Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With the recent mining ship rebalancing haulers should get a makeover too. When an unfit retri and a mack flown without any modules have more total space (yeah I know, only for ore - thx Chewbaccalee) than - let's say a fitted mammoth - it is time to rebalance. So here I collect some of my ideas:

-Balancing with other ship-types

1. The easiest and non-invasive way to balance mining ships and haulers would be to just give haulers more cargo-space. I would say around 50k fully fitted... this would also correspond well with the in-game size of a mammoth compared to a mack or retri.

2. Give haulers an additional "goods-hold" much like the ore-hold for mining ships where everything except ore can be transported. One can argue that some goods need small, air-conditiopned compartments unsuitable for raw ore *blah*

3. Play around with an all new ore-hauler, so I did not train that skill for the noctis alone :P perhaps a mini freighter with 60k or something like that

3a. Ore-Hauler: Take the Primae hull and expand on it. Make two hauler varients, small natural cargo bays but one with a Raw Materials bay + refined materials bay (say 60km3 for raw ore / gas / minerals, 20-30km3 for refined minerals / gas / ice products). The second one would be a supped upped Primae, with a command center hold and large (40km3) Commodities hold. (thx Patrice Macmahon)


-Balancing haulers amongst their kind

1. small t1 - smaller cargohold but make them faster as fast cargo runner with near insta-warp

2. med t1 - make it a specialty ship for hauling cargo with the extra cargo-hold -> so no ore hauling here

3. large t1 - make it a large slow ship that can haul everything up to 50k - much as it is now only bigger!

4. fast t2 - leave them but rebalance so all 4 get up to 10k cargospace and can cloaky haul a bc with a little extra through space (yeah it's mostly the prowler)

5 hard t2 - make them über-tanks... if some ship has to bull through a gate camp and is meant to not die instantly please streanghten it further atm it is near useless (at least for me)

6 more high slots for blockade runners to make them more useful in black-ops fleets (Mr Hyde113)



-Wild Shots

1. Spice up the cargo-space: Why not fit haulers as massive carebear-gankers: badgers of doom extended. Devise extra rigs for haulers that make them a little better as deathtraps for trigger-happy pirates :P This is a wild shot but I loved the vids with the hulk of doom... why not allow for some hauler teeth too?!

2. Add a special hauler with subsystems yay! so it is more a large combat transport, perhaps with a cov-ops cloak, with fleet modules, triage, etc. DO IT! There must be more out there than the Orca :P

3. "Farmers Market in Space": semi-stationary trade ships for sys without stations (link below)

4. Cargo Drones - loading up your stuff and transport it 10 sys max to another station (and are fully shoot/lootable) on the way (thx Lokoboto)

5. Strategic Industrial (t3) - More customizable indys / a use for high indy ship skills


These are my 5 cent on this topic - I would love comments and feedback!


Cheers,

your friendly supply runner,

gecko

P.S. There is a post out there that has a slightly different take on things so I will include the link:

An odd idea on the industrial ship revamp.
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=226948

I think that's necessary too. As I see it, it's the only way to revitalise the smaller/beginner versions of the t1 haulers. That said, there should def. be a rebalancing of the space - could also be a special goods hold much like for the miners, which can hold comparable amounts (35k m3 min). That said, nerfed haulers with large cargospace should still be usable in low and 0.0 (besides being the perfect loot pinatas).

I also think a t3 indy would be fun. See this post:

Strategic Industrial - More customizable indys / a use for high indy ship skills
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=228195

i dnt know how they are going to approach the asymmetry between races, but i hope its not going to be to give odd and unique traits that may well be amazing or useless to ships that only one race has access to.

surely a very very simple idea would be to have 3 haulers for each race. and to upgrade/sidegrade/downgrade itty 2's to 3's and itty 4's to 5's.

If CCP really want to balance haulers they need to get rid of cargo expansion modules.

Haulers and blockade runners currently exist and fill their intended roles. You have cloakies that can navigate Null sec with impunity (relatively), and blockade runners that can haul more and run low sec relatively easily.

*EDIT* With the advent of covert Cyno's going into place, I DO support cloaky haulers getting two high slots like the prowler*

Both ships are able to easily transport necessary quantities of ammunition, ship modules, and relatively small loads of frigate and cruiser sized ships without too much of a problem.

From a factional military stand point, they fill a military logistics role very well. As for large bulk movements between 0.0 and low sec / high sec, you have the coveted, ever expensive jump freighter, and for large scale alliances / corporations, does an excellent job at moving mass quantities of anything back and forth out of Jita.

BUT.....

With the advent of ORE literally being re-worked and monopolizing the mineral and raw goods production (They even have the only bonused gas mining ship), it should fall to ore industrials and ore industrials alone to save the day and handle their massive metric volumes.

Rather than re-working or re-twinking the existing logistics pattern, why not expand ore to address this role, give them a sweet spot niche, and go from there.

Take the Primae hull and expand on it.

Make two hauler varients,

Both would have pathetically small natural cargo bays


Give One with a Raw Materials bay + refined materials bay (say 60km3 for raw ore / gas / minerals, 20-30km3 for refined minerals / gas / ice products). Cargo sizes would ofc be after putting the Ore industrial skill to V.

The second one would be a supped upped Primae, with a command center hold and large (40km3) Commodities hold.


As for filling the blockade runner niche for ORE. Ore doesn't fly through combat zones... Let them fill another niche and allow for a less expensive method for getting raw materials to and from high sec, abit at a reduced cost and much smaller scale than traditional jump freighters:

T2 Jump Industrials. Take the above ship types (only able to hold decent amounts of base materials, not modules), and slap a jump drive on it. Ta-Da! It's the ultimate blockade runner, limited in scope, very specialized, and somewhat affordable for smaller conglomorants. Leave it relatively weak and vulnerable, only one utility high slot, still has to use a dedicated cyno ship. No cloak, no built in WCS.


I did a more detailed explination in my own thread before finally stumbling onto yours: Dustin Off The Primae - Industrials with a Role

Would love to get your feedback.


As it stands, current industrials do fill a mass trader, military logistics boats and stargate to stargate movement role in 0.0 and low sec.

Some of the balancing needs issue too. Does Galente really need 5 industrials when everyone typically uses either ItyIV or V? Nah.

But as for the massive new ore holds on the Miners, lets make a specialty ship for that and hand it over to ORE. I like the bestower / ITY V with it's massive cargo holds. You start adding ORE bays to it and CCP will naturally start stripping that massive hold size away from us, making other trade / military logistics more difficult.

Just my two cents. ^.^

A good cloaky hauler pre-positioned at a halfway point can do wonders on the flexibility and range of a BLOPS fleet. Not to mention a group of bombers supported by a 'combat' industrial with loads of extra bombs and torps can help make short work of blockade units, un defended jump bridges, and in some cases, stations.

Combat logistics is just that. Part of combat. An army moves on it's stomach, and lots of ships eat fuel and ammo like starving rabbid wolverines.

Just because it doesn't have a torp launcher doesn't mean it's not vital to sending thousands of torpedoes down range.

The ability to have it light a covert cyno further solidifies it's ability to be just that - a Cove Ops support ship. Your gonna leave the boat off grid for re-supply anyway, why not allow it also be the becon for more BLOPS style reinforcements?

Covert Cyno's are essentially a cheaper, more available version of a titan bridge that has severe ship limitations. If your willing to hot drop that many relatively fragile ships, go for it!

Even rookie ships can fit a normal cyno, so why not any covert cloaky light a covert cyno?

Yeah, no problems!

I like that your collecting the industrial threads. Hopefully you can get a dev to put this on the common proposals to help centralize this discussion.

^.^

I reported the thread for inclusion into the idea-list. When that's done, we can send it on it's way ;)

Cheers,

gecko