Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Neat thing is you don't have to do any of that. You can just sit and do things until the notification pops up and then you know he's bit the hook. No chance of warping off into the sunset when you are strapped to a structure.

Not sure how thats any different from current sov. I would argue its not even related to sov. Camping undocks and running away when the heat shows up is something you can do right now.

They're casting spells on the structure? Looks like they've put their ass on the table, so it's time to go for the kill, or wait until the next timer, if you're unlucky enough yo lose the fight.


Oh dear, it looks like people are actually going to have to defend their space instead of waiting the better part of a week to batphone as many dudes as possible. Poor (former) sov owners. Maybe it's time to start condensing.

It will become quite difficult to troll someone's space when there are over a dozen people in system.

I don't really do null, but the concern in general seems to be over small, fast ships ducking in and out. Why not just make it like the other siege-y things and give the ship using the module a velocity penalty of -100%. Sure, you can get into a system easily on an interceptor, but you're not speed tanking anything if you can't move. Or, you know, give a static sig penalty and speed reduction so small ships are possible to hit before they inevitably warp out and pen15 in local.

You need to get used to the idea that this system is designed for people who like 'content'. Either the attacker gets 'content', or they get your space. Or both. Maybe with Lazors.

ECM is going to be stupidly powerful against these suckers. If I'm running 3 ECMs with only a 5% jam chance each (example, my Falcon against a sensor strength ~300, or an unbonused ECM against 72-90 strength on-racial or 24-30 off-racial, depending on skill in Signal Dispersion), which is really easy to reach, I'd have a 60% chance of jamming a target at least once in a 2 minutes period.

And that's with only 3 ECMs with a 5% jam chance each. In a more realistic scenario (say, a Falcon with a full rack of 6 on-racial jams from a depot and Information booster links, ~17 jam strength per jammer) against a local ECCM'd HAC (~50 strength), I'd have a 99.99997% (yes, really) chance of jamming him at least once in that 2 minute warm-up period. Alternatively, I could just wait for him to finish the warm-up, then start jamming, and still have a 99.3% chance of jamming him within the first 20 seconds of his actual progress cycle. Now he spent 4 minutes (and 2 cycles of fuel) to gain maybe 1% progress (~5 seconds, since there's about a 95% probability of a jam on the first cycle) toward capture of the target.

Unless they block external EWAR (jams and damps, not neuts), ECM is going to be essentially a hard counter to these. I mean, even without warfare links, a pair of Falcons could decloak, lock, jam, and warp to safe in under 12 seconds, from 90km away (1 falloff out of optimal = 50% "miss" chance), and have a 95% probability of disrupting the link with essentially no chance of reprisal.

As usual, damps are a hard counter to jam sniping. However, a Maulus by default only has an 80km lock range, and even at perfect skills only reduces the lock range of a Falcon to about 75km with a single damp. If a pair of Falcons decloak, the Maulus will almost certainly lock them before they lock the Entosis ship, but only if the Falcons are in range (and they can jam reasonable effectively out to even 100-110km). If the Falcons are in close enough for the Maulus to damp, a single damp won't do the trick anyway, and the Maulus can only carry 3 (plus prop mod).

And that's with perfect damping skills. A Keres would have a better time of it, of course, as would either of the Recons, but the point remains. I'm not saying that ECM is without counter, but the decloak-jam-warp concept using a gang of 1-3 Falcons can basically completely block the Entosis with no need to control the grid, without a very specific counter being deployed just to block that sort of attack. Would seem to me that the link should carry with it EWAR immunity.

You like Jammin', don't you.

The only problem I have with it is that the Entosis Link is stuck in the "on" state until it finishes cycling. If you jam the ship 10 seconds in, they are still stuck there for another 2 or 5 minutes, unable to warp, not affecting the capture target (with another 2/5 minute warm-up before they can), with a penalty to agility and no possible remote assistance. Just from one simple jam. No other module in the game has that much penalty from a jam. The only other module in the game that anchors you in place that doesn't provide EWAR immunity is using the bubble on a HIC, and that doesn't require a target. Siege and Triage both make you immune to EWAR (and remote assistance), and Titans are simply naturally immune to it (since their DD anchors).

I see EWAR immunity as the simplest option, tbh. The other option is to make a successful jam instantly end the cycle, but that's exploitable in the other direction (friendly jams to quickly end a cycle and save the link ship). EWAR immunity would only be exploitable insofar as fleets near one of those modules could all fit and activate Entosis Links to block hostile EWAR, but since that also blocks friendly assistance, prevents a fair amount of tactical movement, and requires either a fairly significant chunk of cap and PG or requires the target to remain in a fairly limited range of the Entosis targe, I don't really see this as much of an exploit. It's also worth noting that it's a very valid tactic to have many ships activate links on the target as a way of increasing the number of ships that need to be killed to shut down progress, and reducing the impacting of losing any single Link ship. Logi could potentially use it to prevent EWAR, but the cap/PG penalty or the range restriction (not to mention the block on incoming cap transfers!) would end up being painful, as would the block on warping.

I just seems the best of all options to block EWAR with the link active. The alternative of letting a single ECM completely screw a person out of 4-10 minutes of time (since a jam within the first 5-10 seconds of the second cycle is essentially just as effective as jamming during the first) is just too powerful.

And I say that as someone who preferentially flies Falcons as my standard cloaky and Blops ship. I will admit that part of this is self serving, however: I foresee the potency of ECM on these links causing a massive increase to the already annoyingly large outcry against ECM. I'm trying to address the issue before the solution becomes "nerf ECM into the ground".



It's my dearest love, actually (seriously, 10.7m SPs in Electronics)

I see your points. But still think that it goes too far in what you propose.

As stated in the design goals:
"The Entosis Link itself should have the minimum possible effect on what ships and tactics players can choose."

Now, lets say I escort my entosis ship with, hmmm, 2 or 3 Keres with a sebo on each. We will most likely lock and nullify your Falcons tactic with little difficulty. This was just my first thought, I have no doubt other counters would be readily applied as well.

If the entosis-enable ship had a natural resistance to EWAR like a Marauder for example, then that would be conferred by the ship. The link itself should not have that effect on the ship in my opinion.

This is your issue. How do you fix this, without it being abused by the attacker to "bail out" of an entosis cycle?



This is a better solution. The effect of the entosis link on the timer must be suspended as well while target lock is lost.
It does fall within the design goals

One thing I'd like to see a clarification on, which multiple people have discussed, is the role and effectiveness of EWAR against Entosis mechanics - both during the warmup cycle, and post-warmup cycles.

From the op post:



So during the warmup cycle, you must maintain a lock on the structure. That sounds reasonable. Because you can't receive remote assistance, you can't receive Remote Sensor Boosters to increase range when using the T2, or Remote ECCM to counter ECM jamming attempts. This means EWAR can be used against you to break your lock and you would have to fit your own countermeasures on your ship, such as ECCM or Sensor Boosters. There are both mid and low slot modules for these, so it's fairly balanced to take this into consideration, although armor setups will have a slight advantage as the midslot versions have a higher bonus.

So far so good. Where I see a concern is the first point - "Requires a target lock on the structure to have any impact". If this applies post-warmup, you still need to maintain a lock on the structure to continue Entosis, this means one lucky jam will reset all progress and you will have to re-lock the target and start the warmup cycle over again. If all progress can be reset by one lucky jam, that seems overpowered and an easy strategy to abuse.

Can we confirm if post-warmup cycle, the target lock on the structure is still required to exert influence on the structure? I would prefer to see that once you are successfully "linked" to the structure by completing the warmup cycle, that "all that matters is that your module stays active". This would mean that all the ship with the Entosis module needs to do after the warmup cycle is stay on grid within range of the structure for the module to continue to cycle, and tank any incoming damage without being able to receive remote assistance.

This gives a window to disrupt any new Entosis attempts during the warm-up cycle with EWAR, but if the warmup cycle completes successfully, the strategy then changes to pressuring the linked ship with enough damage to voluntarily end the Entosis cycle so it can warp off or receive remote assistance, or risk being destroyed before ending cycle. If the ship does come out of Entosis to receive reps, it is then vulnerable again to EWAR as it goes through the new warmup cycle. This seems fairly balanced to me.

Having the target lock be irrelvant after warmup also makes refitting during an Entosis attempt an interesting dynamic. After the warmup stage completes, refitting EWAR countermeasure modules for more tank could be favorable. If this is something that could be abused, we may want to look at disabling refitting while an Entosis module is active.

The other slim use case I was thinking about was using Mauraders in Bastion Mode to initiate the warmup cycle. Since they are immune to EWAR while in Bastion Mode and receive increased tank for 60 seconds, the survivability of completing a 2x Bastion Mode Cycle with a T2 Entosis Module would be fairly high without enough DPS on field to pressure the battleship. Although not a common occurrence, Remote ECCM Burst from Supercaps can still disable a target lock on targets normally immune to EWAR.

Just some other things to think about when considering the role of EWAR in the Entosis mechanics.