EVE General Discussion

All weapon share the same range, tracking to a target. You can't group guns that are unalike.

Ships don't. Also, the have different agilities, different top speed, signatures etc etc. I don't know why you think you can just group ships like they were guns.

What is the formation anchored to? At any point you're asking the game to calculate out the formation, check if all the ships are in place, tell ships not in place to move to that place. If it's just anchored to one person, when welp if they turn a bit because the edges of the formation will have to mvoe in a very wide arc, but will immediately be out of formation, losing all bonuses.

With short range ships, attacking an edge means the rest are out of range, and will lose bonus the instant they try to get in range.

Oh, I'm not talking about warping the formation — I'm talking about turning the formation around its pivot point at some leisurely pace, but with a freighter at the very tip of it.

To keep the formation intact and moving as one piece, the server would have to move that freighter at 800m/s around the pivot, and when position correctly, just break formation and warp off.

I'm not sure why you would put your slowest ship at the edge of your formation to begin with. In that odd situation your freighter should be at the center of the formation.

Common sense in your fleet composition would need to apply of course. It would be a poor idea to have your cap ship formation include your interceptors.

Proper composition and positioning of a fleet would actually require some thought to leverage correctly. I view that as a good thing. Of course, for those that don't want to deal with it (or if your gang composition doesn't lend itself well to a formation) you don't have to use it.

Fleetwarps all warp the ships to the same point.

Formations need all the ships to go to different points, which have to be continuously updated.

With an anchor, each ship tells the server which direction is is going. The server doesn't have to calculate where to go, the appropriate direction and then the appropriate speed.

On the one hand I want to support this because it gives DBRB something else to fuckup, but then on the other it's pretty bad for all the reasons mentioned above.
Also that it takes individual control away, which is something Soundwave has said he's heavily against.

HOWEVER any attempt to add in an auto-conga feature would be welcome, because there's always a bunch of 5 guys who just don't get it and follow the lead.

I can see what the OP is getting at, but I lack understanding of the topic overall.

One thing I must admit is this: whenever we see press about big fleet fights, and they show a blob of ships all tangled up, my first impression is how stupid that looks.

My second thought is, how others will see that and also think it looks dumb.

That there are no real maneuvers with the heavies - admittedly at the speed they move why bother? - and they all just pile up and sit there hitting and getting hit probably looks dumb to outsides. To an insider there's more going on of course, concerns about damage, primary, logistics, etc.

This is the thing I don't grasp. If people are to be attracted to the game because they envision something like the fleet battles from Star Wars and Star Trek (assault on the Death Stars, Battle for Deep Space 9, etc), what impression is this "big static blob of ships" going to give them?

It's as if the very appearance of this big selling point un-sells itself.

And how many trailers have we seen where the ships are doing everything but just sitting around?

NO

because you didnt even bother to put it in the right forum (features and ideas) so there isnt much thought in your idea either and its not even worth discussing

The main problem I see with this, and the reason this would add tremendous amounts of processing time to the already beleaguered eve nodes is that space is a 3 dimensional playing field, and it's space.



A 'V' shape wouldn't do here. A cone maybe, but seeing as we're in space, why would a pointed configuration give any benefit to speed or maneuverability? In theory any given formation would be as fast as any other. If you want to optimize damage, then a semi-sphere with optimal range as it's center would probably be best.



A sig radious fleet boost does sound neat and there may actually be a logi/warfare type skill-link that does this. Still we're talking about lines, though and this won't do at all. If you've ever seen the "Ball of death" motorcycle stunt, that would work better here and this can be done manually anyhow.



V's still won't do, and you'd still have to optimize for distance considering the person at the apex would need to have the longest optimal range. Semisphere at optimal would work best again, but I'm against giving bonuses based on number of ships that showed up as a matter of principle.



This is the one that would hurt the server most. The system, right now, does not keep track of where projectiles are, it just calculates whether it hit or not and applies damage. Asking the server to keep track of what's between point A and point B would bog down the system once any decent number of ships started firing. Also, You'd need a bubble because dropping someone above and below a wall would become trivial.



Staggered Logistics ranges does sound neat but in practice would lead to most fleets being "Logi-ball" fleets with everyone staying within various optimal ranges always.


I see where you're going here, and I agree that formations and such would look pretty awesome especially from a tactical overview point of view but pre-set formations take too much control out of the players hands individually for a group numeric benefit that I feel would be detrimental to group play.

I'm no sailor/pilot, but aren't precise formations of ships or fighters mainly good for photo ops and initial approaches anyway? Large aerial or naval engagements aren't common these days, but it's my impression that in the days of close-range dogfights and ships trying to broadside each other with somewhat weak and inaccurate cannon, large engagements quickly became confusing masses of planes or ships maneuvering around each other, formations be damned.

I'm something of an outsider, and shots of EVE battles consisting of numerous ships jumbled together have always struck me more as exciting and realistic than as confusing and silly. If there is a problem, then it probably isn't the ball of ships so much as the lack of differentiation between fleets. Both sides are using more or less the same ships with the same markings/colors, so assessing a large battle from the outside can be difficult. I would imagine shots and footage of a battle between, say, an exclusively Amarrian fleet and an exclusively Caldari fleet, would be much easier for the outsider to process.

Otherwise, EVE battle screenshots and zoomed in footage remind me of the battles in the newer Battlestar Galactica series, which is fine by me (lack of collision damage and Newtonian physics in EVE notwithstanding). ;)

Ok, I'll give in on this point, since it would be mostly an automatic "form list of players" "each ship is keeping the ship above at range" sort of thing. Of course #1 person has to fly manually.