EVE General Discussion

I guess smaller is more boring because you get kicked about by people with friends?

In real life it works that way? Well maybe in a bar brawl. As you or someone else said EVE fights are direct combats, all bring what they have. It's a kind of ancient warfare. Find a field the conduct your fight and that was it, more or less.

But even in the good old days we had:

• superior tacitcs - not applicable in EVE since the fog of war isn't dense enough
• terrain - we find that in EVE just by the jump lanes surely not enough to turn the tide
• technical superiority - techwise the ships&moduls in EVE are more or less equivalent, not the thing to give you a real edge

(more could be added to that list if i thought of it longer)

Your it's in the rl world so doesn't hit that well. As i said before EVE is no rl world simulation. Take the flight mechanism of our ships. That isn't spaceflight it's submarine. They took it because it required less adaption of the player.
But players adepted to a ton of other rules. The SOV mechanics for example. That can be changed or replaced.

Going back to pre-Dominion SOV-systems won't change anything.

The current system favours numbers and doesn't provides anything to counter them. That being said, it's no wonder some rage about afk cloakers. Since disruptive actions are the only thing left to do something against numbers.

I second this. No, no and no to anything that has to do with diminishing or boosting returns based on numbers save that for modules in a ship. EVE already has all the stats required for numbers being either an advantage or disadvantage depending on what you want to do. It is just a matter of implementing it properly.

Well, to be fair EVE sort of have this as well. As long as numbers are not too extreme there are still cases where the outnumbered ones win due to better teamwork and planning and all that. Rooks and Kings are good examples for instance. It's just a bit too bad that it is larger scale cases we are talking about. It would not work for smaller cases with smaller ships since their nature is entirely different, yet these are the ships that are flown by smaller corps.

Yes, it does. If you look at the history of warfare and find a significant number of examples of an *invading force* defeating a defending force 10 times larger than it, I will eat my hat.

There's a reason why nearly all the examples of "overcoming immense odds" are defensive. (And not nearly overcoming 10-1 odds).

Flip it around to be similar to the RL examples of the "little guy winning", and a 500 man group in EVE could likely keep a system from a 1000 man group, if they used the SOV mechanics wisely.



1. Absolutely applicable to EVE. But expect your tactics to be copied quickly.
2. Do it right, and the grid or a gate can be used to turn the tide of a fight.
3. Take a look at some R&K videos and tell me that technological superiority doesn't give you an edge.




Everything in the world ever favors numbers. It's why we remember the Battle of Thermopylae (even though, strictly speaking, the Greeks lost that battle) and David beating Goliath. They're rare examples of the little guy not getting stomped into the ground.

You keep dodging the prime question. Why shouldn't numbers bring an advantage to a fight? Numbers bring an advantage to everything in the real world.

Sure, the SOV mechanics can be improved. Not saying they can't. You're saying they should be changed to remove (or limit) the advantage that numbers bring, and I'm saying that, even if I were to grant that that would be a good thing (I won't), you cannot do that without the resultant mechanics being contrived, stupid, and trivially exploitable.

As you say yourself in your next post, making David winning Goliath etc. made the news for how rare it was.

Instead, in other games a small group going to bait and even tease a large blob is so normal there are no "R&K" videos of that. Most videos of those cases come out because of an expecially executed or ludicrous manouver that is worth recording not because of a small group going against a large one. In EvE you really have to go after Garmon super-cases to find such examples.

Finally, about collision, I take it you have not seen what's possible with *real* collision detection. Collision mechanics being "usable" is all another level compared to consistently using them to take a great advantage (i.e. body blocking narrow passage ways, funneling, drawing DPS away....).

Nope. The new world was primarily "Conquered" by disease. In North America, for instance, the series of plagues that spread from Hispanola and other sites of first contact wiped out over 90% of the population (in some placed mortality was around 97%). (There's a reason why the Skraelings easily drove off the Viking attempts to settle, while the British settled relatively easily and described their use of plowed and cultivated fields available for their use).

Cortes described having to literally walk on the bodies of the corpses (dead from European disease) lining the streets of Tenochtitlan.

The Boxer Rebellion had nowhere near a 10:1 size disparity.

And most of the rest of the British Empire came about through their vast technological advantages (I guess I should have mentioned that Gun vs Spear fights don't count, unless you want me to count the times people Smartbomb 10+ Mackinaws in an Ice belt).

(Oh, and the Mayan civilization started its final decline into warring cities in 1450, and completed it well before the Spaniards got anywhere near them, so they really don't serve as an example.)



And? This topic started on how smaller groups can hurt larger ones. Now you've decided that smaller groups should be able to take Sov. Why?



Hey, China's economy is competing pretty well with that of the US (which has a 50+ year head start on industrialization).

You're grasping here.



What are you talking about.

Propose a Sov mechanic that reduces the advantage that numbers bring that isn't contrived and easily exploitable.

Second, answer the main question: WHY Should 100 Guys be able to take Sov from 1000 who are actively defending it?

Considering WHs are here for smaller corps to prosper without blob-fare, the "land owning" is not an issue.
Considering WHs are here for smaller corps to prosper, CCP spent their good time to cater to them too.

So the only thing left out is "PvP on the field", and a game favoring the large mass of blobbers is not really a team play game. Sure, you can call a flash mob "a team" but that's not exactly the concept of "team" most people (expecially PvPers coming from other games) have.

Because they're "better"? I wonder how many of this mindset stems from people who wrecked a bunch of huge carebear corps in highsec/lowsec and can't figure out why the same tactics won't work in null sov space where they can't play station games or use neutral alts (serious question).

Size does matter in this game and large groups have compounding advantages over smaller ones. It's not a matter of two heads are better than one. It's a matter of one head is one head and two heads are three heads, because EVE says so.

Boosts: How is it that one dude in a Drake has x shield HP, y targeting range, and z agility, whereas, that same dude, in something EVE calls a "fleet" has m*x shield HP, n*y targeting range, and o*z agility? There are skills, modules, ships, and implants that boost a whole multitude of attributes. There might as well be gang links to increase your cargohold and reduce your market tax. The more players you have, in such a scenario, the easier it is for one to justify specializing to do this "fleet boosting". As far as I'm concerned, the whole "Leadership" skill tree should be thrown in the garbage. Either that, or let that one dude in his Drake be in a fleet of one dude, and have m*x shield HP, n*y targeting range, and o*z agility.

Fratricide: The larger a force one has, the more one should have to think about friendly fire. If I am alone, behind enemy lines, I can shoot in any direction at anything resembling a target and the only thing I need to worry about is revealing my position to the enemy. However, if I am at the center of a writhing blob of friendly ships, I should maybe have to . . . watch where I'm shooting. Communication with my own guided munitions and drones could easily be disrupted by enemy and friendly transmissions, as could my ships sensors. Area of effect (nuclear weapons) and directional weapons (napalm) could devastate a formation without any sort of target "lock" to warn us. Not to mention an enemy or group of enemies simply putting on our uniforms (spoofing our ship transponder signals) and laying waste to us while they simultaneously broadcast S.O.S.es on our frequencies.

Mobility: One guy cannot always move faster than ten guys, but it is far less likely that ten guys can move faster than one. Unless he's maimed or defending something, that one guy can always make decisions and mobilize to action more quickly, and he doesn't have to regroup if he changes his mind. EVE's solution to this "problem" is propulsion jamming and interdiction. So, you activate a module to make that one guy slow enough for the ten guys to catch him. Well, in a scenario where one guy has to move as slowly as a gang of ten, guess who has the advantage.

Logistics: EVE ships essentially move around for free. Jump drives and whatnot use fuel, but your average grunt in a battlecruiser just has to worry about having his ship fitted with enough ammo in the cargohold. That differs considerably from the real world, where, if you walked to the fight, you can walk out, or somebody might even be able to carry you out. If you drove a Humvee to get there, as long as you don't break down, you probably have enough gas to drive home. If you drove a tank to get there, you're maybe going to need a second vehicle just to carry your fuel and ammo. If you flew an F-15 to the fight and you run out of fuel, getting back to where you came from is the least of your worries. I would be curious to know how many Titans have been stranded because they didn't have enough fuel to get home.

Stealth: "Knowing is half the battle." If you can prevent your opponent from knowing who you are, how many you are, what your intentions are, or that you are even there at all, you are half way to victory. I read an article recently about a North Korean soldier who walked across the DMZ, one of the most heavily defended borders on Earth, and the South Koreans didn't detect him until he knocked on the front door of one of their military installations. That was easier for him to do because it was just him. Is something like that possible in EVE? Should it be?

Time: Time is on the side of the larger and/or more passive group. They need time to organize, coordinate, understand, etc. Things like logistics ships, which dump ungodly amounts of HP into friendly ships for enemy ships to chew through, things like ECM, which basically give you a 20 second timeout, things like titans, with their millions of HP buffers, not even counting active tanks, things like POSes, with their day long cloaks of invi . . . errr . . . reinforcement timers, these all give defenders time to respond. So, if it takes a 5 man battlecruiser gang 20 hours of non-stop DPSing to do something that "matters", the mission is probably FUBAR. In the real world, 1 bullet, 1 bomb, 1 single piece of information could be all that is required to clear an objective. Why could not one dude in a stealth bomber just fly up and push the off button on a Territorial Claim Unit?