Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I would agree with your assessment of the problem, not convinced on your solution, and REALLY don't like having it as an ability, maybe just phrase it as 'jump fatigue' or alternatively
alternatives - massively nerf the range of anything that's able to self-project, with the execptions of BOp's and JF's (those two are designed with travelling great distances quickly), have a timer cooldown on titan bridges after they've jumped through X mass, have titans unable to bridge anything into a system until the cyno's already been up for x minutes (might need to make cyno's longer duration)


though.....
each method of jumping (not warping, and including normal gates) has a multiplier, and the distance you jump is multiplied by that multiplier, so if you chose slow methods of travelling - you can travel more or less all day,
Static jump connections (normal gates, static jump bridges) have a low multiplier
Ships that can't really fight but can jump (BOp's, JF's) have a slightly higher multiplier
using a BOp's bridge has a higher multiplier still, maybe on par with caps jumping
Caps jumping - higher still
titan bridges have higher still
super caps jumping has the highest
multipliers to be determined by CCP but that's the rough idea

PPP is only depleted when you use one of the teleportation mechanics.

Going to your destination by gates will ALWAYS be available. You can do that all day long and you'll keep your PPP at 100%.

That gives a "home advantage". You can't just attack Period Basis from Y-2 at the edge of Fountain. Or actually, you can, but you will spend your PPP way faster than the locals in Period Basis.

The main goal behind this is to make sure that in order to defend something, you want to be close to that territory if not living there.

There are currently huge amounts of undefended 0.0 space that won't ever be attacked (Branch, Pure Blind, Foutain etc), just because the defenders can be there en masse before any meaningful damage can be done. This leads to stagnation. This needs to stop.

If you only take care of cynos or bridging you will change nothing. The big power blocks will simply stash subcaps and capital fleets in their territory and will order their pilots to clone jump or pod kill themself.

The only solution must involve all types of teleportation effects or will fail from the beginning.

In addition it needs of course changes to 0.0 industry so corporations and alliances can actualy live out of their territory. I would also add some more access points from hi/low sec to 0.0 to prevent perma camping a few hotspots.

I feel altering how much can jump to a cyno is a more sensible option then setting a limit on how much you can move in a day? Reason being, again, logistics. People plan moving ops, and a proposal as outlined by Marlona really screws the smaller groups.


The action of setting up various 'stashes' alone is an improvement over the status quo of 'everything in one station, light the beacons!'



There are enough access points. They just require a few extra jumps so are avoided for inconvenience.

A really nice piece of text. Please write more.

Limiting force/power projection is a good thing and making the verse larger is also a good thing.

I've seen methodes in other games to limit some strong weapons or other tools to interact with entities in the game be it other players or objects. The one that appeals most to me ist the overheat mechanic in Planetside2. In this game stationary guns exist, that can put out a load of damage in comparison to tanks, planes, etc. When you fire these guns it heats up a certain amount and cools down if not used. If you overuse them they overheat and and cannot fire till they are completely cooled down.

This might help aswell in eve to allow smaller groups to keep their mobility and hinder large groups to teleport large quantities of ships in a relative short amount of time. To bring up an example it could be possible to limit a teleportation device in a way that a jump of one carrier brings the "heat" to 10%. After one minute the cooldown process starts at a rate of 1% per minute. After 6 Minutes the "heat" would be at 5% and 11 minutes after the jump back at 0%. If you jumped 10 carriers within one minute the teleportation device would reach 100% "heat" and would be unusable for a full 100 minutes. This might apply to a jump bridge. This would also work for a dread if you brought this "heating" to a jump drive. Tie it to a cyno and it could become worthy to have a cyno up for the whole 10 minutes (smaller heat portions and higher cooldown rates required). If then the indivual jump range would be limited to a point where you would have to "burn" your jump drive to exceed the speed of a BS that travels the gate jump way a BS might become more usefull. The "choices and consequences" thing comes in.

Staying with the carrier and comparing it to a BS (perhaps we use the Megathron as it was mentioned in Marlonas great blog article) the carrier clearly can bring more firepower than the Mega.
Let me just throw a figure to make this a bit more readable and say the carrier increases firepower linear in comparison of the Megathron and the Mega should be the more mobile concerning traveling to a destination. To make the Mega faster after some time the carrier would need to have a sustainable jumping speed of making this possibly longest voyage in around 240-270 Minutes (4-4,5 hours) if you dont "burn" your jump drive. This includes the rough increase of 30 minutes from Ceptor to HAC and the next step of 60 minutes from HAC to BS wich would result in either 90 minutes increase (compared to the BS) if you increase the travel time linear or 120 minutes if you use Fibonacci.

Funnily this would give you as the defender of an area an option to quickly respond to threats. As the attacker you would have to plan your moves as your jump drives are more under "heat stress" and if you are too hasty you lock yourself down to a point where you would have to wait a very long time to be able to travel again.

One could also say that caps on jump-cooldown cannot dock so it would put caps at risk while traveling.

The name "jump heat" is surely somewhat arbitrary but I'm far from beeing creative enough to bring up a better one.

Fly safe. :)

We also have almost 100% membership with carriers so we're less affected still. But the issue is wider than that. This IS a game, and should be remembered to be such :)

well considered, and yes the assessment is accurate, but like several others PPP isn't it.

there are several points of neglect in your assessment that i think have caused you to concieve an inadequate soloution.
(most of this is summarised by 'pay attention to the art of war when assessing this in a battlefield context')

first:

you neglect force ratios and deployment context between attacking forces and defending ones

• an attacking force is much easier to deflect, route and destroy than a defending one

due to many factors the primary one being force disposition and availability of both human and material assets - attacking is 3x more costly and resource intensive than defending - thus force recovery and sustainability becomes an inherently high priority for any attacking force.

attacking forces must endure defenders long enough to break them - faster ships can't do this it's not feasible, and heavier ships need to be first moved (hence the importance of jump freighters and carriers) attacking is and always will be an uphill battle if you can't fight something more powerful than you you can't attack. (relativity is very important - you know and have demonstrated this but in a context too limited for your intention)

on the flip side: if an attacking force is too concentrated the defending force must avoid them and strike else where to draw off pressure - if they can't do this they must withdraw in their entirety or are indiscriminately destroyed.

the cynosural concept is there primarily to balance attackers, to lower the barrier of entry when making the 'do we commit' choice.
the jump bridge system and cyno both are there to benefit defenders for the same reason with a different intention "can we get out of the way to recover later?"


Second:

this brings me to the cost, both forces have an amount of resources invested, this is usually AT LEAST double whatever you see on the field at any point - because if what is on the field is destroyed what is not on the field is used to recover or execute the next phase of action.

defenders have higher stockpiles than attackers as covered
both teams have the same access to supply chain logistics, but the local force can produce more without them.

these resources cost very very large amounts of time to establish - often disproportionate to the usage they get as when they are deployed they need to cater for human elements that cannot be quickly catered for otherwise - hence the advent of doctrines, 'prepare for these ships and style so we can cater the resources you need and not spend every cent the alliance has ever earnt'.

when inevitably one side loses, takes a hit too heavy to endure they must withdraw what assets they can, as i said earlier typically this is much easier to inflict upon an attacking force than a defending one but it happens for both depending on the warfare environ as a whole. - these events cannot be readily predicted ahead of time and so rapid response is a MUST.

without the ability to withdraw assets quickly from a broken line the fighting will stop not for days or weeks, but months as losses are recovered - in this purpose the bridge and cyno system is facilitating to reduce cool down to force buildup.

>>

I am fast approaching the word limit so additional sections will have to wait, I'd also like to afford you the chance to consider those first two points before text walling, and'd like to add something of my own on the end.

Force projection negates the "Heavier ships need to be first moved" thing. It's as easy to bring supercapitals as it is to bring interceptors. For coalitions and very large/large and very organized alliances.



There is no reason to "strike elsewhere". The attacking force can relocate very easely and can defend on multiple fronts. Asking the defenders to "strike elsewhere" just means the defenders won't be 100% focusing on defending and that means death.



The jumpbridge system is there to benefit the defenders, that is true. Cynos aren't really used for retreat. What I mean is that well, when you're stuck in bubbles with subcaps, you don't/can't use cynos at all. You won't ask a Titan to come in a bubbled hell to bail your subcaps out. When you're stuck in bubbles with caps, well, it's just an easier way out. Easier and faster than trying to align and then warp-out while praying no dictors/HID is paying attention to you.

Cynos benefit the attacker a lot more, that's what allows him to move from his homeland to the staging close to the defenders' space. And that's what allows him to make fleets literally appear next to the defenders' objective. It's the defenders' region, they don't need Titan bridges to move around. Sure they can use them but they're not really forced to.



Defenders don't always have higher stockpiles. Stockpiles are basically "Things stored at X location". Because of force projection, it doesn't matter where the stock pile is. What matters is how large the stock pile is. It all boils down to "which stockpile is the largest" here.

Both teams have the same access to supply chain logistics, and the local force can't/don't produce anything because importing from Jita is 200x easier/better/whatever. Except for hulls maybe. MAYBE.

Sure, it's easier to move 700 battleships than 700, that's for sure, but it really isn't an impossible task for a massive coalition.

Each carrier can bring 2 battleships. A full carrier fleet (Both coalitions have been able to field that kind of stuff pretty easely) can transport 500 battleships complete with their fittings in one go with monstruous LY ranges. Sure, it will cost fuel and will need a couple cynos. But it is totally possible to do without too much trouble.



The issue is that currently, there is no "breaking a staging system" because that takes days to actually do meaningful damages to SOV. They can drop on you and stop you from doing anything in less than 10 minutes. Your SBUs will be long dead before you can online them, no damage has been done, but the systems you were defending still need to be defended and will still fall.

There is no "fortifying" a system, except maybe putting up a cynojammer.

There is really no effective way to "alleviate pressure" other than rage-camping the attackers' staging. And if you can do that, well, why aren't you winning the war already ?




Well, a defender don't really need cynos before the fights, except maybe for bringing in more war assets from Jita ? Defenders are already fighting at home, they have everything at their disposal. Their only use of cynos will probably be triage carriers for POS-reps or just regular cap hot-drop. Subcaps won't need a single cyno for the defender.

If you're about to be attacked, you can indeed undock all caps/JFs and haul all the stuff you can out of the station. That is true.

If I seem off, well, that's because I don't fully understand what you're trying to say, either I'm really bad at reading comprehension, either there are missing words or missing punctuation =(



True. Individual assets don't really matter all that much in sov wars tho, the only things that matter are doctrine ships and capital ships. Minerals need to be transformed to either doctrine ships, ammo, doctrine modules or caps and that takes too much time in a war. Everything else is irrelevent.

there almost is - i say almost because i haven't seen this implemented well enough to say whether or not it's feasible - however there are new remote cyno jammer structures that can limit where and how a fleet can come in, so if you're able to position behind them not long after an attack gets launched then there is potential - again it's just as easy to use by both sides so will wait and see.
(what i'm really interested in is to see if it 'disables' already lit cynos)


as a side for built up resources and assets yes usually doctrines are the only ones that matter - though if it comes to it a kitchen sink can be made really nasty if flown well ( i say this cuz i know it is a lot of extra work to use - individual's carriers and freighters in particular prove the most useful - larger coalitions say 'fit your own carriers like this and we'll replace em if they die' rather than pre fund all of their own - it's easier to manage) additionally it's often faster to have pilots fly their own gangs and hulls than alliance ships for smaller harassment ops - which takes pressure off of alliance resources so they can be used for heavier fighting.

i do have to agree with the limited options in bolstering other systems in the fortification sense - I did/do see cases where time zones play factors that remove your ability to defend the front line systems however - your reading comprehension's not off that's the basics of what i meant regarding use of defensive cynos it's faster to move mass resources via a titan bridge/several jump capable ships to a ship cyno than through a pos bridge/cyno generator (part of the reason behind the OP - 'too easy to move' i think is the general pretext)


if anything i'd like to see ship borne cynos removed (or atleast made unviable for bridges), perhaps make use of the deploy-able structure mechanic (so a cyno beacon has to be established, set up at the destination and then it can be used to bridge to)

just a timer of a few minutes to setup would be plenty (30 seconds is a large enough window for reaction times) and it'd encourage support fleets to take the field first to establish the beachheads ahead of larger forces as opposed to just a few inties/cov ops