Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Everyone and their brother will tell you ECM drones are horribly overpowered in game atm. One example that is really telling is the Rokh.

Currently, 5 ec-600 drones with maxed skills has a 27% chance to jam a Rokh. Some people are already like, oh that's not so bad. But then you start looking at probability trees where you start to rule out the chance that the prior jams do not hit until you get a jam and you realize that by the 3rd cycle of the ewar drones, you've reached a 61% chance to jam the Rokh at some point in that duration. The biggest problem is that from the first jam chance to the 3rd jam chance is 10 seconds of time + any flight time.

You then realize that If the Rokh is fighting any ship BS or smaller, it's going to have at the very least a 3-5 second lock time. Because Ewar drones cycle in a certain manner, lets assume the Rokh has a 5 second Relock time. In the period of time where the Rokh lost lock, the Ewar drone gets a new jam chance at 0 seconds past jam, and another hit at the 5 second mark where the Rokh finally get's you relocked. At this point, the laws of probability already put you at a 46% chance to be re-jammed. And 5 seconds later, you're back up to a 61% chance to have been jammed somewhere in that 15 second period of time meaning the rokh might at best get one or two shots off on you.

I chose a rokh because the sensor strength is reasonably high for a BS, and obviously higher than ships under the size of a BS.

What's important to note is that the cumulative effect of probability on a very fast ROF drone in addition to the further stacking at the moment the jam cycle ends + the additional relock time all add up to silly chances to jam a ship over time.



So in order to fix this, I would reduce Ewar drone strength by 50% and Increase the ROF by 2.5 seconds. This provides a slightly longer jam, but also a much larger window between likely jams and smaller stacking over time.







If you're curious about the current probability tree here's how it works for the Rokh:

27% first cycle (5 medium drones)
46% by the 2nd cycle
61% by the 3rd cycle
71% by the 4th cycle
79% by the 5th cycle

In other words, through shear probabilty, you have a 79% chance to be jammed somewhere along the line within the 25 jam attempts by medium drones over the course of 5 cycles each.

It doesn't work the same as ship to ship modules. The reason is that the power of the ewar drone comes from stacking probability over multiple instances.

For 5 drones and 5 instances, with 1 ECCM Grav II, the Rokh Grav str goes up to 47... nearly double, but the chance to jam after 5 cycles is still 56.6%


It breaks down to

15% first attempt
27.75% second attempt
38.5% third attempt
47.79% forth attempt
55.6% fifth attempt

Every time you get a jam, you basically return to the 3rd level of likelyhood due to the way drones work plus lock time.

Small technical details stealing away from purposed meaning.... I forgot how important nerd technicals on a forum were.

No, that would mean medium drones have a 13% chance of jamming a Battleship.... Cruiser class weapon on BS class hull.
Heavy ECM drones would have a higher % chance.

Against another cruiser, they'd have a much higher % chance, vs a frigate, they'd still be silly powerful.

Right now, a Iskur with 5 light ecm drones has something like a 45-50% chance to jam another frigate on the first cycle. Same would be true of any cruiser hull with 25m3 drone bay. How is that reasonable. The strength needs to come down, the cycle time needs to go up.

You get 4x the amount of jam chances in one multispec cycle.... saying that 30% on both is equal is really unrealistic. 5 second drone jam cycle vs 20 second mod cycle is a huge advantage for drones.

show me on the pirate ship where the carebear jammed you and warped away

fit ECCM it works I never have problems in my ECCM fitted mega

Your Rokh should fit a smartbomb.