Player Features and Ideas Discussion

The point I'm making is that it seems counter-intuitive to have a mimic hulk that a player has absolutely no way of determining isn't a hulk when instead they could just make a module that hulks can fit that causes them to sacrifice what they normally do (mining) in order to counterattack a ganker or survive a gank in highsec. Howabout a high slot module that when activated increases the ship's resistances by 75% for 15 seconds, and then at the end of that time, it loses 75% resistance for 3 minutes. Or a high slot module that would reflect damage back to the attacker (without reducing the damage incoming). Either one would be one less strip miner on the hulk, and as such would very significantly impact its mining capability. Having both would gimp it as a miner but you'd still have one strip miner to make it look like you're a normal miner. Just brainstorming here.

The biggest thing is that in order to have mimic ships, they have to make an individual ship for every mimic version, and balance it, and that takes production time. Then players in-game have to build these ships and put them on the market. It would be far simpler to have a single module that allows any ship to be turned into a mimic.

Except they did work, just not very well.
On occasion they did catch the U boats off guard.
As a result, some U-boat commanders were more cautious.
It was a form of psychological warfare, its not all about the kill"loss ratio.

A better example is a related concept, the "East Indiaman" - again, armed merchant ships - except in this case, they didn't hide that they were armed, in fact, they often portrayed themselves as better armed than they actually were.
(they had a light armament, but often had dummy gunports painted)

The best example of their use was Linois' disasterous naval campaign.
First he stumbles upon a convoy protected only by a single Brig and some lightly armed Indamen. - The indiamen had been painted to appear like ships of the line, formed a battle line, hoisted ensigns of the Royal navy, fired some volleys at long range, and drove off Linois' squadron (he believed the indiamen to be ships of the line). The convoy was saved, its loss would have basically bankrupted England (Battle of Pulu Aura).

Linois was heavily criticized for failing to take advantage of the opporotunity...
At the end of the campaign, hile sailing back to france, he again encountered numerous ships... numerous ships of the line, which he believed were actually indiamen, trying to bluff him again - he probably though something like "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice..." - so he engaged.... only to find out... nope.... those were real warships, and he was massively outgunned.

His entire squadron was captured, and never achieved much of anything. Napoleon refused to do a prisoner transfer to get Linois back...

The "indaman" ruses worked quite well.
They may not have destroyed any enemy warships directly, but they saved their convoys, and lead other warships to their doom - even if the guns of the indamen never sank an enemy ship.

Q ship?

Why not try Battle Badger?

Industrial hulls are cheap enough and flexible enough that no additional hulls are needed for this role.

Rather than a new ship hull, we need a weapon that looks like a mining laser, and can be shot at rocks like a mining laser.
Then we can fit all kinds of ships to make them look like they are fit for mining, when they are actually waiting for prey.
(ie BS's can be converted to be a decent mining ship - sacrificing lows for MLUs and cpu UGs, with 8 mining lasers in the highs)

How about a crystal that turns a modulated strip miner (or an entirely new mining laser module)into a damage dealing weapon.

Tank up a BS, fit it with a tank, web, and point, and 8 of these new mining lasers in the highs, start "mining", and drop a can, as if you were really a mining BS.

When prey comes, swap the crystals, to give you essentially 8 focused medium beam lasers worth of firepower... (plus launch combat drones) - you might actually get something.

Yes, some variation of the above.
We could make a crystal for normal lasers that makes them look like mining lasers (though to complete the effect, the 3d model would have to change too - I've never tried shooting asteroids with normal guns, are they a valid target, or do you get some message like target is invulnerable?)
We could make a completely new mining laser, that uses this new damage dealing crystal (or normal mining crystals).
We could make a crystal for the existing modulated laser (while the low PG use could be a problem, the ridiculous CPU use should balance it.
It will leave the BS with anemic firepower, so extra grid available to fit buffer would actually work well I think.

How about a simple disguise module instead? One that only makes your ship look like a different ship of the same size. I.e. slap the Disguise Module on a Caracal, activate and you now look like(and show up on the Overview as) an Osprey to all other players.

I'm afraid that would make it way too pointless, since you're going to stealthscan any potential gank victim/every ship in popular trading hub anyway.

I was thinking more of a combat/movement penalties to the ship using the module, with the disguise only going down on any aggression.

ECM, Random 0.5-1.5 modifier applied to all turret damage, Falloff misses...

Though I agree that we probably shouldn't add more randomness to it at least. Simplest counterbalance would be to make a module that negates the Disguise module.

Sorry i havent posted in a couple days. Been a bit busy else where.

If it can be detected by scan, its useless. The entire point is psycholocial warfare. Its meant to look in ever reguard precisely like the ships its mimicing. NO ONE is going to attack a ship that is OBVIOUSLY a warship in disguise.

As was pointed out above, its meant to make people THINK about fighting, not just simply figure its got to be worth their time no matter what the MINOR cost is. The way things are now, it never cost more to gank a hulk that you get back either from the salvage or the reward, usually both.

The original idea was to have a ship that could be converted with inventions and such into a warship. I dont see that this would be a great cost in time. Bots will not use them, but people that will are wanting to fight but only those that deserve to be fought. I dont want to go out and just attack some innocent player that might have everything invested in his ship. I want to know that the people Im killing are killers that deserve to be killed.

If a scan can show a battleship or something like that behind a screen, it invalidates the idea.

Yes, it might be better to have a module that will REDUCE the ability of a ship to do things lke hauling or mining, but if it cant do those things at all, all a ganker would need to do is watch and if it didnt mine, they would leave it alone. IT HAS to mine or haul, even if only a small amount to show that it would be capable of doing so.



Precisely the situation this will cause. The gankers will be saying "that freighter got lucky and survived until concord took us out".

The freighter will know that it was due to the armor he had installed and would know that it was him, not concord that took them out.




Most of the gankers Ive heard of has a scanner at one gate, scanning those that come in, and let those at the other gate know whats coming. They have all the time between the gate to decide if they want to attack you or not. Many times when I hauled long range I would be scanned at a gate. It didnt matter that I warped out before they had time to think about it, because it was people at the other end that made that decision. Only because i never hauled anything of that great a value keep my ship alive most of the time.

IF they were to make a module that would see through the disguise, it would have to be a seperate one that wouldnt be of use other wise, thus requiring the people to decide if they wanted one type of scanner or the other.

Think about what you guys are saying. It boils down to "It would be a waste of time because miners and haulers would know that the gankers would have to be able to spot these things a mile away. Your saying that ccp would have to make it so easy to spot that no one would fail to realise it was a warship, because the gankers would have to know that they shouldnt attack it.