Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Solution #1: Distance from epicenter.
The further your ship is from the epicenter, the less damage you take. Simple as that. Just like falloff, there's only a slight reduction in damage at first, then it becomes dramatic, with it tapering off at the end.

Pros: This system rewards skillful play for both the bomber pilot and the potential targets as the bomber attempts to bullseye the target for maximum damage, and the target has 12 seconds to try and get away from the impact point to minimize damage. In this regard, speed (along with situational awareness) can be used to reduce incoming damage by moving away from where the bomb will detonate.
Cons: Small ships have a very real chance of getting insta-popped by a bombing wave just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Anticipating bomb trajectory is quite hard.

Some examples of how damage would be reduced:
0km from center: -0.000%
2.5km from center: -15.943%
5km from center -50.065%
7.5km from center: -79.075%
10km from center: -93.880%
15km from center: -100.000%

In this solution, the bomb explosion radius would likely need to be increased to 30km so as to put the 50% damage mark at about 10km from the epicenter.

The issue of how many bombs are allowed in a run may in fact be self-correcting as bombs detonating in close proximity to maximize damage on a single target or clustered blob would be reduced in number, but "carpet bombing" a larger area could be done with more bombers.

Another tactic this would open up is sustained fire where bombers launch in series rather than concurrently so that each bomb is far enough away that it's not destroyed by the preceding bomb. This solution would definitely require testing and feedback to balance, but may not need much change to how bombs themselves are now.



Solution #2: Size of the object.
The larger the ship is, the more surface area it has, thus the more damage it takes. If I'm not mistaken, every object that can be in space has a volume attribute. Here I use ship volume in the falloff formula rather than distance.

Pros: The larger the target, the more damage, which helps prevent small craft from being instablapped and still does heavy damage to the large ships that bombs were designed to destroy.
Cons: "Grazing shots" where the ship is just barely within the blast radius still take as much damage as if it was at the center, which does not reward skilled play, especially for the bomber who typically has the advantage in bombing runs.

I chose a volume of 600,000m3 for the 100% damage mark because the largest battleships are 595,000m3. This could of course be adjusted for balance if needed, but using what I've got, here are some examples of damage reduction based on ship size:
Capsule (1,000m3) -99.998%
Atron (22,500m3) -99.119%
Moa (101,000m3) -83.764%
Covetor (200,000m3) -49.935%
Iteron Mark V (275,000m3) -26.880%
Typhoon (414,000m3) -4.995%
Machariel (595,000m3) -0.023%


The easiest solution to the "number of bombs" problem would be to make it so that bombs, once launched, have their volume attribute increased in a manner similar to how deploying a container does. When a container is launched, it "unpacks" or "expands" becoming larger than it was in the cargo bay. Same concept.

Bombs would probably have to increase to somewhere in the range of 10,000m3 when they are launched. When in your cargo bay they would still be 75m3 of course. They would need to have their resistances removed, and use their expanded size to determine damage taken from other bombs. To make it clear, a bomb that "expanded" to 10,000m3 would take (from level V bombs) only 13.55 damage so they wouldn't need resistance anymore.



Solution #3: The better of the two above.
When a bomb explodes, the server makes two calculations for each object in the radius. One for damage reduction based on distance, and one for damage reduction based on size. Whichever of the two gives the most reduction is the one used to calculate applied damage.
Pros: Gives the best of both worlds. Small craft aren't punished for supporting larger fleets, and direct hits on large ships still does large damage.
Cons: Very punishing to bomber pilots who don't land perfect shots, and makes bombs basically worthless for attacking something smaller than a BC.


More examples:
Atron (22,500m3), 2.5km from center (better of -99.119% from size, or -15.943% from distance): -99.119%
Moa (101,000m3), 10km from center (better of -83.764% from size, or -93.880% from distance): -93.880%
Covetor (200,000m3), 5km from center (better of -49.935% from size, or -50.065% from distance): -50.065%
Iteron Mark V (275,000m3), 2.5km from center (better of -26.880% from size, or -15.943% from distance): -26.880%
Typhoon (414,000m3), 12.5km from center (better of -4.995% from size, or -98.849% from distance): -98.849%

Combining the two ideas above would work here to limit the number of bombs at once. The self correcting nature of solution #1, combined with increasing in-flight volume of solution #2 would be effective, but lots of testing and feedback would be needed.

I've skilled for bombers, but haven't gotten around to using them. I'm still interested in using them, so this sort of topic does grab my attention. That said, I would like to opine on this a little bit, but I do it knowing that I don't have the large amount of experience others have.

Your ideas are quite interesting. But I don't quite like the "distance from epicenter" idea. Bombers are there to counter blob or hit a wide range of targets. Falloff damage from bombs puts a very serious dent into their primary purpose and limits them in ways I don't think is in the spirit of the weapon system. With the now 12-second travel time, people have plenty of time to get moving, if not completely out of the way, but closer to the edge of of effect. Plus, how do you ever really do optimal damage on any moving target when they're most likely moving at full speed (unless a Marauder or something) for a full 12 seconds? They are probably using a prop mod, if not before you uncloak and launch that bomb, then certainly after.

Someone once suggested that the already-existing explosion velocity be the new way of calculating damage, instead of sigrad. That way shield doctrines aren't unfairly gimped, and using MWD to get away from the bomb area makes more sense. Smaller ships already have better speed, so the ability of bombs to do more damage to larger targets would be in play.

So what do you think about incorporating velocity into your suggestions?

Honestly, somehow I didn't see the spreadsheet the first time. However if you are suggesting to increase the damage area to 30km, that would alleviate many of my concerns.

I also like counterplay, I just want to make sure counterplay doesn't become too one-sided. Whenever people bring up bombs, there's always a wave of suggestions about various ways to shoot down bombs which either side on completely useless or completely op that would negate bombers as a tool altogether. I just don't want to see that happen.

You are right that distance from epicenter does indirectly work like velocity*, I'm just used to the idea of hitting all targets within a sphere equal opportunity of damage. With distance, those already on the edge would barely feel any damage and the effect on them would be minimal outside of calling for reps (or self repping) a little bit sooner. I just imagine that the threat of full damage within the sphere (sigrad or volume withstanding, of course), at least forces them to react to the attack, rather than being able to shrug it off because they're not close enough to the center to care. But I will say this again with emphasis so it is not missed, your suggestion to up the damage sphere to 30km does alleviate many of my concerns on this, enough that I'm actually rather interested to see your suggestion implemented on the test server to see how well it fares in practice.

Also since you seem knowledgable about bombs, let me ask you a quick question. As I said before I haven't been a part of bomb runs. And I've heard conflicting information on one point...if you release a bomb but your bomber gets destroyed and/or you warp off before it detonates, does it still detonate?

I've heard secondhand on comms from a corpie who was lamenting that he was flying a bomber, had to warp out before detonation, and therefore the bomb did not detonate. As he tells it, he sent in a support ticket asking for clarification, and the reply was "working as intended - you are supposed to be forced to stay on grid with the bomb until it detonates just like missiles". He was annoyed at that reasoning since bombs aren't guided, and he did make quite a stink about it on comms.

Last time the bomber nerf came up, people discussed shooting down the bombers quickly via destroyers, but I saw numerous replies of "shooting down the bomber/forcing a warp-away doesn't do you any good if he's already released a bomb, you're still going to get hit hard".

So which is it?

*fixed a typo

Bombers will never be good because of all the tears they would have to hear about, they like dishing it out but not other strategy's where they have to take it.

Download my spreadsheet. In it there's a bunch of fields you can enter your own numbers into. Try putting 1,000,000 into the "Volume (in m3) for 100% damage" field and see what happens. :)

One great thing about my proposal is that there's lots of nobs and dials to twist to get the balance right.


Computers love doing calculations. They LOVE it. Every time a turret fires in EVE this calculation is run: https://wiki.eveonline.com/wikiEN/images/a/aa/ChanceToHitv2.png

That's run for every turret, including drones. When you group your turrets it still runs the calculation for each one. When 1000 sentries were assigned to a drone bunny the server didn't catch fire when he pulled the trigger. I'm confident the server could handle it, even if there were hundreds of targets in the blast.



On this point I must disagree. :) See, if CCP sees bombing runs as a problem, I think they should focus on the bombs. Torpedo bombers aren't broken and shouldn't suffer nerfs because of issues with another weapon system. It's like saying "Hmmm the Megathron does too much damage when using rails. Let's nerf the Megathron." When really looking into rails would the the correct course of action.

I mean, they almost sorta got it right last time when they attached the sig penalty to the bomb launcher. But then they put their pants on their head and reduced the warp speed and agility of the ship itself. *sigh*

To the top, for great justice!

Not gonna lie. I'm a little disheartened that this hasn't received more of a response. Other ideas, good, bad, or controversial, have however.

+1 Love your ideas!

It really shows that you have been doing your homework.

IMO, bombs should be anti-capital weapons, with much less damage applied to sub-capital ships. I would increase the explosion radius of bombs from 400 m to around 2000 m, then give bombers a bonus to bomb damage against capital ships (maybe like 10x or so). This is assuming that capitals are made more useful in the future than they currently are with the new sov system. Otherwise, this would probably be a bit cruel.

I get the right sort of vibe from #5 as if you manage to land a bomb in the middle of a bunch of frigs they are going to know about it! but they are smaller so it takes more skill to line up the shot. but you don't have to be quite so accurate on say a BC.
It seems to follow a fairly logical curve.

AS for comments on hamsters, They have alot more to worry about than a few pesky bombs going off, they will survive.

Wooly

P.S bombs in low would be nice - you can use DD in low so why not bombs!