In this formula, the sig ratio is a multiplier to tracking member, and nothing else. Some people already explains why this is a bit silly.

In my formulas, we have the third member to adjust hit chance based on the sig ratio, hit chances being the damage modifier for turret, no need to turn them into missiles. This third member is now a hard pressure on the damage potential of turret based on signature. It can even be tweaked by adjusting the exponent. Furthermore, the presence of the sig ratio in the range member will kill the falloff if the target is too small. That may hurt minmatar more than the others, but I think they are way too powerful against smaller ships right now; by the way, that can be tweaked with an exponent too. You can also tweak the sig res of autocanon to compensate.

That's it. Now, if a math guy can check this, that would be perfect; I'm only a computer guy, and I lack rigour to be good at maths.

Important note : tweaking a model is good, but those tweaks should not modify the model. I think the best way to tweak the model is to use exponent on the terms to give them more or less importance; but I'm not scientist.

About the titans now : I think people using them will always find a way to use them against subcap. The best ideas I saw here are removing the EWar immunity (maybe give them some resistance to it) or a siege/triage module (force them to be alone and actually commit when committing to a fight). I prefer the siege module to be honest, because you can tweak it on top of everything else. Maybe removing the damage bonus of titans and placing it on some siege module can be a good idea ?
Mechael
Tribal Liberation Distribution and Retail
#482 - 2012-04-01 19:37:04 UTC  |  Edited by: Mechael
All I really want to hear about this issue is that you guys over at CCP recognize how absolutely ridiculous it is to have an entire fleet of supposed "capital" ships, or even just have more than a handful of them in your fleet relative to the number of non-capital ships, and that you have a plan in the works to fix this ::coughyou'realreadyrebalancingeverythingfromthegroundupanywaycough:: Give them real roles, a real purpose. Something beyond being "wtfpwnmobiles."

Make fielding multiple capital ships redundant by limiting their combat abilities to only apply to structures and other capital ships. Also, remove the silly ewar immunity in favor of high base stats (sensor strength, etc.)

It's a pretty simple concept, and it'll get rid of a lot of wonkiness from the game in addition to make things a little easier on smaller alliances who are just trying to get a foothold in null.

Whether or not you win the game matters not.  It's if you bought it.
steave435
Perkone
Caldari State
#483 - 2012-04-01 20:52:47 UTC
The problem is that any change that only affects the CHANCE to hit will still make it possible to find ways to hit anyway, and when you do, it's for full damage. Moving sig to provide a damage cap is an absolute, you can increase the damage a bit by applying target painters, but after that certain point it is completely impossible to increase damage further.
Bouh Revetoile
In Wreck we thrust
#484 - 2012-04-01 21:52:50 UTC  |  Edited by: Bouh Revetoile
steave435 wrote:
The problem is that any change that only affects the CHANCE to hit will still make it possible to find ways to hit anyway, and when you do, it's for full damage. Moving sig to provide a damage cap is an absolute, you can increase the damage a bit by applying target painters, but after that certain point it is completely impossible to increase damage further.

Yep, chance based; though it's the same chance mechanics that make you miss your target when it goes beyond falloff. Have you ever tried to kill something beyond your falloff
Infact, I don't the accuracy of the random number used to check a hit, but if they are not too accurate (say 10^-2), then there is a cap where chance to hit are 0, and this is when your X in the formula get beyond 0.01 in accuracy of random number is 0.01
XL gun sig res is 1000. That mean that with my numbers ((turret sig res/target sig radius)^2 ; yea, I made a mistake, the sig ratio of the sig member should be inverted)), a titan would have less chance to hit an armor BS than any gun to hit at optimal + 2.5*falloff; and I'm speaking here about an immobile BS laying at your optimal range
Is this enough of a cap ?
With more reasonable numbers, we could make one shot on five to hit their target, considering transversal is not yet considered, chance to hit will be dramatically low. If all the titans blap a target once every 10 cycles, they are not a problem anymore because BS would be way more effective.
I may have been too far with my numbers infact, but you got the point I guess : tweak the exponent
What we should be careful about is how often we want a big gun to hit a small target; but I really think we should keep the differences between turrets and missiles.
Soon Shin
Scarlet Weather Rhapsody
#485 - 2012-04-02 00:29:55 UTC
While you're taking a look in Titans can you also look into Regular Capital Ships?

They have been largely replaced by Super Capital Ships that do the same job while being overall much better.
Khalimus
Coreli Corporation
Pandemic Legion
#486 - 2012-04-02 06:37:37 UTC
Get rid of guns and make DD kill any ship in one shot including other titans. Hey presto - role and major isk sink in one go!
Richard Desturned
Royal Amarr Institute
Amarr Empire
#487 - 2012-04-02 07:07:19 UTC
Khalimus wrote:
Get rid of guns and make DD kill any ship in one shot including other titans. Hey presto - role and major isk sink in one go!



ships getting blown up != isk sink

npc alts have no opinions worth consideration
Ejderdisi
Rogue Inferno.
Pandemic Horde
#488 - 2012-04-02 08:59:22 UTC
I come here to just talk about concept. Because looks like we are really getting lost in balance. Balance is your job in CCP, I'm a player in an alliance with lots o fracking Titans. So prolly you won't listen to my balance changes :P

But Titan concept is important for eve :

Make titans awesome. I just heard a guy when he warped to one of our many titans yesterday. He said "Woow, its beautiful!" Keep this.

Make them fearsome. U should never orbit a titan with max speed in a interceptor and feel safe. Even if it is all alone in space in some SS.

Make them fragile. They should be tackled. Tacklers might die fast but a lone titan should be an easy chew for a swarm of other ships even though half of the swarm is dead at the end. Or give something tougher than HIC a way to point titans. Let them both commit when they are fighting. Defender and Agressor.

Make them powerful. I remember their click boom DD was in an eve trailer before it was in tranq, keep it. It is good. It is awesome tbh(inline with concept). If you are too afraid of flying a capital against a titan prolly you should fly what you can afford to lose. Btw you can tank 1 DD easy with lots of fits.




My opinions coming:

Tbh if you today nerf all titans, our carriers will be nerfed soon because you can't kill them with anything less as we alpha your HICs for breakfast. Try not to balance the game on our doctrines :P

Disclaimer: Btw all are my opinions and not my alliance's
CynoNet Two
GSF Logistics and Posting Reserves
Goonswarm Federation
#489 - 2012-04-02 11:07:31 UTC  |  Edited by: CynoNet Two
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Removing EW immunity - sell it to me hard Smile


Proposal:

  • Limit titans to 3 max targets
  • No scan-res changes
  • Remove ewar immunity flag from titans (even if it allows remote boosting)
  • A -75% tracking nerf on XL guns to compensate for remote links
  • Give titans a warp core strength bonus of 1 per level of racial titan*


Reasoning:

  1. It's by far the easiest change on the table, just requiring removal of the ewar flag and tweaking of existing stats that were already planned.
  2. Introduces a trade-off for Titan mobilty in a fight. Dreadnoughts currently have to siege and commit to a fight to recieve their damage and ewar immunity. Titans are free to break off at any time, and therefore should be vulnerable to ewar.
  3. Forces players to control the sub-capital battlefield or take a severe risk with their supercaps.
  4. Supercapital fights no longer rely on simply killing all hostile dictors to remove the risk to titans, although titans can't be tackled by a single opportunistic frigate.
  5. Creates far more options to counter titans than just "more titans" or "enough suicide dreads to crash the node".
  6. Encourages more experimental fleet compositions as there are now multiple avenues to counter titans, via various options to tackle or ewar them.
  7. ECM, tracking disruption and sensor damping become alternative tools against titans, especially the latter two which are currently underused in fleet combat.
  8. *The max warp core strength of 5 is based on the fact that many supercaps will be able to easily smartbomb away most ships with warp scramblers. Taking this value any higher massively increases the number of ships needed to tackle a several dozen strong titan fleet and reduces the pool of available pilots for EWAR ships.
  9. We can revist the balancing at a later date when more resources are available. For example: giving EAS better bonuses for this role, or having the programming resources needed to prevent remote assistance on titans in exchange for another boost.
Killerhound
State War Academy
Caldari State
#490 - 2012-04-02 12:29:36 UTC  |  Edited by: Killerhound
Quote:
Proposal

Limit titans to 3 max target
No scan-res change
Remove ewar immunity flag from titans (even if it allows remote boosting
A -75% tracking nerf on XL guns to compensate for remote link
Give titans a warp core strength bonus of 1 per level of racial titan*


Allowing remote tracking will create perfectly striking titans again and you achieve nothing. It even makes things worse since many will simply focus support on Remote Tracking

It is difficult to understand but mostly the problem is that Titans are very effective due to sheer limitless ressources when it comes to remote boosting / support and numbers.
Using Artilleries instead of autocannons you still can simply One Hit any ship that doesnt move, nonetheless what size it has, unless its a supercapital.

Reducing tracking only serves the purpose of having to fit more tracking modules to compensate. In a large fleet reducing EHP for Tracking is no big deal, and my guess is that CCP fears that those Blap Monsters are used in large quantities and not as single blap ships.

You attack with a 300 Man Gang of drakes/maels/abbas/whatever which costs maybe 30-60b in ISK. If the enemy has not that many numbers he can still destroy you by increasing ISK deployed.
20 Titans with support and the fleet reaches easily 1000b ISK and creates situation where with 150 man you can easily win.

Of course its frustrating to be destroyed by such a fleet but titan pilots will always risk so much more then the support pilot. If you can overwhelm the support the titans by now are totally defenseless against a support fleet.

An FC can easily win with the drakes if he uses high velocity tactics and has some decent target calling. He must focus on support disallowing assistance for Titans. Isolate Infantry from tank and you can strike them with your own infantry, leaving the tanks attack on their own. Even in modern combat philosophy tanks are useless unless flanked by mechanized infantry forces.

So only solution left is minimizing force propagation possibilities for titans. Its also natural that a airplane-carrier cannot deploy everywhere in no time on earth as he wishes. Movement
WolfLeader316
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#491 - 2012-04-02 13:05:08 UTC
CynoNet Two wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Removing EW immunity - sell it to me hard Smile


Proposal:

  • Limit titans to 3 max targets
  • No scan-res changes
  • Remove ewar immunity flag from titans (even if it allows remote boosting)
  • A -75% tracking nerf on XL guns to compensate for remote links
  • Give titans a warp core strength bonus of 1 per level of racial titan*


Reasoning:

  1. It's by far the easiest change on the table, just requiring removal of the ewar flag and tweaking of existing stats that were already planned.
  2. Introduces a trade-off for Titan mobilty in a fight. Dreadnoughts currently have to siege and commit to a fight to recieve their damage and ewar immunity. Titans are free to break off at any time, and therefore should be vulnerable to ewar.
  3. Forces players to control the sub-capital battlefield or take a severe risk with their supercaps.
  4. Supercapital fights no longer rely on simply killing all hostile dictors to remove the risk to titans, although titans can't be tackled by a single opportunistic frigate.
  5. Creates far more options to counter titans than just "more titans" or "enough suicide dreads to crash the node".
  6. Encourages more experimental fleet compositions as there are now multiple avenues to counter titans, via various options to tackle or ewar them.
  7. ECM, tracking disruption and sensor damping become alternative tools against titans, especially the latter two which are currently underused in fleet combat.
  8. *The max warp core strength of 5 is based on the fact that many supercaps will be able to easily smartbomb away most ships with warp scramblers. Taking this value any higher massively increases the number of ships needed to tackle a several dozen strong titan fleet and reduces the pool of available pilots for EWAR ships.
  9. We can revist the balancing at a later date when more resources are available. For example: giving EAS better bonuses for this role, or having the programming resources needed to prevent remote assistance on titans in exchange for another boost.


I agree with this post.
Courthouse
Perkone
Caldari State
#492 - 2012-04-02 19:59:44 UTC
Quote:
Proposal

Limit titans to 3 max target
No scan-res change
Remove ewar immunity flag from titans (even if it allows remote boosting
A -75% tracking nerf on XL guns to compensate for remote link
Give titans a warp core strength bonus of 1 per level of racial titan*


Okay, let's break down why killerhound is wrong:

Killerhound wrote:
Allowing remote tracking will create perfectly striking titans again and you achieve nothing. It even makes things worse since many will simply focus support on Remote Tracking

It is difficult to understand but mostly the problem is that Titans are very effective due to sheer limitless ressources when it comes to remote boosting / support and numbers.
Using Artilleries instead of autocannons you still can simply One Hit any ship that doesnt move, nonetheless what size it has, unless its a supercapital.


Stacking penalties. Stacking too many TE/TCs on a titan should reduce the effectiveness of remote tracking enhancement modules. Ideally with the 75% back tracking nerf back to near the place that titans will be at given current proposed mechanics

The tracking formula will be looked at later, this is a change for a short term fix until a long term adjustment can be made. In the meantime, it iwll reduce the effectiveness of titans and force them to be supported by subcaps.

Killerhound wrote:
Reducing tracking only serves the purpose of having to fit more tracking modules to compensate. In a large fleet reducing EHP for Tracking is no big deal, and my guess is that CCP fears that those Blap Monsters are used in large quantities and not as single blap ships.

You attack with a 300 Man Gang of drakes/maels/abbas/whatever which costs maybe 30-60b in ISK. If the enemy has not that many numbers he can still destroy you by increasing ISK deployed.
20 Titans with support and the fleet reaches easily 1000b ISK and creates situation where with 150 man you can easily win.


yes, and they lose cap regeneration and/or tank for that. Tradeoffs are good.

"Titans were never meant to be cost effective. It's a huge ****."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVmS5uBgaEU

Killerhound wrote:
Of course its frustrating to be destroyed by such a fleet but titan pilots will always risk so much more then the support pilot. If you can overwhelm the support the titans by now are totally defenseless against a support fleet.

An FC can easily win with the drakes if he uses high velocity tactics and has some decent target calling. He must focus on support disallowing assistance for Titans. Isolate Infantry from tank and you can strike them with your own infantry, leaving the tanks attack on their own. Even in modern combat philosophy tanks are useless unless flanked by mechanized infantry forces.

So only solution left is minimizing force propagation possibilities for titans. Its also natural that a airplane-carrier cannot deploy everywhere in no time on earth as he wishes. Movement


Require support to deploy 100b isk superweapons? Well I never.

Spool-up on jump drives is a proposed solution, but it would take new mechanics and a longer/more in-depth look at capitals, in general. Again, this is short term.
Ganthrithor
School of Applied Knowledge
Caldari State
#493 - 2012-04-02 20:05:35 UTC  |  Edited by: Ganthrithor
Isn't the whole "5 points of WCS being balanced around supers being able to smartbomb scramming ships" kind of assuming a lot? Any ship can fit scrams, not just frigates. A handful of brick-tanked battleships with higher EHP than HICs (and which can be remote repped) would be the new way to tackle supercaps. Typhoonfleet, assemble. Hell, they're even 1/3 of the price of a HIC.

e: also, you don't need to tackle 12 titans for force a fight-- just one or two.
steave435
Perkone
Caldari State
#494 - 2012-04-03 09:38:25 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
steave435 wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
CynoNet Two wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
I see what you're getting at, I think. Can this not be mitigated by just adjusting the falloff formula*, alongside potentially adjusting the general balance between optimal and falloff

*As in, the attribute "falloff" that currently exists on turrets etc, not sig-based damage reductions

How would this affect anything within optimal range? Blasters and Pulses would still be capable of alpha'ing anything within 70km with ease before their falloff even kicks in.


Hence the bit about potentially adjusting the current balance between optimal and falloff. We already have a mechanic to make you hit less at long range; if that's not working, I'd prefer to fix that mechanic rather than introduce another one alongside it. If we don't like that you can do 70k optimal on pulses, we have the technology to just reduce that number to a range that we do like, and kick the falloff up to compensate. If we don't like the way damage drops off as a result, we can adjust the falloff formula to do whatever we want it to do Smile

But doesn't that take you back to having to change an entire mechanic, which will then significantly affect the balance of all other ships as well? And if you're gonna start messing with that, then changing the falloff formula to fix a tracking problem rather then changing the tracking formula doesn't make sense.

In addition to that, if it's just the falloff formula being changed, then it's going to reduce damage at range by roughly the same amount against ALL types of ships, including capitals, not only sub-caps

If you do have time to re-work the formulas, what I'd like to see is separating tracking from the guns signature.
Run a script to divide the tracking of every gun by its current sig res, and then set the variable for the guns signature in the tracking formula to a constant 1. Since signature is simply a modifier, this will have absolutely no effect what so ever
For example, a BS sized gun with 400 sig shooting at a frigate with a sig of 40
Today, the BS has a tracking of 400x, but since the guns signature is 10 times higher then the friagtes, its tracking get reduced to 10% of its base value. 400x * 10% = 40x
With this change, its tracking would only be x base, but since the guns signature is considered to be 1, it gets multiplied by the target ships signature, in this case 40. x * 40 = 40x

So why make a change that has absolutely no effect?
Well, 2 reasons really
1. It makes it easier to understand and more intuitive. Currently, a newbie will assume that the gun with the highest tracking track the best, without realizing that the signature radius can change that completely
2. It frees up the signature stat to be used for something else.

So, what could it be used for?
To give guns that need it a maximum damage potential against smaller ships. A new step would be added in the damage taken formula, comparing the sig res of the gun with the sig of the target. If the target is larger, do nothing, but if the target is smaller, reduce the damage taken by the ratio of the 2 signatures. For example
An Avatar is firing at a Tempest. The XL lasers that the Avatar is using has a sig res of 1000, and the Tempest has a signature of 340, so the sig ratio is 340/1000 = 0.34. Modify the damage the Tempest would normally have taken by that value
However, the Tempest firing at the Avatar would have a 400 sig gun firing at a almost 16 000 sig target, so since the target is larger then the gun, it does normal damage
Result: Even if the Avatar hits, it's doing 66% less damage to the Tempest then it would normally do, but firing at the appropriate sized target still does the same damage as it does now

But this would change the sub capital balance as well...
Not necessarily. Have the script that adjust the tracking to the new values also reduce the sig res of all non-XL turrets to 1
Since it is no longer considered in the tracking formula and there are no ships with a signature of less then 1, they will track exactly like they do now and there are no targets that they'd get a damage penalty against

Why is this good?
1. It's a balancing tool. Currently, it's very hard to balance tracking since it's almost impossible to get a tracking value that allows the big ship to hit the small ship sometimes, without also having that hit result in the smaller ship dying almost instantly. This mechanic makes it possible to have the tracking formula decide what types of ships you can hit at all, and you can be pretty generous with that since you also have a second formula to decide how much damage is taken when a hit actually occur.
2. It opens up for new ship roles. For example, you can have 1 BS with low tracking and low sig res. It will be able to hit BS and maybe BCs for full damage, but can't do anything to cruisers, and then you can have an another BS with high tracking and high sig res that can hit anything but will do very little damage to anything smaller then a BS. You'd then have to choose between a BS that can fight only BC and BS and a BS that can fight anything, but is less effective against any given target.


Note to self: re-read this on Monday.

Just a small reminder about that :)
Mechael
Tribal Liberation Distribution and Retail
#495 - 2012-04-03 10:10:43 UTC
steave435 wrote:
But this would change the sub capital balance as well...


This would be a good thing, imo. It's too easy for battleships to blap cruisers, and cruisers to blap frigates. Let us not forget the cycle ... frigate < destroyer < cruiser < battlecruiser < battleship < frigate

Honestly, it wasn't until fairly recently that I came to understand that tracking and sig radius have a multiplicative effect on each other rather than being two separate things entirely. I liked it better when I believed they were separate; it made so much more sense.

I think it was explained very well in an old issue of EON Magazine. Tracking is all about how fast your guns can move. Sig radius should be a sort of sphere in which your bullets/beams will land, and if the thing you're aiming at has a smaller "sphere" than your guns, you're less likely to hit. Each of these factors should be judged separately, and I'd be totally okay with a sigrad/sigres ratio determining a damage percentage while tracking determines chance to hit at all, across the board for all ship shapes, sizes, and roles.

Bigger != Better
Expensive != Better

These changes would make small and medium sniper gangs much more viable, as just one example. Currently it doesn't make sense to fly a small ship with an optimal bonus when a ship that can use bigger guns with an optimal bonus will do the job so much better. With the change proposed by steave435, sniping small targets with big guns won't be anywhere near as viable. I mean, seriously, have you ever tried to hit a human-sized target at 500 yards with an M16? (Sorry, I'm a former US Marine.) It's tough! And that's a target that's the same size as me. Now, imagine if I were trying to hit a target, even a stationary one, that was no bigger than a dollar bill at the same range, or an artillery battery that's trying to land a shell in something the size of a bathtub from 4 miles away. Clearly sig res is more important than current game mechanics suggest.

Roles, roles, roles, roles. Oh, and roles. Big weapons for big targets. Little weapons for little targets. Thank you.

Whether or not you win the game matters not.  It's if you bought it.
steave435
Perkone
Caldari State
#496 - 2012-04-03 10:42:12 UTC
Quote:
This would be a good thing, imo. It's too easy for battleships to blap cruisers, and cruisers to blap frigates. Let us not forget the cycle ... frigate < destroyer < cruiser < battlecruiser < battleship < frigate

I agree, but changing it for sub-caps would require serious balance testing and considerations for them as well, which would be too big to fit in this quick fix. I'd love to see that happen eventually, but doing it the way I suggested allows it to be applied to titans now, and then it can be expanded down trough the ship sizes piece by piece.
Ken Ishitawa
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#497 - 2012-04-03 12:46:25 UTC  |  Edited by: Ken Ishitawa
Gun damage equation should be

Tracking Chance x Evasion chance x Hit quality x Ship Theoretical DPS

Where

Tracking chance

If tracking is greater than or equal to target angular velocity =1 else 0

Evasion chance

Projectile time to target x Target ship lateral (evasive) velocity is greater than or equal to Target signature radius =0 else 1

Ship Theoretical DPS is your good old number from EFT that some people worship.

The quality of hit should be something along the lines of

(Ship Sig - (Time to impact X Ship lateral movement))squared
Ship Sig squared


The power you use is up for debate as this could be used to make partial hits have far less damage that perfect ones

This would require projectiles to have apparent velicities and shps to have a new attribute added. The evasive manouver could also possibly have it's own equation so if you are not gooing full speed your ship has more engine power in reserve to avoid incoming fire.
I think hat one will make people scratch thir heads as being full speed alligned makes you more likely to be hit than a stationary target at range.

You would also be able to remove optimal and falloff from Arty, Auto canon and Rail gun weapons. After al an object in motion with no external force applied just keeps on going. Blasters should have a Time limit after which the containment of the charge colapses.
Ken Ishitawa
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#498 - 2012-04-03 13:14:28 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
Innominate wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

The specific benefits I'm hoping it might yield at this time aren't really to do with warp scrambling, they're to do specifically with tracking disruption. You can get four -62% TDs on an Arbitrator, each of which cancels out four Shadow Serpentis tracking computers. Even if you assign 2x TDs to each titan, this ought to let you significantly mitigate a 30-titan blapfleet with 15 T1 cruiser hulls, which is pretty decent scaling IMO.


This is what people mean when they talk about EFT warriors. Yes the math works, but it's completely detached from the way the game works.

While ewar can be downright overpowered in fights involving single digit players, when you scale into the hundreds of players it becomes much less effective. Ewar in large scale battles is almost hilariously ineffective fleet vs fleet. It's simply impossible to coordinate 50 ewar ships against 50 targets on the nearly one to one mappping that would be needed for this to be meaningful.

In modern large scale fights, ECM is used against logistics, to reduce(but never eliminate) the amount of remote reps being received by your targets, as well as against other targets such as hostile webbing recons and FCs. Those groups all have something in common, they don't need to be permanently jammed to dramatically reduce the effectiveness of the rest of the fleet. Trying to use ewar ships to supress incoming damage slows it down a little but, but ends up being a net loss because the ewar dies faster than the ships they are trying to jam.

If you're looking at it from the perspective of using TDs to supress titans, you've hit a complete nonstarter. Ewar is just not that good in large scale fights.


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.


Could a new colum be added to the over view so that not only can you see what EWAR a target might be doing to you but also cumulatively what EWAR your fleet is doing to a hostile fleet. this would massively reduce over jamming of one target and under jamming of others.
Ken Ishitawa
Garoun Investment Bank
Gallente Federation
#499 - 2012-04-03 13:17:33 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
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.



I agree with this TPs only make your electronic size appear larger so you should beeasier to lock/Tract. It doesn't make your ship physicaly larger.
steave435
Perkone
Caldari State
#500 - 2012-04-03 14:06:23 UTC  |  Edited by: steave435
Ken Ishitawa wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:
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.



I agree with this TPs only make your electronic size appear larger so you should beeasier to lock/Tract. It doesn't make your ship physicaly larger.


That depends on what you interpret the sigs to mean. Personally, I find it unlikely that there would be guns with that fire ammo as big as the ships firing it (like all ships do according to sig values, other then capitals), so I interpret it as the area that your targeting computers define the target as. For example, a Rifter may have of only ~40, but the battleship firing at it is using computers calibrated for larger targets so in the targeting computers that 40 sig rifter seem to have a sig of 400, so when the guns aim at that area only 1 shot in 10 will connect despite the fact that all 10 hit the area that the targeting computer thinks that the hostile ship is in. That's where the target painter comes in and helps the BS with focusing on and thus hitting the Rifter despite its tracking system not really being designed for it.

RP should never be involved in balancing though, it's (almost) always possible to come up with explanations for why stuff work the way they do, so that's secondary to good gameplay.