Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Why do dedicated missile ships not get a bonus to these values?

yes if the fleet is spread over a large area, firing at those in the center of the pack allows the outer smart bombs an opportunity a chance to hit the missile.

I think this draws attention to the fact speed, and not HP (okay a bit of hp) is the interesting factor. When facing a missile blob, the smart bombing fleet now has to maintain incredibly tight order in order for the firewalling to be effective. And from the perspective of the missile blob FC he has to make informed choices to target those on the edge of the blob to reduce chance of firewalling. But also makes your fleet an easy target for a well place bombing run. (i.e not directly into the blob, land the bomb outside of SB range but inside damage range of the bomb)

Whereas at the moment missiles move so slowly, and with such low hp, that the fleet can spread and rely on just a couple of smart bombs lucking out and hitting the missile.

If you going to add resistances to the missiles, then they do not need higher HP. That is the trade off, you should not have both. The ability to reload to any damage type puts the onus on the players shooting them to protect themselves vs firewalling, it also allows players firewalling to push missile chuckers into a certain damage type through smartbomb use, then reinforcing their resistances against that damage type.

One or the other, not both.

First - remember to scale defender missiles damage and hp values as well in this change. Even if they are more or less functionally useless at the moment until recoded it's nice to keep them from being even more useless.

Second - Firewalling is definitely and interesting tactic born of emergent gameplay. Firewalling is counterplay to missile doctrines. This is true. However there isn't much counterplay to firewalling itself. It's a very binary mechanic. Either you have enough smartbomb and you win, or you don't have critical mass and lose. This change is a step in the right direction to account for increased player proficiency at firewalling. I would like to see at the very least, multiple intermediate paths for gameplay to progress when firewalling occurs.

Right now
if you have enough smartboms, firewall wins, no damage.
if you have enough missile velocity to travel more than smartbomb distance in 1 server tick, missile wins, full damage.

Could we consider having intermediate results?
For instance a possible change might be to have destroyed missiles deal their damage to the smartbomb operator's ship.

Now instead of just having damage go poof into the nether, we can introduce all of the regular gameplay mechanics surrounding dealing and surviving damage into the firewall process. By having firewallers intercept rather than outright negate damage we can force them to make interesting choices about when they chose to firewall and what other ships will be required to support them. This also has the added benefit of reserving the strategic niche of outright damage negation for a recoded defender missile.

Buff defenders to compensate for the HP boost.

Won't take you long.

Hilariously a fleet would be too busy damaging itsemf by hitting everyone around to even damage the missiles, heh

IF defenders are missile ewar then each ship must have at least 1 or 2 missile slots, the ones having 7 or 8 turret slots then they cant have a missile defence.


Pretty stupid.

So my non-ECM-fit Blackbird with cap rechargers and no tank can solo a Drake, using only one smartbomb?

Multiply the HP of missiles by five and I'll consider it.






And while you're at it, multiply citadel missile HP by about 25.




Plenty of ships have extra launcher hardpoints. Let them load defender launchers in mid slots, then we can work on the specific attributes of defender missiles from there.

The whole post is a good idea and I support it.

Also, in before "we don't want a weapon that deals ice damage, this isn't WoW".

Man look at all these people talking about firewalls without the first idea of how and if they work.

Seriously you should be proud, there's more wrong in the first 5 pages of this thread than I've ever seen in an EVE discussion not held on TEST forums.