Assembly Hall

Like I have already stated, this will never happen. Capital ships and fleets are as much a part of Eve as the subcap blobs you are so fond of. Even if the 0.0 mechanics change so much that they eliminate structure shoots, (which they won't, at least not entirely) there will still be a place for capitals.



#1 Tracking is an issue, which they need to fix, without also nerfing dreads. The siege module includes a tracking penalty as well. I think that careful tuning of the superdread, or a re-tune of the titans core tracking stats would solve this issue.

#2 This is the point that my proposal focuses on fixing, and in doing so provides an opportunity to get the balancing right on the rest of it.

#3 Log-off mechanics is a stickier issue. If a titan never disappeared when its pilot logged out, you would have no-where to keep it but a POS, since it cant dock. Then all you would need is a single spy to bump it out for his friends to shoot it. To top it all off you probably wouldn't even catch the spy, because he could bump it out of the POS and leave system, before anyone realized what was going on. As a result, no-one would ever fly a titan, because it wouldn't be worth the 50+ Billion, when someone could bump it out and kill it with almost no effort at all. If no-one was willing to fly a titan, whats the point of having them in the game? However, since they already exist in game, we cant just nerf them into uselessness. Therefore, titans need to have a safe method of insuring that no-one can touch them while logged out. Titan pilots have to sleep too. You could add abilities that make the titan un-bumpable, but I see no reason to make the log-off mechanics even more complex to do something that current game mechanics already do. CCP also just changed how mid-combat logoffski works, so I don't think we need to change it up again just yet. I think the real reason you bring this point up is more related to titan proliferation.

#4 Titan Bridges, Jump Bridges, Covert Bridges, and the Jump Drive, all contribute to force projection. This issue is a simple matter of the speed with which you can cross distances. Fleets with access to a bridge of one type or another can move much faster than a fleet without. If everyone had access to bridges, and could move from place to place just as easily, I believe that force projection wouldn't be much of an issue, as the playing field would be fairly level. If you look at the additional thoughts section, post #2, you will see that part of my proposal, the mothership, paves the way for putting "titan" bridges into the hands of smaller alliances by making the cost of the ship less than a supercarrier. More people able to get to more places = more fights, which is something CCP is leaning heavily towards atm.

#5 Titan proliferation is a problem, but there isn't a simple solution for it. Titans are already hard enough to build, considering the time and logistics involved, so making it harder/longer isn't really an option. I don't really like the idea of getting rid of the BPO's and making BPC's a drop somewhere, think about how much raw isk would get dumped back into the system buying back all the Titan BPO's at 50 Bil each. As I pointed out in #3, we can't really make it easy to reduce their numbers outside of a fleet either. Which realistically leaves us with finding a way to limit the number of titans that can be fielded in a single system/fleet, or finding a way to make sure more titans are dieing when they do fleet up. Based on the CSM notes, I expect CCP to probably release a new capital ship for dedicated heavy tackle, or at the very least an infinite point for supercarriers. However, I don't believe that will be enough, since titans are currently balanced around being a scarce commodity.

It looks as if my proposal would solve most of the issues you presented, but if I missed something let me know.

You should check out "On Basilisk Station" by David Weber, its the first book of the Honor Harrington series more commonly referred to as the Honorverse. That book doesn't cover much capital ship combat, quite the opposite, but the series works up to it. As a side note, its entirely possible that parts of EVE were based on some of the technology in the series. The similarities between the impeller drive and our warp drives is striking.



Even before the advent of current SOV mechanics, there was the POS. You needed a fleet of dreads to siege one in a reasonable amount of time. If we could do away with ALL structure shoots, you could make a case for not needing a capital fleet. However, given the fact that POS's exist and can be destroyed, you will need a dread fleet. You will need a carrier fleet for repairing a friendly POS after some nasty dread fleet shoots it. Supers are there to support your capital fleets. Come up with an idea that removes all structure shoots from the game, and then we can talk about making capitals into support for subcap fleets. Until then its just a pipe dream. And a boring pipe dream at that IMHO.


EDIT: Anyway... this has gotten way off topic, so I am done discussing regular capitals, lets get back to more thoughts and ideas for titan balancing.

I think it would be good to have both. currently carriers and super carriers have a good size ship maintenance bay. Mother ship would seem to me to be a super super carrier and have an even bigger maintenance array. although the jump portal would cover most of the needs of a fleet to move ships and pilots. It would add the benefit of taking ships and pilots that logged off inside the mothership with the fleet so that if they do not get on in time they will still be with the fleet when they do log on. Simply undock and join the fight. This would really make the mothership like a portable outpost. the alliance would have to choose between taking the mom to the staging area, bringing all ships and pilots inside with it. or hold it back in safe territory and portal the active fleet from there. Bringing the whole mothership would give the added benefit of extra ships in the maintenance array for when pilots lose there ships.

This would also have the down side of any ships and pilots docked inside a mothership when it gets destroyed would also be destroyed. Dock in the mothership, log off. and log back in to a fresh clone.

Just turn the bloody carriers into this "mothership" idea. It'd be more like real carriers that way, anyway. You'd have the regular carrier that functions like a smaller supercarrier. Get rid of the fighter nonsense. They're just artificial players, anyway. Store real ships in carriers and have them function as force projection ships just like they do in real life.

Titans and Dreads should remain (and be rebalanced towards) killing other cap ships that are in siege/triage mode and structures.

That's all that really needs to happen.

Of course I read the proposal, and I nearly fell out of my chair at how ridiculous it is. It doesn't really solve anything, it just shuffles problems around and makes it more diverse without actually fixing anything. The way things are today, in a short time you'd still have the problem of entire fleets of "capital" ships that are by and large unstoppable except with an even larger fleet of capital ships. There's no balance in this.

I remember when the first Titan was built, and when the first Titan was destroyed. Most of us back then were pretty starstruck by the idea, even (perhaps especially) CCP itself. Over time, though, and predictably, the ships have become a major problem and a game ruiner.

That said, I do like one thing about your proposal, and it's something I've said from the very beginning myself: remove the immunity in favor of greater resistance to EWar.

**EDIT** Even the newest of players should have a viable role to fill in a fleet, beyond mere cannon fodder. How many of us outright laughed at the "I was there!" marketing scheme about the noob interceptor pilot? That's what it's really about: roles and counterbalances. Over the years, CCP has gotten farther and farther away from the cyclic mindset of frigates < destroyers < cruisers < battlecruisers < battleships < frigates again. Cap ships, of any size, should not be able to hit moving subcaps, with the possible exception of dreads landing glancing blows to battleships (which would still be pretty devastating, much like when a battleship lands a glancing blow on a cruiser.) In short ... the game has been getting more and more out of whack as the years have rolled by. I really hope that this new direction CCP is taking will once again bring balance to the fleet.

Anyone else have some suggestions to improve the proposal? Comments and thoughts are welcome if they focus on the topic.

Your proposal isn't bad Tyran and it may be able to address the issues behind the ability of fleets to kill a titan and therefore limit their proliferation by increasing the number of Titans being destroyed. However, these fleets would need to be made up of more Titans/supers/caps. This would therefore increase the number of Titans built and not limit their propagation in EvE.

What it seems to me you are doing is effectively creating is another tier whitin EvE. Sub-capital ships will no longer matter in capital fights (as is the case now), and once Titans get deployed in a fight, it will be a matter of how many more Titans the other side can deploy to counter this. That is one of the points made by Mechael in his post.

Instead, as with the sub-capital system, where smaller ships can be immune to larger vessels and be useful in fighting them, so sub-capitals need to matter in capital fights. Therefore the answer, in my opinion, would be to make adjustments to the current capital ships to make them less effective against sub-capital ships (remove tracking or damage done to sub-caps) whilst allowing sub-capital ships to have some effectiveness against capital ships (EWAR, tackle, damage?).

How this is done... I am unsure... and there are certainly a lot of threads exploring numerous options. If the removal of immunities, reduction of tracking and nerfing of EHP aren't applied, then there were notions of a sub-capital ship with bonuses against the capital ships - or perhaps these ideas in tandem may restore some balance between these two classes.

Since you split the role of one Titan (current) into 3 different Titans (proposed), it can be a valid assumption that this would lead the current Titan pilots to want all 3 ships to retain their full capabilities. Unless these ships would each require a different stream of skills specific to their class, I would say it would propagate the Titans further.

The only counter-argument would be that the current CSAAs are already spitting out as many Titans as they can which would therefore force them to streamline into one of the 3 Titan types each time they build one. However, where there is a demand, there will inevitably be supply and your proposal increases the demand for Titans threefold.



Yes, your proposal streamlines the current Titan into 3 separate ships but without further clarity around what exactly their capabilities would be, I can only be lead to assume that the Superdreadnaught (3rd Titan suggested) which you mentioned would retain the current Titans combat capabilities - if appropriately fitted and boosted, would still be able to hit and 1-shot sub-capitals.



Except they are not. As soon as Titans get on the field, sub-caps cease to matter. Again, it would seem that at least one of your Titans suggested would still be able to maintain this imbalance.



My mistake.



Agreed. However, class-related oversights aside - the current ability of sub-capitals to affect supers in any meaningful way is very limited and in my opinion your proposal unfortunately does not address this problem.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again.
The only thing ccp needs to do, is stop allowing capitals to re-fit in combat.

As it is currently, tracking titans, if primaried, just switch to a tank setup.

i propose a boost!

[able to fit warp disruption field generators]

[50% bonus to focused warp disruption range per level]




titans die everywhere limiting numbers regaining ballance.... also trit price! less inflation:)