Player Features and Ideas Discussion

With all this talk about power projection and apex forces, the conversation always lands on supercapitals. They drop on top of you, murderize everything on grid, and jump out without any threat from anyone, save another capital blob.

I have no problems with supers being incredibly strong. You shelled out a lot of time any money for that ship, so getting plenty of use out of it is perfectly fine.

What's not fine is the lack of counter play. From a game design standpoint, counter play is: "if my opponent does A, he has the advantage, but I can do B to try to take the advantage back". Unfortunately, when the only counter to A is more A, whoever has the most A wins.

Capitals have always held a distinct advantage over the myriads of subs in the area of ewar immunity. The idea was quite simple when it was implemented. How could a single tracking disrupter possibly affect something the size of a city? It was then decided that with all their redundant systems, capitals ought to be immune to ewar.

What happened, as a result, was that capitals no longer had to fear one of the main forms of counter play. They removed B from the equation, so the answer to A became more A.

That being said, your incredibly expensive ship shouldn't be counterable by a kid in a Scorpion, but how about 5 of them? 10? 20? 50?

I propose replacing the outright immunity to ewar with a sensor redundancy score. Each ewar effect successfully applied to the ship would knock a few points off the score, but the ship itself is unaffected. When an ewar effect times out, the points come back. If at any point the score reaches 0, the ship's immunity is removed until the score climbs back up again. With a single value, you can simulate the effects of multiple overlapping systems being knocked offline one by one until the ship as a whole is exposed.

This modification still leaves the capital with a unique niche and advantage, but allows a coordinated group of reasonable size to still present a threat. The counter to A would again be a reasonable amount of B. It makes bringing a contingent of sub-capital escorts to pick off some of the small ships an option worthy of consideration.

This also provides a possible answer for what the SoE ships are actually good at. As science vessels, a certain amount of redundancy in their sensors is to be expected. (Though, admittedly, it would be far less than that of a capital ship.) It gives the Nestor a unique roles as a slightly more robust logistics battleship. It at least makes more sense than a ship maintenance bay.

+1. Very interesting approach to the issue.

Supported. We even have certain mechanics that can support this theme. For example; Deep Space Transports have a built-in "immunity" to two warp disruptors or one warp scrambler. A Titan could have +20 warp disruption immunity or somesuch (which would not step on the toes of a HIC).

+1 for feasability, +1 for originality, but -2 because I couldn't find where you were whining over your most recent lossmail and asking for nerfs to whatever killed you.

I like this idea. The e-war immunity never sat well with me. It probably sounded good in theory back in the days when ccp believed cost would limit its numbers. But we know how that worked out lol.


Doesn't have them jammed real easy but doesn't have them untouchable, fair mix to me.

Good idea, but what caught me more is how everywhere they call nestor useless ... after his last changes i think nestor is perfectly fine ... it was designed as wormhole vessel and as one its perfect for its role ... i dont see any reason why should be nestor changed to fit into 0.0 roles ... you have black ops wormholers cant use, so why shouldnt wormholers have ship designed specially for them? why should be everything only about 0.0?

As a pilot of Falcons, Blackbirds, and even the ugly ducking of the Scorpion, I give this a +1.

Please let there be some ewar other than damps!

And let the Supercaps fear the recons.

Given the proposed jump range changes and the expected fragmentation of null, this might also lead to some interesting fights.

As an example, we could take the current state of affairs with HERO and Provibloc. HERO uses a lot of members in subcapital ships and was doing well against Provi's subcapital fleets, flipping system after system until the heavyweights took notice. They began to drop blobs of capitals on them at their leisure, halting the advance in its tracks.

Most expect drops like this to become rarer, and overall they would be right. Roaming fleets of supers will be replaced by smaller, less mobile fleets. Multiple capital fleets in the same area won't last long and eventually they will distribute themselves out, dropping on subcapital fleets entering their general vicinity. I expect these kinds of encounters to be more common as low sec and even some high sec corps try to chip away at pieces of sov, large coordinated groups of pilots getting overwhelmed by a much smaller force of capitals left over from the Great Dominion Arms Race.

With the possibility of ewar, the large, sub-capital group still stands a chance, provided they do everything right. (which is not an easy task) The result is more fights where each side still has a chance, and people can still hold the advantage over others without completely outclassing them. This could very well result if more "gud fite"s.

An original idea without any whine that makes sense and people agree with? What is this madness?

And that's part of the beauty of this solution. It's not too far off from what the players already know, and it's a numerical stat, meaning CCP can adjust it at their discretion to decide how many cheap scramming frigs it takes to hold a Nyx. If the HIC isn't seeing use any more, they can pad the number a bit to increase its viability. It's a very flexible change.