Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Focusing fire onto a single or small group of targets is standard military practice and has been for centuries why should the game change to prevent this valid and valuable tactic?

Bringing real military tactical discussion in to a discussion about fake internet spaceship mechanics is meaningless. Targeting isn't quite so perfect and effortless in real life, and more importantly, real life has concepts like not actually being able to hit a target because other targets are in the way, including allies. On top of that, the EHP of any given unit in a real fight is excessively low. In general most real life units can successfully 1v1 each other in a matter of seconds.

Focus fire in real life is directed at an area, not a single target, and is more commonly done for supression purposes, not to directly neutralize them. This is because having all your guys shoot at one dude is a dumb idea, because your guys can be easily taken out of the fight in a matter of seconds by any one of those enemy targets if it positions itself properly.

Obviously that doesn't transition to EVE, because the design of TTK on spaceships, lock times, lock limits, and the server limitations that prevent collision detection prevent it from simulating that environment.

I've played a lot of PVP games. There's one constant with most of them. Small fights are more fun than large fights. Usually, this is because small fights generally contain both passive and active mitigation sufficient enough to nullify incoming DPS, which requires smart target selection on the fly, while large fights typically consist of alpha-centric strategies the make most of large fights boil down to "kill whatever target is closest to your DPS ranges" because at that scale the individual utility of said targets is meaningless, only their proximity to enemy fire and ability to apply damage to them is at all important. In games with good/unlimited AOEs this in stead morphs in to "nuke that area" and completely pushes most single target damage right out of the meta, again creating a pretty boring fight that boils down to prioritizing decisions based on target density rather than target utility.

Or, to put it more simply, you don't target enemies based on their function in the fight past a certain point, you target them based on their liklihood of getting healed, because their tactical utility doesn't matter at that scale. Thus, the only targets that are actually useful to prioritize are the healers, which, in such systems, have to be designed to basically screen themselves out of range of opposing DPS to not get immediately destroyed.

What it comes down to, really, is that in a large fleet fight (or a comparably large fight in any MMO really) the vast majority of the combatants could easily be on autopilot. Their job is "assist target caller and DPS" which is, strategically, the superior tactic, and the force that employs it better does well. However it doesn't create fun gameplay. The FCs are having fun. The Logi is actually pretty involved. The rest of the fleet is only there to enjoy the scenery of exploding ships. people don't talk about f1 monkeys for no reason. It's the optimal strategy to heavily employ f1 monkeys. The OP's point is that its not necessarily the best experience for all involved, and turns fleet fights in to FC versus FC affairs with very little room for the skill of most individual pilots to make a difference.

However, it is entirely too entrenched in the overall design to be totally removed. We could theorycraft about it all day, but realistically large fleet battles are going to be mobs of f1 monkeys until the EVE servers shut down because too much of the game is designed around that idea, and the server architecture and overall game design don't offer any really solid avenues to get around it.

It is the dominant and only viable tactic unless you are flying a smart bomb fleet.

Putting a damage incoming and rep incoming cap does nothing for cap incoming. Throw away all the tank expansions, the shield extenders and Armor plates, and replace them with batteries or injectors. Add on the right rigs and ships are unbreakable because they're locally repping with 2-3 reppers staggered and have that many more slots and rigs to devote to resists. Because they can rely on cap transfers, and know they only have to survive x amount of raw dps and thus have not fleet fits, but evewide standard fits for each hull to become permatanking.

Interestingly, there would even be a choice between buffer and resists, because...

Say the raw damage cap is 2000 DPS.
Repair cap is 1800 DPS.

Throwing ideas out based on what I know of current mechanics, using a base the fact that a Target Spectrum Breaker module exists so the that idea of a high count of "target locks" is apparently a mechanic already.

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* Fact that 100+ ships can all lock on to a single target.

There could be a mechanic in place such that when a large volume of targeting systems are all aimed at targets there will be saturation and reflections, same as you would get if hundreds of radars started painting the same target, making lock times increase dramatically or raising the chances of target locks being lost.

Lets assume that that's 'after resists' Damage.
You are neglecting something in that list. Local reps.
Which is where infinite cap transfers would allow you to stack enough rep power to meet the damage cap with just local reps in many cases.

This comment serves to illustrate a point, your assumption here is that you can only focus fire as an entire fleet, but that is only one way in which the term can be used. Focus fire can be applied at the squad or wing level, in fact a good commander will not separate a squad or wing onto multiple targets since drawing them in different directions often cause the unit to loose cohesion and become ineffective as a fighting force.


You do not understand the differences and that is something the group I fly with finds common in EvE. Focusing the fire of an entire real world fighting force onto a single target or area CAN be done. The simple reality is the crushingly over powered nature of the real worlds military equipment means that such a tactic is simply not needed, but that does not mean that it cannot be done. In the real world a single person with a shoulder fired weapons system and just a little luck can remove a destroyer class vessel from the fight in one shot. That same person with that same weapons system could remove an entire squad of tanks from the battle in a matter of minutes. To put this into EvE perspective that would mean that an interceptor could remove a destroyer or cruiser class vessel from the fight with one shot from just one of it's weapons, one has to wonder just how well that would be received by the EvE players.

In the end you are partially correct, EvE is not like the real world. But you are also very wrong EvE is very much like the real world and real world tactics and strategies do apply as long as you adjust them for the specific differences just as you would have to adjust them for each force and situation in the real world. But then to know that you would need to study those real world tactics and strategies that you consider to be useless so perhaps that will never happen. But on the off chance that you do want to pursue this I suggest you start with General Patton and Admiral Halsey they both have some unique ideas and perspectives on battle field / fleet tactics.

Setting that aside commanders in EvE have an entire realm of suicide tactics available to them that a real world commander does not simply because they never have to write THAT letter to a family explaining why their daughter / son will not be coming home.

Has anyone ever considered the use of squads or wings that engage enemy squads and wings as a means to limit focus fire? I also had the idea that squads should have designed roles and ships within that squad get bonuses if they're flying a certain type of ship. This might make FCs have to make more tactical decisions as they assign which enemy divisions/squad their squads can engage. And then once assigned it'll be up to squad leaders to win the smaller squad battle. This is just a preliminary idea of mine but it considers two issues, focus fire and the importance of fleet organization/structure.