EVE General Discussion

Or battlecruisers.

I think T3 battleships would be so expensive that they simply wouldn't be fielded by the average player. It's not like a titan or a cap of any kind really where there's a reasonable expectation that it wouldn't blow up in a ball of fire if it was caught by a small five man gang.

I didn't notice this until now.

I just plugged it into EVEMon and with a P/W remap training five subsystem skills to V takes the same amount of time as training Heavy Assault Ships to V. Those five subsystems skills only work for one ship, whereas the single Heavy Assault Ships skill works for eight ships, not to mention it helps unlock fleet command ships. This isn't even counting the racial strategic cruiser skill, which of course you only train if you're planning on overheating the ship a lot.

There's also of course the fact that unless you're an idiot and forget to upgrade your clone, you will never lose HAS V once you've trained it, but whenever you lose a T3 you will lose up to a week or so of training time unless you eject - don't forget the upcoming changes to aggression flags and such will make it impossible to eject from your ship for a minute after any aggressive act against another player (so I foresee more risk averse people avoiding PVP in T3 ships now that the skill loss is almost inevitable).

That's part of my point. I'm not arguing for more T3 ships as I think they'd be horribly difficult to find a proper niche that wouldn't be imbalanced, but I don't think the current T3 ships are particularly imbalanced, with the exception of their fleet boosting capabilities.

Its much the same with command ships, meanwhile in the two other t2 cruiser specialisations they pre-nerfed the t3 to such an extent no-one would consider using them as ewar or logi except in the most specialised of situations. Basically the variable role concept was a total disaster.

Well, they are very prominent in W-space, and unless we are talking about farming sites (we aren't), Tengus are rarest T3 there due to several reasons (armored logi gangs, hugging wormholes while fighting etc).

OT: I'd like to see more catchy ships of course, but some aspects of T3 cruisers can be looked at first, I think. Straight-up combat configurations that are basically improved HACs should maybe face some rework while making utility configurations a bit more useful.

Also it would be interesting to see what ideas people have for T3s other than cruisers aside from them being modular.

Thing is that frigates, destroyers and battlecruisers are already the most used and versatile ships in the game. Choose any situation in Eve and you can name at least one frigate/destroyer/battlecruiser for the job so there's no point on adding T3 versions of these ships already extremely versatile and powerful.

Battleships could get more use, the price of these actually has more to do with player actions than the ship it self.
One year ago you could buy any battleship T1 for less than 100millions because there was a real competition at materials level, fake competition because alloys mostly and some bots but whatever, those were affordable even being bad for regular pvp.
However now you have this gigantic change to drone alloys that had no real replacement as we can see, and the so supposed bots everyone was so afraid are still not showing up that much (shreegs last public cleanup was very instructive)
You have then player actions decreasing even more this minerals offer because some can't just mine in peace the way they decided, others because there are by far other activities in the game offering better isk opportunities yada ya.

Actually there's no real competition in minerals market, you have at one side the huge mega alliances alt corporations brainlessly mining for their own sake and on the other every little guy and this includes bots that simply can't get enough to cover their losses because of some mining bot paranoia instated by the same guys doing whatever it takes to control market because of some personal conviction this is possible. (however bots should simply get face raped by competent personnel and not by paranoid players actions leading to such stupid metagame, it's even hilarious to see this happen and the justifications behind it)

So, whatever price this T3 BS would be, this is not and should not be whatever factor of balance because of bad players/corporations/alliances choices.

The problem is simple to solve: you want cheaper ships the you either start mining or you can scam other players isk while keep talking about economic inflation/deflation bots and too much isk in the game.
There is far more consistency in introducing T3 battleships or even transports or carriers than frigates destroyers or battlecruisers because if the price of those is more or less acceptable it's only because of players actions, not the item it self.

Tech 3 != Tier 3

T3 cruisers are so extremely flexible and modular between BS roles and small fast stuff, I think there is really no need to expand this system (yet).

Let's see how T3 cruisers are pushed into the existing lines.

My totally terrible idea that would probably get laughed at if I ever went to CCP Fozzie and other ship designers and proposed it would be frigates with 2 subsystems and battleships with 4.

Not that horrible maybe, but let's wait until the current T3 is in a balanced line with the other ships and then you can claim this idea... Look, I quoted it so it's yours for all time