Ships & Modules

Battleships aren't weak, they just rely too much on gimmicky tactics to remain viable. Heavy Neuts are a big one... and they don't even have the desired effect much of the time since most ships that are dangerous to a BS are already either neut proof or just dance outside neut range. Battleship close range weapons should be able to reasonably hit smaller ships.

This is why the BC is superior to the BS in every way (except pure EHP and long range damage projection) right now, medium weapons are far more effective against frigates and always 100% effective (on paper) against anything large enough to be a threat to the BC.

That said, I'm not sure how to fix BSes except maybe to give them more options in dealing with smaller ships, such as larger drone bays, more than 8 hi slots... *shrug*

One old idea I had was sort of like the Marauder idea (half the weapons with 100% weapon damage bonus):

Weapon slots have class categories:

Light, Medium, and Heavy

A Tempest would be changed sort of like this:

It would have 3 turrets and 2 launchers that could be Heavy (BS) weapons. The 3 turrets would have a 100% dmg bonus. The other 3 turret and 2 launcher slots would become Medium (BC/Cruiser) locked with 50% dmg bonus. It would lose 30% of its powergrid.

So at the end of the day you could have a Tempest like this:

3x 800mm II (x2 dmg), 3x 425mm II (x1.5 dmg), and either 2 Torps/Cruise (x2 dmg)or 2 Heavy/HAssault (x1.5 dmg)or a combination of the two.

The secondary system bonuses could (and maybe should) be less than the primary system:

Torps/Cruise get 50% Dmg and HM/HAM get 25% dmg.

Anyway, it is a rambling idea, but I've thought all ships should work that way really (two tiers of weapons), even to the point of Dreads and Titans using BS weapons for point defense.

Because no matter how hard you try, your BC/T3 can't actually match the DPS AND EHP of a battleship. Yes, you can have your T3 with a godawful brick of a tank. And it has minimal DPS. Any attempt to bring the DPS up to battleship numbers drastically reduces your tank. BC's have no hope of having the same EHP as BS's - the best is the drake, and that maxes out around 70-80k EHP. All non-failfit PvP BS's have more than 100k EHP. And a BC is a perfectly valid target for a BS - its fat enough that BS weapons will hit for close to full damage all the time, and none of the BC's really have the agility to get in under a BS's guns, unless said BS is longrange fit (in which case, another BS could do the same thing). Now, BC's have the advantage in mobility, and in hitting cruiser sized and smaller targets - which means that BC's don't need to commit as much as BS's do. But once one side commits BS's, then its all over for someone, and pilot skill and fittings determine whether it was the BS's that finished it. Unless vastly outnumbered, it usually is.

Now, can you take 1 BS against 1 BC or 1 T3 and expect to win? No, they would either get in under the guns and kill it, or gtfo in which case the BS is left holding the field. Put 10 people on each side? This really comes down to piloting, target calling, and who has more logi's, but generally the BS's will win, or at least drive off the smaller ships. Can the BS's give chase? Not really - which is as it should be. But when it is important that you hold the field, and there are similar numbers, battleships are going to be what hold the field for you. And as the numbers in fleet go up, the abilities of the battleship to hold the field go up as well. And no, teir 3 BC's didn't replace BS's, because they are too squishy to hold the field.

So when is holding the field important? Pos Bashing. Sov Grinding. Cap/supercap rescuing. And assuming that both sides brought equal or near equal numbers, guess which side is going to hold the field? The battleships. When is holding the field NOT important? Skirmishing. Small gang work. "solo PvP". And guess what... battleships don't work well here. Is this a problem? NO. Battleships have their role, and they do it just fine.

Would I object to them rebalancing battleships? No. But I would object to making them actually able to chase down smaller vessels. Battleships are designed for, and should be used for fleet warfare. Stick with smaller ships for roaming - thats what those are designed for.

-Arazel

bump

A major reason is that BS take damage every bit was easy from frigate weapons as BS weapons. As previous posters have already stated, if you want to effectively engage a BS, you should have to engage with BS sized weapons.

250DPS from a frig sized weapons is the same as 250 DPS from a BS sized weapons.


An example is this is a free to play game called World of Tanks. If that game worked like eve, the biggest best armored ships in the game would fear the smallest light tanks.

If eve worked like world of tanks, BS would not be able to easly deal with smaller threats, but they could effectively ignore them as well.

Umm, no, prior to the introduction of Aircraft carriers, battleships were rightfully feared. No single surface vessel could stand against one. Smaller cruisers and destroyers would be blown out of the water before they got in range.
Their escorts were needed to give them eyes and ears, basically as armed scouts, to determine where the BS could be brought to greatest effect (not to mention, what they can do to shore defenses, and the number of marines they could carry).

Torpedo boats, en masse, could overwhelm a BS, but only under certain conditions, such as at night, or if a BS was in an archipelago area, close to shore, where the torpedo boats could appear already very close to the BS.
Out on the open ocean, a fleet of torpedo boats would get destroyed by a BS.

The problem was... almost no Naval battles have ever been fought in the open ocean - fleets would encounter each other near strategic locations like island naval bases, and then you have those damn subs and aircraft... the BS was obsolete...
Then on top of that, you had the development of guided missiles, where even a cruiser (tiny in comparison), could launch anti ship missiles over the horizon that packed a big enough warhead to disable or destroy the BS...

Prior to, and during WWI, the BS was king of the open ocean, and very dangerous to coastal areas.
It did need screening forces when near the coast to protect from torpedo boats... but it could handle a mere handful of them.



The problem is in EVE, just 1 cruiser, or even 1 frigate, is enough to do in a lone battleship. It doesn't even take a several frigates or a few cruisers.
1v1 BSs just lose (except perhaps certain passive tanks that a frig can't get through, or maybe a drone boat like the domi with enough drone upgrades to allow them to kill frigs - i think a rattler could survive many 1v1s, but the enemy will just escape)

By the middle of WW II yes, but for about a hundred years prior to that, Battleships were the pre-nerf Titans of the seas. If you had the most and the biggest then you were the top dog because they could shoot further and hit harder than anything else. As soon as carriers were able to hit harder and further than that, battleships became obselete.

Battleships in EVE aren't really the equivalent of naval battleship; Dreadnaughts or maybe even Titans are. EVE battleships more closely fill the role of cruisers. But because EVE ships don't really have layered weapon systems, any comparison is inexact at best.

They're not solopwnmobiles, and a damb good thing two. What they are good at is being relatively mobile, whilst having more EHP x DPS x range than anything else that can move about the grind. Obviously they need some weak points otherwise no one would use anything else.

If the OP thinks battleships are obselete for fleet combat, then he is simply wrong. There was a ~15 month interval when first AHACs and then Drake Army doctrines were superior to BS doctrines, but post-Titan nerf, the Hellcat-fitted Abaddon convincingly destroys Drakes, and the Foxcat-fitted (Na)Apoc convincingly destroys Tengus.

battlships are still powerful and relevent.

Comparing Eve to real life naval combat is fail. Eve in a lot of ways behaves more like air-combat priniciples than naval prinicipals in terms of speed, range, maneuverability, and escapability.

There are three factors that limit Bships in solo combat. One is slowness. Survivability in Solo combat hinges on maneverability many times and if your not fast, your dead. The other is tankability... yes the armor hitpoints are high, but the resist are very low compared to the T2 Bships, cruisers they will face. All the extra slots will go into trying to achieve the same tank that the T2 cruisers and T2 BCs get inherently. The third is accuracy. Large guns have such vunerability to close orbiting targets that when coupled with their slow maneuverability makes them easy to defeat.

So now they just take longer to die.

The issue is that the web nerf effectively turned battleships into pointless ships - the megathron is the only one who can hit small targets due to its huge tracking bonus.

The whole binary thing of being webbed or not being webbed, imo, was a stupid reason to change webs. A frigate with an afterburner could still sit under a battleships guns even when webbed - so i don't see where the issue was. I do agree that battleship active tanking needs a buff, but they still lack in other area's.

It's pretty easy to make a BS that both outdamages and out-EHPs a Drake.

Start with an Abaddon with 8x Megapulse II, a 1600mm plate, a DCU II and 2 heatsinks

for funsies, you can make one that out-DPSs, out EHPs and is faster too. (Hint: Typhoon)

Eh, I am not so big on them needing more tank or accuracy. Heavy Neuts and Drones should be enough, besides those defenses everything else should be handled or helped by a support fleet. Tank is already strong along with range and DPS.

I think an XL Shield Extender is in order but it should just be called Large. Small = Unseless > Medium = Frigate / Dessie, Large = Cruiser and up.

I would prefer they changed all the Large to Medium / All the Medium to Small along with buffing the Current small. and introduce a new Large.

Small T2 = 900 HP, 10 Grid / 25 CPU +7 Sig
Medium T2 = 2700 HP, 165 Grid / 46 CPU +30 Sig
Large T2 = 3900 HP, 1250 Grid / 95 CPU +125 Sig

Then do the same for Plates.

400mm = 1000 HP, 12 Grid / 17 CPU Mass of a Meta 4 200mm =137500
800mm = 3000 HP, 230 Grid / 28 CPU Mass of a Meta 4 800mm =1375000
1600mm = 4800 HP, 1500 Grid / 35 CPU Mass of a T2 1600mm = 3750000

This kind of thing for XL-Shield Boosters and 100MN's as well.

That is beside the point though, what I think is the absolute main thing that will do the most good for Battleships is simple. Their MWD's. Lessen the Cap Drain so they can run somewhere between a Cruiser and a Battlecruiser and get the Heavy Cap Booster off as a near necessary module. Most of them can even pull an extra web / painter / TC out of that too. It helps active tanks like the Hyperion be less in a bind for Cap and Mobility.

Finally the last thing they should do is boost up the Scan Res to slightly below Battlecruiser. 160-200 Max Skill. Not a fast lock time on Frigates and Destroyers but a solid lock time on Cruisers and manageable on Frigates.

The finishing touch would be about 3000 new Grid to each one to accommodate Battleship Sized Fitting to mods that were ambiguous.