EVE General Discussion

The basic problem of null is not one of null alone but something buried deep within game mechanics, it is not about supercapitals or capitals alone, as they are symptom of the underlying problem.

Back in 2005 and 2006 50 people in battleships were considered an average to large fleet, but what happened then was that, specific tactics aside, a large fleet would beat a smaller fleet. CCP tried to fight it by introducing capitals and supercapitals which are somewhat cumbersome to use but could act as force multiplier to their fleet. The original doomsday was intended to discourage just bringing a bigger force of ships. In theory it would work, but only as only the one with the smaller fleet had the capital ships. In practice the "blobs" would just grow bigger and bigger as a larger fleet was needed to overcome the capital ships.

More ships were brought into the game, the nano-fleets that started by the end of 2006 were in itself a force multiplier as a few vagabonds and nanophoons would win against a fleet several time the size of their gang. The obvious response was to fly nanoships yourself. In 2008 Nanoships were nerfed heavily as they were a to big of a multiplier to any force that would use them. Falcons were later also nerfed, for different reasons,but in practice they were also a big force multiplier.

The basic problem in EVE is still the same one as in 2005/2006. If you can bring 100 ships, why not 500 or thousands and then put everything you have in force multiplication (Titan-Jump bridges, doomsdays, supercapital-hotdrops)?

The option I would see out of this mess is, to make such blobs to cumbersome to handle and forcefully break down combat into smaller engagements.

For example if any target below the size of a capital ship can only be engaged by a Squad sized group at maximum, the impacts of the already ongoing fight would lead to missiles losing their targets and turrets not being able to track the target. This would of course be quite heavy handed and no doubt it would need more adjustments to the effectiveness of remote repair, but it would be doable and would make huge blobs ineffective.

EVE, you're best when you're alone.

Space: Cold, harsh, forever alone, elite solo.

Seems you found the smallest small there. No, not that small. But much smaller than the current numbers of the top 10 alliances.

abc is so cheap because of super caps and several years drone poo

and yes, nullsec mining iis not worth doing if you factor in all the costs and extra hurdles you have to face

...coming in a little late on the conversation, but I do have some thoughts on this.

On the topic of supercaps the solution to me seems pretty straight-forward and obvious. We need more caps. A lot of people get bothered by that, but think about it: the eco-system of capitals is too simple to properly balance it by adding more rolls to existing caps. The problem with merely adding rolls to them is you end up with the equivalent of Titan **** trains w/ area of effect doomsdays. What we need are "game changer" caps to balance them out. There are a lot of good ideas in F&I about how to do this. A few I often cite in these types of conversations are T2 dreads that can only target caps but pack more punch, so that a couple of them could ware down a titan in the time it takes sub-caps to wear one-another down. How about another cap that, again, can only target other caps, but can jam them? What about giving each race's T2 capitals significant race-specific bonuses, so that each is specialized for combating a specific race's capital ship and in like kind has greater defense against another race? Maybe somebody would actually buy a Leviathan, were that the case. These hyper-specialized "silver bullet" capital ships could do a lot to make everyone happy:

• It levels the playing field. Now getting a bunch of titans together only presents a uniform attack strategy that can be easily countered. As a result, fleets would need to be diversified quite a bit to counter "cheaper" one-of defense strategies.


• It de-emphasizes capital warfare just a little bit. Support fleets would become much more important, and the permutations of effective fleet compositions would increase exponentially, adding more strategy and depth to everyone's fleet doctrine.


• The "bittervets" have been crying for years about not having enough to train. Having a pre-requisite of ::insert capital skill here:: trained to V for each variant of T2 capital ship would ensure there are always new caps to train for and get into.


• It makes capital warfare in general more interesting. Just as adding battleships, T2 ships, T3 cruisers, etc... has created a rainbow of PvP strategies for sub-capital PvP, broadening and properly balancing a wider range of capital ships would increase the attack options and defense considerations for all capital pilots. It would allow CCP to utterly rethink how each cap functions. Instead of the nerf - nerf - nerf "balancing" strategy CCP has thus far been applying to caps, we would actually be able to give a buff here, a nerf there, and a new capability where needed to truly balance the capital ecosystem. Nerf - nerf - nerf is all you can do when there's only a few types of ships and no real balancing lateral.


• Industry would explode. There would be fierce demand for all these new capital variants, and from an alliance perspective it would behoove them to encourage their cap pilots to keep as wide a variety of capital ships as possible on hand, so that the strategy brains of the alliance aren't hindered by the "have nots". That means each player will have more caps on hand than they otherwise would, meaning much more ship production. I also believe diversifying the capital ecosystem will result in a lot more dead caps, which of course will need to be replaced. Producers on all levels of the food chain will feel their wallets bulging should this happen. Moreover, it would encourage more industry outside of empire, as the tremendous volume of minnerals / components would need to be brought into null to actually manufacture all this stuff.

I could go on... but you get the gist of what I'm saying I think. Diversify the cap offerings and a lot of nullsec and capital problems get solved all at once.

---

On the topic of incentivising nullsec more, I agree it needs to be done. I would just re-iterate what others have said with regards to incentivising it from the bottom up. I realize alliances need isk to wage their wars, but alliances are made up of players, and players at the individual level need to feel like they are "getting rich in 0.0" if they are going to move with the alliance to 0.0 and start fighting to protect what they have with their ships. Moving tech to rings so the players do the mining seems like a good start.

Didn't even get THAT far. Saw OP, laughed at the vet part and left...

What do you mean "not goonswarm"? All the systems in that area are owned by GSF.

Oh, and no one goes through xcbk-x for anything. Sometimes these out of the way systems are great for other purposes. And part of that they suck for other uses. That system only has 4 belts, so trying to rat or mine that system heavily to put in upgrades is near impossible.

Actually when I said area in general I was referring to Null.

4 belts is actually a reasonable number of man hours to mine out. But yes you are right the amount of hours requires of usage to get and maintain sov would need to be modified as a base value per system.

Except instead those mix of ships will be a requirement in fleets. Drop a few carriers for a couple of each racial caps and it's same story different day.

Nerf having friends.