Warfare & Tactics

Blobs firing at one target then switching to the next one is no fun. Not only is the primary guaranteed to die (unless they have five hundred guardians, also not fun), it's boring for the shooters and it's pretty easy to tell at any point who is going to win the fight. It's like watching a status bar. Blob warfare also leads to boring fleet fits, stifling individual creativity and piloting skill.

I would like to see large battles that are more skirmish-like, more fluid, less predictable, more dependent on individual ingenuity--like small gang fights but with higher stakes, way more chaos and a correspondingly larger opportunity to gain the upper hand through effective communication and leadership. A well-organized fleet with five guardians should be able to defeat a badly organized fleet with twenty.

So here's my idea: sensor glare. When targeting a ship that is being targeted by a large number of other ships, your sensors need to "tighten up their aperture" in order to work effectively--like your pupils when you try to look at something bright. You can target that ship like normal, but beware--like your eyes, your sensors will need time to readjust and focus on a new, dimmer target after the first is destroyed. So blob-targeting someone has an inherent drawback: you are basically committing your fleet's targeting power to that one ship. You gain the temporary advantage of full fleet dps but suffer afterwards as you wait for your secondary target to lock.

A mechanic like this would avail fleets that divided their fire between multiple targets, leading to the more skirmish-like situation described above. Multiple primaries means a more granular leadership structure is required, e.g. wing commanders call targets and FCs handle movement and make sure wings have different assignments. Right off the bat this means that no one pilot on the field has full information at any given time, eliminating the status bar situation. Pilots from wing A don't know how close to dying wing B's target is (unless they are very well organized), so situations can shift dramatically in a few seconds. The FC role is critical as always but has less to do with getting people to shoot specific things and more to do with parsing second-hand information, making fleet-level judgements and handling wing commanders.

As a disclaimer I am not an FC nor do I have endless experience in blob warfare, though I think I have seen enough to get the gist of it and notice some non-fun things. This is just an idea that I think would actually work well; it is realistic, relatively easy to implement (think heat but for sensors), jives with the current mechanics of the game and actually has some cool secondary/meta implications. As some parting food for thought, here are a few interesting situations I up with while bored at a conference today:

1. The gate camp feint: If you know a 3-man gate camp is on the other side of a gate and you NEED to get a transport through, you can have a buddy jump through first to (indirectly) dazzle their sensors. They only have three ships and therefore need all the dps they can get, so they all target him (hopefully he is fast enough to get away) but in so doing they commit their sensors to his ship. When you jump in a moment later in the transport, their targeting time is increased just enough for you to safely warp out without being tackled.

2. Wolfpack dominance: Ships with a small sig radius will benefit more from this mechanic than larger ships, especially in large battles. If balanced correctly this might make smaller ships relevant in major fleet fights (hello meaningful AF role).

3. The self-targeting meta-game: If more sensors trained on one target is detrimental to the targeter/attacker, then what about deviously pre-targeting friendlies that you expect the enemy to target? A scorpion is a no-brainer primary in a normal 50 vs 50 fleet engagement. But what if attacking that scorp with half your fleet risked incurring a 75-ship sensor glare penaly for that half of your fleet? This would add another layer of complexity to target calling.

And finally, 4. The desperation all-out assault: Even if it means that no one in your 1200-man fleet is going to be able to target anything for the next year and a half, sometimes you just have to kill that Titan/carrier/whatever. Focus fire at all costs!!

Let's not get sidetracked, I'm just trying to frame the idea. All I intended to say in the passages you quoted( which are just context to the real post) is that there is so much more potential in eve for fleet organization beyond getting as many people as possible into guardians and armor bs. Put another way, bringing more logistics than the other team is a weak form of organization compared to smart fc'ing on the ground.

Just sounds annoying, another gameplay hoop to jump through for large fleets taking sov. Its already annoying enough to FC large fleets in sov fights without having to deal with arbitrary sensor nonsense ******* your target calls.

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

No clue who said that, but your FC are using a tactic that works. And until guerrilla warfare became an accepted tactic, this approach is exactly what all major armies in the war used IRL. Now you're FC is using the same elementary tactic in space 50 million years in the 'future'.

But it works.

IMO, the counter to a large blob fleet with one or two ships calling primaries are:

1. Good Intel (it looks like a blob... it smells like a blob... what's a blob taste like?)
2. Good friends (It's not ****... it's a surprise Titan baby")
3. Good kill-squads (say hello to my suicidal interceptor WWW squadron)

All of these are human factors, not mechanical. ++++

have u read the chronicle about the amarr-jovian war? called the Battle of Vak-atioth or something. What you are suggesting is akin to that. It will be definitely interesting if fleet battles happened like that.

This is a partially solution to the core problem of 'the Blob'. The core problem of the blob is not superior numbers: it the ability to focus fire perfectly.

Take that ability away, and you break the 'one-second-youre-alive, next second-your-dead' problem of larger fleets.

Make it more difficult to focus fire on specific named hostiles or ships, and you open up the chaos of the battlefield. Ship hostile to each other should not broadcast their id's during battle, you should something akin to a fog of war.

CCP likes EVE to be the ultimate SF simulator. Everyone who has seen SF shows knows how space battles are portrayed (even in CCPs own video's): ships weaving in and out of enemy lines, and multiple small battles between individual ships going on amidst the greater carnage.

Allow for more chaos in space battle (overview and broadcasts are major nuisances in this regard) and the better organized and skilled people will have more chance to come out on top vs. superior numbers as well.

Allow for more chaos, and you have a better chance to exploit local superiority (even on grid) if you are a more expert PvPer.

I suppose you are trying to make space fights a little more like 18th century naval warfare. You might have fleets of a hundred ships of the line, but by and large each ship would target a different enemy ship. You would never have a case where all 100 ships of the line targetted the same enemy ship, vaporized him with a volley, then moved on to the next ship.

If they COULD have focused fire like that they WOULD have. And indeed, every time they had a chance to 'double up' and put 2 of their ships vs one of the enemies ships, they did.

However, to get rid fo blob warfare you'll have to implement a much better physics engine that accurately models two important real life concepts:

Friendly fire is possible: if you fire a laser/missile at an enemy but a friendly gets in the way, the friendly takes the hit.
Intercepting fire for a friendly is possible: if an enemy fires a laser/missile at friendly but you get in the way, you take the hit instead.

As long as the weapons being shot are not physical objects that can interact with all the friendly/enemy actors on the field who are also physical objects, I don't think you'll ever be able to solve the completely unrealistic perfectly efficient blob focus fire technique.

That said, there is no way the current engine can support something like what would be needed, so don't get your hopes up. Additionally I have no idea how to make the friendly fire issue work with CONCORD in high sec space, but without it, people can just blob up and fire the hulls of their own ships. There's no need to spread out and form wings, etc, to maximize firepower. So EVE remains, at it's core, a very tactically uninteresting representation of fleet fights that everyone KNOWS is completely unrealistic.

In real life you simply have to disperse or adopt formations so you don't shoot your own friendlies in front of you. Until EVE addsd something like this, I think the focus fire blob will always remain the dominant method of fleet combat.

I think this is a great idea.

Massing fire at a single target is basic military strategy. Given current game mechanisms, the blob firing at a single target makes perfect sense.

Change the game mechanism by making it more difficult to mass fire, and tactics will change. Battles will be more dynamic with many small fights taking place within the larger battle. Lower level leaders will have a much greater role to play.

As a previous commenter stated, the battles will have more of a sci-fi feel to them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

This is an important read. Currently we have in blob warfare, you call primary and everyone shoots at it. This counts as aimed fire, and is covered under Lanchester's square law.

Where the square of the ration of the forces determines the inverse casualty ratio.
example (A)100 vs (B) 50. Ratio is 2:1, So casualty is 1:4. A looses 12 ships, B looses 50

Whats important here is that the skill ratio is linear based while #s is square based. Note that Lanchester's Square Law does not apply to technological force, only numerical force; so it takes an N-squared-fold increase in quality to make up for an N-fold increase in quantity.

So if you are out number 2:1 you need to be 4 times as skilled to take down your opponent.

By limiting the Number of Combatants, were you can only engage and be engaged by X, similar to your 18th century warfare. This follows the linear laws.
In this case the same battle of 100(A) vs 50(B), you'd have a 1:1 ration. Where A looses 50 ships and B looses 50 ships.

People who can mobilise large numbers of pilots and have them fight in a well co-ordinated way should be punished because I don't like losing to people who can use their superior numbers effectively.