Player Features and Ideas Discussion

It's not practical in space though - your allies create a cone of 'no shoot' behind them. Unless you're a jerk who shoots their friends.

Shots travel through objects, ships that collide take no damage and all ships fire for full effect in all directions. Fleet formations are utterly pointless in eve.

If there was benefit to them, we'd fly them manually,

Ships orbit an anchor. The anchor maintains position for the fleet. Other pilots can focus on the job the fleet is intended to do.

The short version first so you can read and move on.
There is no practical or combat related reason to have formations in EvE so we do not have them because looking cool in your formation as you fly to your destruction in not a valid reason for CCP to waste dev time working on them.

In real life computers do not maintain formations, the people piloting the ships do by communicating with the others about what and when they are going to do something. Consider this your challenge as well, can you and your mates hold a formation while engaging in combat?

More useless stuff because I want to.

In real life combat ships at sea travel in a formation designed to maximize their ability to detect submarines and to protect the primary ship in the fleet which is usually but not always a carrier. Secondary to this is to maintain spacing to maximize every ships ability to do the job assigned. We do not have submarines in EvE, what we have is cloaked ships since they cannot be detected until they un-cloak there is little reason and no need to fly in fleets to maximize our ability to detect them. As Daichi points out since our shots fired or those fired at us will travel right through any ship they were not targeted at there is even less reason for formations.

In real life fleet formations at sea break apart as each sub group within the fleet does what they are assigned to do, as a result a travel formation rarely survives initial contact with the enemy.

Bombers in real life.
In WW II the bombers flew in a specific formation that maximized their ability to bring their machine guns to bear on enemy aircraft while minimizing the potential for damage to another aircraft in the formation.

They flew in formation because it was not uncommon for navigation instruments to fail or the navigator to be shot and wounded or killed, by being in formation there were always other aircraft they could follow to the target or back home again. In EvE we do not have navigation instruments to break or navigators to be killed so there is no reason to fly in a formation.

Modern bomber aircraft do not fly in formations, they are for all practical purposes on their own so they are not relevant.

Fighter aircraft will travel in a formation however when they enter into the combat area that formation will break apart with each aircraft and their wing man going off in their own directions as required by the attack plan and the situation. In fact modern fighters are at much greater risk of being shot down if they are in a formation, while radar may not be able to detect a single aircraft a formation of them would show up much more easily.

This has been suggested a lot and there's just no practical reason to implement something like this. It would just increase server load when used for no actual benefit.

Besides, if some advantage to more precise positioning was implemented then it shouldn't be automated, positioning should be something based on manual input rather than some automated system that makes you have to do even less to fly the ship.

I agree entirely that such a formation in such a fleet in the middle of a fight would be suicide. Which was why I specifically mentioned the frigates taking manual control when it was time to engage.

Different fleet comps need different things, for example Cerbs, Petes, and other kitey crap need to keep-at-range from their anchor so that the FC can warp them all to a ping that he has aligned to... anyone orbiting instead of keeping at range is gonna get left behind and quite possibly end up tackled. Having a formation would mitigate this. "Get good" is also a good way to mitigate that of course.

Moving your fleet in squads would help to decentralize things. I'm not saying that's useful in present mechanics, because a giant ball of ships is more useful, but if they ever make diverse fleets a thing and get rid of alpha fleets (I have a thread for that at this very moment) or if they make ship bumping more extreme (imagine 50 HACs playing a permanent game of MWD bowling just by trying to anchor up), then formations would absolutely come into play.

At the moment, as said in my previous post, it's useful for nothing more than having the "anchor" be pre-determined by their location in the squad. And looking cool.

It remains functionally useless, although I admit it would "look cool" to have a squad of frigates in formation.

Whether or not there is a targeting penalty, you would have to make it absolutely crippling to outweight the benefits of anchoring. With anchoring the FC can warp his whole fleet out (by making sure the anchor stays aligned to a safe/whathaveyou) and not rely on special individuals to align their own ships.

ASSUMING "incentives" were offered for fleets, I'd rather see something like frigates being able to link their shields together. I am not advocating this as it would be horribly OP, but something that offers incentive rather than penalty will encourage players to utilize it rather than ignore the downsides.

I'd find a more nuanced sphere formation to be pretty welcome. It could be done with the addition of a single variable.


Basically, instead of having a 20km or so warp sphere, have a variable radius mechanic.

If you weighted the radius to ship mass, you could sort ships that way. You might have an inner sphere comprised of heavier ships, and an outer shell comprised of lighter, more maneuverable ships.

Conversely, large hulls tend to need more room to prevent visually unwelcome clumping. *snip* comment about travel system *snip*

It could also be a mass independent warp option selectable by the user. They could not control where they land, but how far from the target, and not just in a strait line from it.

Another possibility is that "warp accuracy" could be an allowance that offsets minimum time or velocity associated with getting up to warp. Objects like warp core stabilizers (or even destabilizers) could modify these values.

It would be interesting to see CCP play around with large volumes of space in a tactical context, but I doubt it would ever be considered.

I agree with the suggestion and wonder myself why formations are not implemented. Mechanically speaking, there should be a "join formation" command in your context menu which will then move your ship inito formation with the 'anchor'. The chosen anchoring ship woulf have a pallete of different ship formations which would automatically assign ships into formation positions based on their size and function. The maximum speed of the formation would be governed by the slowest ship so it would guarantee position.

This process would be a more efficient form of anchoring. Unlike anchoring, it would guarantee allignment - such that the anchor can align the entire fleet and guarantee a successful fleet warp during disengagements. It would also prefent the bumping which occurs with anchoring, and give the FC much greater control over ship positions. With the selectable use of 'light lead', 'heavy lead', spherical and wall formations. With this level of control the FC can create open formations to mitigate AoE damage, or create a standoff formation with light screening ships, or use a tight formation to keep everything close and centralised.

+1 this suggestion and hope that it is implemented.

Single-target damage clouds caused by missed shots would also fix blobbing. Can't hit a speed-tanking frig with 800mm arty, but you sure as hell can hit a flock of them all clustered on an anchor.