Warfare & Tactics

Or another neat idea of mine,

When jammed:

Make only the source jam ship lockable. So to at least be able to defend yourself...

Or


Make it so it reduces Max Lockable targets to 1 instead of 0.

FoF missiles /thread

If you can get your drones to aggro the ECM boat, they'll continue to damage it if you get jammed.



it already works kind of like that. bigger ships, with the sole exception of Marauder class battleships, have higher sensor strengths and are harder to jam out.

The butt hurt is strong in this one, show us where the Griffin jammed you on the model ship.

I've always found this amusing. How exactly do you plan to counter potential sensor dampening? You sacrifice slots for a sensor booster. What about neuts? Cap boosters or cap batteries. Both are potentially devastating if unchecked, and yet nobody directs the same level of vitriol towards them that ECM garners. Target painters are entirely uncounterable (without relying upon your own EWAR), and enough of them will bloat even the smallest of targets to gargantuan proportions. Yet nobody really cares.

If you're dual webbed and unable to apply damage to your target as a result, do you charge headlong at the forums, your mouth frothing with tales of your misfortune and demands that this ridiculously broken module be fixed? No, you don't.

When your kiting ship blunders into scram range, do you blame the scram itself? No.

The funny thing is, ECM is one of the least reliable forms of EWAR. It simply has the most obvious impact when it works because for whatever reason people seem to believe they shouldn't prepare for it. That's your problem, not ECM's.

There is a group operating in my area that frequently relies upon ECM, and those that blunder into their trap often cry foul of ECM because they didn't expect it to be present. I fell foul of their trap once, and simply pointed out I would no longer fight them if it were present. Unlike everyone who cries about ECM, I then adapted my tactics and waited until I knew their Kitsune/Falcon pilot was flying another ship or absent. They responded by ensuring they never flew without it. Fair enough, I thought and went back to the drawing board, selecting ships with innately high sensor stengths and trained my support skills. When this proved unreliable, I modified the fits further. We haven't fought recently, because apparently ECM and overwhelming numbers weren't enough to ensure their victory. They've now added links to the mix, which won't help them for long. But when I decide to prove my point, they will know I'm ready for all their dirty tricks. Assuming they take the fight, which I highly doubt.

TL;DR?

Adapt or die. ECM is no worse than any other form of EWAR when it costs you a fight.

Now I know you are not going to believe this when I tell you that I was mining on an alt in Caldari space. I was bored and was doing some fiction writing at the same time.

The Venture was just mining as happy as she could be when these three horrible Gurista pirates show up on the scene. Having a decent tank, the alt somewhat ignored them as drones were deployed for defensive purposes. The thought was they will get their initial jam on her and then I would lock them up and sic the drones upon them with delightful glee.

I am NOT f***ing kidding when I say that the alt was permajammed by these three rats for at least seven minutes as they slowly chewed through the Venture's shield buffer tank.

Seven freaking minutes!

I ended up warping to another belt because I could not lock onto them and my drones, which were set to aggressive, just sat there lazily orbiting her. I dropped the drones out once again and went back to mining in another belt. After a few minutes, one Gurista pirate showed up. I thought the jam would hit and the drones would go do their job.

Well, it wouldn't be a story if that happened, would it?

No, she was permajammed yet again for over five minutes by ONE rat and my drones just sat there. So I abandoned those worthless drones, said "SCREW MINING!" and warped back to the station and logged her off.

ECM sucks when it happens to you. Mining sucks too.

ECM has extreme diminishing returns compared to other EWAR. The modules don't stack at all, they all operate independently.

Say I hit you with a jam, then 5s later, hit you with another successful jam. You're jammed for a total of 25s until that second jammer cycles, assuming no other jams land in that time. Every time I have to throw two jammers at you, coz one missed, is one less other target I can potentially jam out.

Tracking/Guidance Disruption, Damps and Target Painters suffer stacking penalties, but they do stack. This is how a Keres can completely lock down an Orthrus. 3x Damps should knock their targeting range down to below my Scram range, now all I have to worry about is those blasted light drones.

Remember: a mere two volleys from a flight of unbonused light drones can blap a Kitsune. Pretty much any destroyer, except the Dragoon, can alpha a Kitsune clear off the field. Falcons have a targeting delay after they decloak. Use that 10s to lock them up and get your drones on them. All you have to do is threaten an ECM pilot with damage and they'll bug out if they can.

ECM, as I've written before, is not a magic I Win Buttan for your gang or fleet.

I'm not even going to mention the non-trivial training times required to really have Strong Jams. FYI: 'Strong Jams' is considered at 15 points of jam strength. Usually, this means overheating.

I think we may have different interpretations of terms here when it comes to diminishing returns. ECM either works or it doesn't. There is no diminishing returns there. If you waste a cycle of your jammers on a target already jammed, that is operator error. In your hypothetical, each jammer is operating at full strength and the reason you jammed me for 25 seconds instead of 40 is you blew your load too soon. I think "stacking penalty" is a more apt description for what you were describing.

What I was trying to describe is:

I jam you, you're stuck for 20 seconds.

I jam you again, this time diminishing returns kicks in, you're jammed for only 10 seconds.

Then we can have ecm ships with tanks slightly stronger than a wet paper bag so they can stay on grid for longer.

It appears a number of players do not get elementary probabilities.

eg: #1
A Jam is 20% effective (or 0.2). In the case of a single target the chance of a successful jam per single cycle of all jams, where for example a griffin using 3 jammers at 20% is as follows:

Failure to jam at all 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.512 = 51.2 %
Jam successful by at least one of the ECM modules = 0.488 = 48.8%

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eg: #2
So with Racials in a medium FW plex, for example, with a Rook or Falcon (undectable and can be a neutral alt) against Cruiser targets you might have:

5 jammers of various types so maybe 2 at 45% effect and 3 at 15% effective. Probability of all 5 jammers failing on the one key target you want to take out (maybe a soloist):

Jammers all fail at 0.55 x 0.55 x 0.85 x 0.85 x 0.85 = 0.1857 = 18.5% chance of failure each cycle of all jammers failing.
So jammers that had 45% and 15% chance just stacked to an 81.5% chance to jam. Stacking bonus not penalty.

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If you choose to use your jammers to jam multiple targets, you are taking your chances more but those successful hits take out multiple targets for a cycle or more and that is a very powerful force multiplier. (The original intention for ECM I suspect was to allow smaller groups to fight against larger numbers).

With ECM used on multiple targets at one module per target you get the situation where often your ECM fails you completely because you left yourself at the mercy of the gods on a 45% chance or so with racial.

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Most jammers are used together on a key target. Most used this way (correctly) are successful because of the probability from multilple chances (see examples #1 and #2 above).

Hence why people experience the "perfect" or "useless" effect when using ECM.

It should have been reworked in 2005 and CCP never dedicated the effort it deserved. Time for change is overdue.

I am at a loss to understand the benefits of having ECM that is 'no problem'. The whole reason you use ECM is to create a problem, for the other guy.

I do not fit a multi jammer to my nullsec haulers so you are faced with no problems, I fit them for the (admittedly low) possibility of escaping the problem you're trying to cause me. I do not camp with a falcon up my sleeve for it to be no problem. It's a force multiplier that helps me cause problems or, when I have over extended, to help me to preserve assets in bravely running away.

The current ECM dice-roll seems, to me, to be a reasonable balancing act, although I did kinda like the previous awesome power of dedicated jammers. I am a sick person and see jamming as another awesome part of the eve game dynamic*.


* I still chuckle to remember the tears of Makalu Zarya (A very good eve player, now retired byt he looks, who also happened to be an enemy) when our ECM-intensive fleets would grief his assembled AAA hordes.

* I also think cloaking and cloaky camping and afk cloaky camping is another dimension of eve's excellence. So sue me!