Assembly Hall

Firstly, numbers is a real issue, It is at the point where people can field enough supers to destroy any non super cap fleet with impunity.

Secondly, This is EVE, not WoW or any other generic MMO, there should be no 'best' ship, no ship that WILL beat everything else, right now, the only way to beat a super cap blob is with an even bigger super cap blob, sub caps are pretty irrelevant once supers show up. As it is, most big fights end the same way, sup caps and normal caps fight for a little while, then one or both sides bring in the supers, maybe doomsday a couple of things and then everyone goes home, because there is no point fighting anymore.

Thirdly, and this is similar to the second, Titans can currently track, and pretty much insta pop, battlecruisers and up, and therefore they have no real counter, as they can kill off all the DPS of a fleet very quickly, which is wrong, everything should have some counter that is not just a bigger blob. This is why people are screaming for CCP to nerf Titans tracking.

^^ This is pretty much it... but I will elaborate with my 0.02 isk worth:

One of the best aspects of EvE is bigger does NOT mean better. When you get into bigger ships, you often gain some dps, some tank, some range, but you also limit your ability to apply your dps to smaller targets, you lose mobility, etc. Essentially, every ship has pros and cons. To kill a battlecruiser, you can ship up and just out-class it OR you could ship down and take advantages of its weaknesses. I've solo'd vaga's, drakes, and ravens in a frigate because those bigger ships have weaknesses I can exploit using a smaller ship.

In most cases, the pros and cons of entire fleets scale up. A fleet of abbadons has the range, superior dps, and superior tank to annihilate a similar fleet of drakes. But those abbadons will get dessimated by a fleet of afterburning zealots and guardians, becuase the BS's can't hit the AHACs for much damage. The drakes shred a fleet of AHACs because they can outrun the zealots, and their medium weapons hit zealots for lots of damage. This is makes EvE a high-tec Rock-Paper-Scissors game, also known as Rochambeau.

The Rochambeau game keeps gang and fleet warfare very interesting, because winning often doesn't revolve around a "best" fleet, so much as a counter fleet. Even carriers, dreads, and supercapitals fit nicely into the Rochambeau game unil the release of dominion. In dominion, SC's and Titans were buffed from fleet support ships into frontline fleet dps ships. With their EWAR immunity, their ability to destroy any class of ship (be it frigates, cruisers, BC's, BS's, or other capitals), their amazing tanks, and their ability to RR each other, a group of supercaps hard to beat. Their RR abilities, tank, and EWAR immunity also mean they scale EXTREMELY well. So, with the release of dominion, the superpowers started producing supercaps en mass.

By the release of cruicible, the number of supercaps in the game grew from a few hundered Pre-dominion to over four thousand. Suddenly, 100-man supercap fleets are not the dream of some super alliance, but the standard sov-fight escallation force.

A 50+ supercap fleet used to have the power to obliterate any fleet on the field, and there was NO counter beyond MORE supercaps. Essentially, the rock-paper-scissors game devolved into rock-paper-scissors-THERMONUCLEARSUPERCAPBOMB. Essentially, the delicate game balances within EvE was ruined, and so CCP stepped in during the cruicible release to tone down the overwhelming domination supercaps were playing in the game. While they made leaps forward, they overlooked titan tracking, such that titans, with their enormous guns, can still decimate any fleet thrown at them.

The reason you see these threads, is people feel the game needs to be balanced. It's totally reasonable for supercaps to represent a potent option to the Rochambeau game... but they need to have a weakness so they can be countered. If the only counter is "more supercaps", then the rock paper scissors supercap game really breaks down and becomes the who-has-more-supercaps game.

This is not acceptable.

No-one really gives a **** about small groups of supers being hotdropped on people... What they care about is the impenetrable assault force they represent when dropped in large groups, especially during sov fights.

I'll say it again - give Electronic Attack Frigates the ability to apply their EWAR to supers. Makes them more useful than just filling out an Alliance torny fleet's numbers, gives a counter to titan locking/tracking etc... and can themselves be countered with drones/smaller weapons etc... whilst NOT being counterable by supers themselves. Supers with support can counter them. Supers without support can be pwned by a fleet containing EAFs..
Add in a cool down timer on super's jump engines to stop them crossing the galaxy in < 5 minutes (no bat phone PL from anywhere to anywhere as long as u pick up the fuel tab) and you are in business.
Give super carriers the ability to also have a flight of bombers AND fighters (still no drones) so they can also engage larger sub-caps.

The problem with super carriers is that we have too many sub cap pilots who can't afford them and then proceed to cry about their awesomeness until they get nerfed into a flying tombstone with the focus on being pure eye and easy pray candy for km jewing cane gangs running around the ghetto looking for "good fights" without asking for a fair fight........

Ban sub caps!

Give us capital interdictors and t2 ewar capitals!

Some good points here.

Some answers i can put forward, even though i may get some heat from my alliance...

1) To limit the numbers you first have to look at who has how many Titans, what region is making the most and why. I am fairly sure that the Drone Lands would be one area where SC production is very high. It has the end to end resources to make SCs at a very fast rate. Other areas are limited to either mining or buying minerals (especially in the Tech rich regions).

Now, do you think it's a good idea for CCP to limit numbers artificially, or to increase the difficulty of making them? Maybe the CSAAs could cost a lot more PI to make, introduce a super rare planet like Tech moons (limited to high sec only), that CSAAs need? Artificially limit the number of CSAAs that can be deployed in a region operated by an alliance. Increase the production cost and you will see less SCs on the field.

2) In regards to warfare, what battles are the SCs being deployed at? Sov warfare would be the majority of cases. Deploy 20 Super carriers and a few titans and that Ihub is toast in 5 minutes flat. Sov warfare needs to change. At the moment the concept is way better than POS spams, but having a few big fat targets sitting in space is a target perfectly matched to a SC.

Maybe a counter to this is to a) introduce a way for the defender to expend fuel for resistances b) Automatically ajust resistances of Sov equipment based on the types and numbers of weapons attacking it?

3) You have to wonder why anypone would attack a titan with BCs. Its stupid. To nerf pretty much the last weapon of a titan to make it no more than a bridging/boosting ship is a waste. People want titans, they want them to shoot people easily. I personally think that limiting the availability of titans would be more than enough to limit their effectiveness in large battles.

^^^ Sounds like a good plan!

It reminds me when FBs were introduced, CCP changed their 'Torps' to 'Guns' in order for them to miss sub caps. I think a similar rework could be the go there.

The ultimate solution to the supercapital problem would be the need of a siege module.

It's pretty simple. That's why dreadnoughts and carriers don't scale well. When the dreads are in siege. It doesn't require more than *what's required to take down a dread* to kill ALL the dreads that are currently on the field.


Here are the supercapitals problems :



A siege module would fix this.

Supercapitals wouldn't require truely massive amounts of ships to be taken down as they won't be able to RR eachother AND have their offensive capabilities. Same goes for Titans. Apply a "No reps if a siege module is active", a tracking nerf (Just like the regular siege module that wreck the dreads ability to hit subcaps (Actually, sub-battleships) and a "committing to the fight" thing.

Add the "Supercapitals can still online and offline modules, but the onlining of a module from another ship's fitting service will consume 80% of the ship's capacitor". That doesn't prevent supers from fitting and unfitting modules in a POS, that's the minimum they should have, it would be terribly hard to manage a super without that. But refitting on the field is a massive problem when you encounter tracking Titans. The fact that you can adapt in 10s a ship from being the ultimate killing machine to being the undestructable mastodon is simply wrong and doesn't fit anymore in EVE Post-Crucible.

Right now, supercapitals are kind of a guerilla supermachine. They can jump somewhere, kill **** lightning fast while being untacklable by anything that isn't a dictor or a Hdictor (Those will get instapopped by Titan guns), they can refit from tracking Titans to Tanking Titans and get out if eventually things don't go their way.

This is simply too much for one ship-class.

While this is kinda harsh to supercapital heavy alliances, you need to give supercapitals new things to work with. Such as a workable clonebay/SMA thing. With that kind of things, reshipping from a couple supercarriers in a staging POS will be an actually usable strategy. I don't think I ever saw a fleet reshipping from supercarriers SMAs. Why is that ? Because it's hard to use/manage/control maybe.

Lets not forget the massive bot mining problem thats running rampant and unchecked by CCP.

They mine 23-7-365 and those minerals are flooding the market. Mass producing supercaps is now cheaper and easier to do than ever.

Stopping the bots = Stopping the mineral flood in the market = increased cost of minerals / decreased minerals available = increases the price to produce supercaps = supercap mass production slows to a steady crawl.

As to whom caused what I'm not sure.
Did the demand for mass producing supercaps drive the mining bot activity up?
Or is the mass production of supercaps merely a result of mining bots flooding the market with minerals?

How about making cynos like WH's. 1 SC would cause the cyno to collapse so to speak. So if you wanted to blob SC's it would take a **** ton of cynos instead of just 1. Remove ability for supers to fit cynos

then attacking a system would be impossible.

you attack our home system, we have 500 super caps, we got them there last night
you take your cyno alts in, you have a few options
cyno all in one spot, cyno all in random spots either way your screwed.