Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The concept of ship stealth and detection: incorporating it into every module, every choice!

Imagine if different types of shield extenders increased your ship's signature across various different racial emissions spectrums. The same for various microwarp drives or afterburners. What if different types of armor plates provided lower signatures due to better signal absorption, at the expense of not providing as much EHP? What if passive shield/armor hardeners provided lower emissions spectrum than active did? What if using special (Tech 3?) ammo in your guns caused zero increase to your sig (silenced weapons anyone?), allowing you to quickly and quietly make a kill before anyone knows you're in the area?

On earth, not every ship is a submarine, but every submarine is a ship. In Eve, EVERY ship is a submarine. Some are just more stealthy than others. Dedicated Covert Ops and Recon class ships will have exceptional sensor suites and ultra low emissions in addition to active cloaking capabilities. I would recommend that these active cloaking abilities be of limited duration and require cap/fuel to use, similar to how diesel/electric submarines used to operate. You can "go dark" to sneak up on a target and then attack, but you'll eventually need to "surface" and refresh your air/recharge your batteries so to speak. All other ships simply wouldn't be allowed to cloak. Non Covert Ops cloaks would be replaced with "stealth modules" that would reduce a ship's signature, but wouldn't render it completely invisible/impossible to find like cloaks currently do.

There should be trade offs that would make currently "worthless" modules attractive: do you go for the best fitting, best performance, best efficiency or lowest sensor signature/emissions? Incorporating various sensor emissions capabilities into named modules seems like a good way to differentiate them, mitigating the "bigger is always better" game design that currently exists.

Sensor networking:

In addition to information, sharing it is just as important. Where Corps and Alliances will really benefit is in the sharing of information. If you're in a gang and you have a CovOps pilot with you, what if everything his sensors detected showed up on your tactical overlay? Now he truly is your eyes and ears for your whole gang! What if your ships could fire their weapons at targets he acquired, even though the targets are out of your lock range (but not weapons range)? Indirect fire, so to speak!

What if you're two systems away but an enemy blob arrives and your Alliance has regional and local static sensors installed in that system? You're able to look on the map and notice increased activity two systems over in the past 4 hours and are able to pack up your mining op in time to make it to safety. Unfortunately, the next day the enemy comes back in smaller ships and in fewer numbers and splits up into three different groups, arriving from three separate directions. Unable to detect the smaller ships in fewer numbers from long range, your sensors don't notify you until it's too late and you lose half your mining crew to the invaders.

The inability to manage large amounts of information will inherently limit the size and scope of space that a single Alliance/entity can effectively police and control. This is another positive byproduct of this concept: it will be very costly in TIME to control a lot of space. People will tend to settle on a reasonable and practical amount of space to control and stick with that. Controlling large swaths of space for little or no need will go away as it won't be cost effective to do so from a time standpoint.

Thoughts?

Balance for the first part would be hard. But interesting.

My reply is more geared to the cloak aspect.

Have a script nature on the cloaks. With script in it becomes active style that uses fuel at a set rate. Either like capacitor that needs to recharge to be used again or a consumable fuel based on some racial fuel types, assuming the easiest would be isotopes. When active the ship is the same as cloaks are now but can only do this as long as the fuel is available. In the passive mode no fuel is consumed but it can be scanned down. It would be harder than normal but still possible. So no more afk cloaking. Semi afk would work still.

Recons and Covert Ops would be exempt by ship class from fuel consumption or have a consumption bonus/reduction per level and would be the only ships to be able to.

I like the vision. However, this would tailor EVE to the needs and wishes of exploration-minded players. That suits me, but I think most others would be put off. The majority of players in 0.0 want quick and easy fights, and the majority of people in hisec want to be invincible. The latter will never invest any effort into being less vulnerable, and the former will never want to invest all the effort into intel-gathering.

So I think the proposed changes would reduce conflict and battles to a large degree because people couldn't easily find each other anymore.

The OP's vision is basically an enhanced version of existing w-space. And do you know why so few people want to live there? Because you have to put more effort into your game and things are less easy.