Player Features and Ideas Discussion

An interesting notion, but it makes the sub into something that needs to go passive whenever the shield is dangerously low.

These shields are not defensive in that they resist damage, they are quite weak and easily popped. A medium smart bomb or bomb from a SB is more than enough to wipe them out.

The shield should never self destruct, this ship's true vulnerability is in being ambushed.

The sub should be predictable to a degree, so the strategy to catch it means you just need to predict how it acts.

Allow me to point this out.

The sub has a almost non existent turn rate, so it is most likely to exit in the same path as it's bomb fire. It is going to fire at what appears to be a single, or underdefended, so a decoy can be staged.

Put an interdictor on standby, bookmarked to the spot where the decoy is. (As soon as the bombs are launched, try to time the arrival of the dictor to arrive just after they go off) Bubble the target. The sub won't be able to turn before ships arrive to catch it.

It cannot warp without getting caught in the bubble. A few smart bombing ships can locate it based on the reciprocal path the bombs arrived. (Have a CovOps local to observe this)

The subs shields should easily be popped by a medium smart bomb. If a SB is handy, it can be useful.

The destroyer I suggested would have probes designed to strip the shields if dropped in 15KM of the sub, whose location above should be easily known within this range.

Wait, I picked up on what the other guys said, and what Nikk said.

There are no ships in EVE with ablative shields, or that are forced to go inactive after a period of activity.
(I am guessing you are not making the sub a disposable item, good for only X number of uses)

And even if it had to go passive, what difference would it make? It would just need a scout, since you made it unable to scout for itself effectively.
(A paranoid pilot would probably already have this in place)

It's better for the defenders if the sub tries to do it's own scouting, since that exposes the ship to chances of impulse attacks, rather than having second thoughts on what would be an ambush potentially.

You are forcing the sub pilot to practice more safety.

Ohh... that would make the sub much less offensive, since it could not be active beyond, 15 to 30 minutes?

I am guessing here, is that supposed to reflect a 5 minute base time, with an additional 5 minutes per skill level? (Minimum level to pilot sub must be level 2 for this)

I am picturing players with stop watches... which perversely reminds me of sub captains in movies timing things to pick up details.

Not an easy ship to fly, and you would be earning any killmails you got. Not to mention, everytime you go active, they know you have to be inactive to cool off too.

Not sure about the rest of the idea, but I admit I would like to see more ships with limitations on gate travel.

A while back I suggested a 'local attack craft' type ship... so no FTL engine but a hell of a lot more PG/CPU.

And, in all candor, the minor change to create an effectively new ship as a result: The Destroyer (sub hunter edition)

The Interdictor is nice, but having another T2 class of destroyer would be awesome.

Can't wait to see a new Tech II destroyer. And I thought training for Interdictors was gonna be boring.

Just sayin, the destroyer always wins in the end.

You might have overcompensated this thing, with all you put against it.

You actually created a killer cloaky thing that manages to be underpowered, lol!

No.

Nikk, it was a troll.

That quoted paragraph said at the start "In naval warfare..." quite clearly.

Maybe she is not a native english speaker, but that was clipped to be misleading.

At the OPs request he seems willing to listen now.

First off let me lay down the rules of better ship engineering in this game.

1 Never ever rely on skills or material prices as a balance factor, it will never ever work if the idea is to prevent numeration.
2 Do consider the numeration issue, at what point could this ship reach critical mass? If the answer is never you just did it right.
3 Gimmickery Factor - This is a bit of an iffy issue and it varies from ship to new ship suggestion. There are bottom lines should no be crossed. The first of which that ships whole purpose in life shouldn't be a sole target of just a gimmicky ship to kill it thats counter intuitive.
4 Gimmickery Factor 2 - The role selected for the ship is so narrow small and in its own corner it almost breaks off from the rest of eve.

Now then lets take a better look at this ship one line at a time.

As a cruiser needs to drop the capital ship designation, this ship falls under either definition of such ship class or ship role.
Capital ships in Eve are only defined and needed two tier process to construct where as all non caps go straight minerals into ship.
Other define capital ships is a feelt center ship this cloaker boat doesnt do that as well.
Alnterantively we make it into a capital ship and one of that size as well.

So we're possibly looking at this ship in either being a new tier of recon ships or an entirely new class of ships in the capitol ship size.

Low Agility and Speed is an okay balancing factor but its very dependent on the function.

As mentioned before price and skills are not going to be considered and shouldnt even be part of the selling point at all in this manner of time.

Gate Lockout is something designated for capital ships only at the moment so if we go wtih new class of capital it would definetly require such restriction.

Special Cloak - We'll look at this in a more different approach later but effiecntly much more intuitive over the previous edition. For now we're going to call this a stealth generator.

High Damage - High damage isnt that bad especially if you paper thin the ship in question. Which is what we are going to assume on the full capital route. The bomb launchers sounds farily good idea considering thier long refire times. However what we may wind up with is mass numeration as an issue. The issue being the AOE affect itself. There is a couple ways to tackle this but well discuss it later.

Fires while stealthed - Now currently this wouldn't work with traiditonal launcher as missiles are counted as objects and can decloak people if they're in range of a passing by missile. This ship however as a special generator that prevents such from happening.

List of Counters
As stated earlier before you should never ever need a 'second ship' to argue the existence of the first. We're going to pretend that ccp can only introduce 4 ships at a time and the new destroyer wont be possible at the moment.

So now were left with a ship that cannot be targeted easily and the best counter against is are currently, smartbombers, and stealth bombers and that is not good for business.

Well look at possible altneratives in my next post until then read and digest this for a bit.