Ships & Modules

I'd not adjust tracking right now, concentrate on the other areas, no need to break something now that has to be fixed again later.

EW immunity should probably go, however they should have enough sensor strength, warp core strength etc, that it would take about a dozen subcaps to effectively hold them or jam them. Introduce new EW Capital Ship (probably a new dreadnought say level 3 Dreadnought, one per race with their races EW bonuses). They would use Capital EW Modules which against capitals would be just like using a Scorpion against Battleships (while we are at it the other races could use their own EW Battleships....). I'd probably base the bonuses of the EW Capital Ship off the races Recon bonuses, making them a bit more flexible.

I'd rather see baby steps, then massive changes that might incredibly break the game.

It kinda smells that this one is going to affect all capitals, which in my opinion is very bad idea.

First of all, aren't capitals supposed to be different from subcaps in other ways than just CPU and PG. If you take away to refitting capability what's left besides the jump drive?

Secondly you will be removing lot of different roles and tactical options from say triage carriers. Just take a look at latest Rooks and Kings video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMFahR4wXTg where you can see how big role the refitting under fire plays. Please don't dumb down the game any more, superior tactics and player skill should still have some effect to this game.

Thirdly just because you are hell bent on driving the supercaps into gutter, it does not mean that you have to destroy the one capital ship class that is actually working really well currently.

I used mine for it for a while when we were in a safe area, and I was pulling in 300-350m/hour.


1) Realism should have NO impact on game balance concerns. Make up the RP to fit the mechanics that are needed, not the other way around.
2) If you want to go RP-mode, then ships aren't shooting rounds as big as they are, and when you're firing f.e. a beam laser that beam needs to stay on the target trough out the firing cycle in order to do full damage, so if it's having a hard time hitting it's not gonna manage to keep the beam on target constantly, thus reducing damage.

If you're looking at building the difference in ship signature radius and Weapon Sig radius into the equation to work on damage should this not be an exponent not a linear relationship. After all it should be the area profile of a target that alters damage not how long a ship is.

That might require the sig radius of all/most ships to be changed though so should be done with the ship role work.

Making dreadnoughts into anti-BS platforms just goes to obsolete BS and make dreads the new fleet platform. So, little change, except that the dreads are much more mobile thanks to jump drives and require much more SP to fly, thereby hindering and discouraging new pilots from taking part in fleet engagements. Not a sensible change at all.

Already doing this The "balance team" is pretty small, and we talk to each other about all of these things, don't worry And yeah, we'd love to move balance to a place where the "core concept" ship is making up say 40-50% of the fleet rather than 80%+.



1-4 are hopefully targeting Escalation, 5 and 6 I have NFI at this time

Reposting my reply from the CSM forum here so everyone can see the discussion:



This sort of gameplay is emergent and cool and interesting and something we very much enjoy seeing players discover, but it also sits in a particular kind of design grey-area where it's not really something we want to be seeing (for reasons I'll describe in a second), but something that's benign enough that we're not actually going to take action to nerf it just because of that, but also nevertheless something that we're not going to explicitly exempt from larger changes if they happen to impact it.

The reason we don't really like this sort of thing is that pre-fight fitting decisions are supposed to be one of the fundamental decisions of EVE combat. Most MMOs let you change your weapons and armor more-or-less on the fly. We don't, and there are clear and long-standing design principles behind that. SMAs let you make that decision *closer* to the fight, but they're not there to let you change your fitting *in* the fight. Yes, we need more interesting decisions that players can make during combat, that's one of the fundamental problems with our combat model right now IMO, and yes, removing this option will take some interesting decisions out of combat, and that makes us sad.

That said, it is nevertheless the case that the design team here doesn't feel that explicitly supporting this kind of gameplay by exempting non-supercap ships from the restriction we want to take here is a direction we want to be taking the game in over the medium term. We would rather remove this particular option in the short-term to maintain the importance of pre-fight fitting, and then solve the larger problem of a lack of interesting decisions during combat in the medium term with mechanics that explicitly and properly support such decision-making in the full range of combat scenarios, rather than grandfathering in an exception to the general design intent to leave a small bandaid on a large wound.

We're still listening to the feedback here, obviously, but we feel we have a lot of reasons to be moving in this direction right now.



If you want to discuss it here I'd recommend posting it here

It's a pretty massive set of posts - I actually would in this instance recommend that you read it over there.

Might not be the best solution, but why don't you make the sig ratio work as a fuzzy-miss factor? not just compare the two, but based on the sig comparision ratio shots might (partially) miss with a probability. The more close to the target's sig to the weapons' the chance for this is smaller, when it's the same size or bigger, no misses happens due to this factor, on a lower sigres on the target than on the weapons', a (partial) hit might happen, reducing the damage by a second factor, taking into account the two sigs' ratios.

Combining this with the stacking penalties of targets painter might solve the issue, when properly tuned for the numbers. Damage should scale for the size of the targets, and tracking won't be only relevant attribute. Right now even with a battleship i can volley frigs, which have considerably lower sigs than my weapons'. Seems like a more universal solution for me.

A megathron does not exactly struggle to hit a webbed and scrammed cruiser (and battlecruiser would be a more apt comparison) within optimal of its blasters. It does, however, have problems at close range hitting with, say, rails. And, to top this off, titans are actually a lot more mobile (you know...siege, inability to get webbed, ability to warp in and out if there are no hics or bubbles) than dreads, so I expect dreads to fit the long range weapons more often than titans. Also, a Moros is an order of magnitude larger than a BS and has a larger set of guns. An Erebus (more than) is an order of magnitude larger than that, so why does it not get an even larger set of guns.

Carriers are too small, the macharial is too big. This has been the case for some time. However, titans and supercarriers require an order of magnitude more material input, and as such, should be an order of magnitude larger in size (the difference between a cruiser and a battleship). A supercarrier is a tier 3 carrier if a hyperion requires 15x the material input of a dominix. Not only that, but the idea of a tier 3 ship having 15x+ the hitpoints of a tier 1 ship.

One way I have put it in the past is that volume should be proportional to material input, and that volume is (for ships of similarish dimensions) proportional to lenghth (the cubic root of length, to be precise, v = l*w*h, and if these are proportional...). Given a Titan requires 3x the material cost of a SC (Lets use a Wyvern-Leviathian or Avatar-Aeon comparison, given the (very general) similarity in shape), its dimensions should be 1.44x the dimensions of a supercarrier. Given that a Supercarrier uses 15x the build material of a carrier (For the sake of argument, they have about the same shape), its dimensions should be 2.466x the dimensions of a carrier. Given that a carrier required 10x the material input of a battleship, its dimensions should be 2.15x the dimensions of a battleship. And so on. (At this point, we can calculate that a titan would have 7.63x the dimensions of a battleship, occupying the volume of 450 battleships.)

On your earlier point about diversity.


Have you seen incursions. If you change it, you just have incursions with triage. If there must be a cookie cutter fleet for each (in both cases there is a shield and armor variety), then at least don't make them the same fleet compositions (difference is triage carrier + carrier for escalation only + dreads, you would actually be reducing it to triage carrier + c carrier for escalation only + 2x dreads for escalation only, do you want the sole purpose of dreads in w-space isk making to be to spawn **** and warp off?). Remember, sleeper sights were kinda designed with dreads in mind (ya know, the whole capital escalation thingy).

Anyway, curious as to CCP Greyscale's opinion on XXL turrets and a 1 size lower with webs or (in the case of sieged dreads / idiots burning straight at you or sitting still) immobility (severely low transversal) rule (with XXL turrets set up to have insane weapon sig and tiny, tiny tracking). A dread should be able to hit BS like a BS can hit cruisers (not all that well if you remove webs from the equations). A titan can hit carriers (and useless, moving dreads out of siege) like a dread can hit BS in siege, etc.


Fix local chat and the risk rises a lot. Just sayin'.

Atm, the risk is minimal because they can be aligned out and watching local (with intel channels based on local chat intel). If local was not such a good tool, this story would be different.