Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Jump drives require you to have a certain amount of capacitor before you can jump. This amount is a percentage of your total cap and can be reduced by skills. Making a jump reduces your capacitor well below this level and you have to cap up again before you can jump again.

This mechanic exists to:

1. prevent jump capable ships from making multiple jumps in a matter of seconds. (limits power projection)
2. provide a way of trapping supercapitals (neut them) which cannot be pointed due to their electronic warfare immunity.

I will outline an argument here for why this mechanic is flawed and not fit for purpose, then suggest an alternative and discuss any problems that may come of it.

Power Projection

If all capitals travelled separately and did not interact with each other, this mechanic would severely limit power projection as intended because they would all have to wait for their capacitors to recharge.

However, this is EVE and we have these things we like to refer to as 'blobs'...

Standard practice when moving capital fleets around is to take carriers with capital remote energy transfers to generate cap out of thin air and speed up the recharging process.

The larger your capital fleet is, the more 'cap carriers' you can bring and the faster you can recharge and jump again.

Conclusion: this particular game mechanic lets larger groups project their power more effectively than smaller groups

So how can we replace this unbalanced power projection bottleneck with a balanced one? Simple. We get rid of the "you must have this much cap to jump" requirement and introduce a new "Jump Drive spool up timer".

The timer would be about 5 minutes (before skills) and would be reduced by the Jump Drive Operation skill (which currently lowers the capacitor threshold that you must exceed in order to jump). It would begin to count down immediately after completing a jump and would be reset every time you pick up a weapons timer or are in siege/triage.

Pros

• The size of a capital fleet would no longer have an impact on how quickly it could make multiple jumps.
• Capital ships could no longer jump away immediately after coming out of siege/triage modes.
• Pilots would have to de-aggress prior to a jump, giving a subtle indication of their intentions.

Cons
There is only one major drawback - supercapital ships could no longer be held down by neuting them. This isn't such a problem in nullsec where they can be held in place with bubbles, but it would make them very hard to catch and kill in lowsec. (As if that isn't already true lol)

Workaround
To me the problem with supercapitals in Lowsec is their immunity to electronic warfare. It's incredibly OP. I want to take it away... but I know I can't, because that's sorta their thing. I propose a controversial halfway measure:

• Remove the "immune to electronic warfare" role bonus
• Give all supercapitals the exclusive ability to fit a new high slot "counter-electronic warfare suite"
• It would be an active module with zero activation cost and zero fitting requirements
• The drawback would be that it cannot be activated in empire space just like bubbles and bombs

Where would this leave us?

More balanced power projection, where blobbing up does not entitle you to move your capitals around faster

Capital ships must de-aggress before jumping out just like subcaps using stargates

Capital ships could not undock from a station and jump away while still invulnerable to targeting

Supercapitals and capitals alike would be able to jump with any cap level once their spool-up timer is ready

Supercapitals would no longer be immune to electronic warfare by default

They would have to sacrifice a high slot and fit a "counter-electronic warfare suite" for that ability

They would not be able to use the "counter-electronic warfare suite" in lowsec, thus making them vulnerable there

OK, I'm done. Hang on, lemme just put the flame-proof suit on... there we go.

Ya its called a HIC

All a HIC can do is point it.

We need capital-size EWAR modules and specialized EWAR capitals.