Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Light command ships are the T1 Battlecruisers.

A command ships require this extensive and time intensive outstanding skill tree outside the usual skill forest because they fill a very special role. Underwhelming links or skill boosts for the fleet are not even fine for most small fleets where only your maxed boosts give you an edge over blob fests like Brave, Provi, CFC or other entities who rather fight skill with numbers than with skill. If underwhelming links/boosts are enough for your fleets -- and that's the case for most newbie fleets, who long for small skirmishes only --, the T1 Battlecruisers are good for you or basically anything because the Non-Specialist Leadership skills are meant as pure skill-based boosters. If you want more, you specialize in the Leadership skills and train the specializations. This is exactly what the community applauded with much hooray when CCP announced their shift from generalization to specialization, as far as I remember.
However, if you are not after underwhelming links/boosts, you ought to specialize quite a bit in leadership and get your skills there up to maximum possible/feasible level in that area of expertise. After all, you don't want to sit in a ship that expensive and not be able to give your fleet the best possible love there is in order to ensure its survival and victory. That is the CS' primary role and that is what you train for, and for that role the prerequisites aren't even enough as T1 Links don't cut it in these days and ages. I furthermore don't see the long skill training time as a problem as this forces people to also train up the mandatory support skills to fly these ships and remain with the fleet for a very long time. There is no use in a command ship with paperthin tank, no agility, no speed, insufficient fitting capabilities because it can't provide what the fleet needs and it will get ripped apart with ease and leaves the fleet behind in a very disadvantageous situation. If this is fine for you, T1 Battlecruisers are what you are looking for. If not, you train these skills after you made sure that your CS is going to be the diamond brick on the field it is supposed to be. CS are an advanced feature of the game and new players have no reason whatsoever to sit in it, absolutely no reason. There are a lot of things that new players, or younger players, can do in the game but ensuring a fleet's survival on the field by means of providing essential bonuses does not belong to that category.
I also do not think that the skills should be commandship specific; so that the Damnation/Absolution only require Armored/Information warfare specs and no other specs. It might not matter much in big fleets as there are several different links available which are better than the skill based bonuses, however, in smaller fleets where you maybe only have 1 booster, the skill based bonuses also add up to your advantage and therefor should be trained. Furthermore, Commandships is still a general skill and not divided by races, which means that you train all these Leadership skills in one go and then have access to all the commandships without having to start training again for another branch in the leadership tree when you want to fly a Vulture or Eos instead of your Damnation, their prerequs already met of course.
If you are only after the combat capabilities of Absolutions, you now look at a couple of days less training time than it used to be prior to the skill changes. These fleets are also anything but completely out of a new/young players league as they require expert skill levels in all the support skills. Such an, probably in your and other eyes, unattractively long skill training time for the commandships drives those people away from them who do not have the required skills for them to begin with, both in terms of SP as well as Player Skills (PS), and gives those people something to train for who have reached a level where meaningful skills become scarcer and scarcer to train. However, it gives both a very meaningful milestone to long for: for the new players it's this very important ship to fill a new expert level fleet role and make the fleet's performance depend on them; and for older players it gives them a meaningful and time consuming new thing to train once they reached a point where Mining or Trade is the only thing left for them to train.

/WOT

*brushes a tear away*

Industrial Command Ship known as an Orca, require two weeks in avg. to train and able to fly.

Command ships, more than two months.

Elita, I like your sweet talking, btw. I normally can't get people to do it if I ask.

Lest we all forget, the reason they did this was because they wanted the training time to be roughly the same, but they wanted players spending that training time on skills that would actually be useful for the ship.

After all, before this change, you had to train both HAC IV AND Logistics IV if you wanted to be able to fly all of the command ships - skill requirements that made absolutely no sense, because they offered no benefit at all to the hulls in question.

The design logic was covered in a very long dev blog by CCP Fozzie.
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/the-great-skill-change-of-blessed-2013/

Nevermind, all, I'm over it. Having slept on it, I think I'm looking for an explanation where there's none to be found.

As long as none of them will have the ability to drop sentries.....

Command Ships take slightly more training than a HAC does and slightly less training than a Marauder does.
There is no 'exceptionally long train'. They fit right in the middle of Cruiser and Battleship training times.
The training required is just a branch that not so many people bother specialising into, as is appropriate for command ships, and they are a speciality ship.

Thank you, dear!
It came to my attention that I can sound condescending or rude and I thought we girls need to stick together

xo

command ships require you to use basic t1 links not t2