Warfare & Tactics

Three small letters: EHP.

CCP chose the EHP grind and timers as the de facto method of 'controlling' time, combined with a steady increase in subscriptions (although stagnated a bit lately I think) you end up with 3-4 fleets (ie. a thousand people) for the regular grinds. Without changing the above paradigms, any changes such as suggested will just add administrative work to fleet warfare as you'd have 6-7 fleets rolling around together rather than 3-4.

In short: For the desired outcome, of several smaller crews running around you have to give them something to do that 'Da Blob' can't do better/faster and you would have to address the force projection issue (read: Supers+Bridges = The third rail of Eve).

PS: OGB is the issue as one cheap'ish ship can augment several others to the tune of trillions (if the augment was individual mod/implant based (officer/faction)) while being nigh invulnerable doing so. But props for bringing some variety to the OGB defence lobby.

The biggest problem with doing this is the amount of time it takes to train up skills for the boosting...

** These times are with the correct remaps for the skills with +5 implants **

It takes over 2 months to train Wing Commander, and Fleet Commander to r5 to give you the ability to have that large of a fleet. You have another 4ish months in training to use all t2 boosters. Then you have another month or two in training to get core skills up to fit a ship, 15 days for cybernetics 5 for a mindlink, another couple months for training for a t3....Since t3 boosting is getting nerfed you have a large amount of time to spend on training up the pre-reqs for command ships and then taking it to 5.

I think you are starting to get the picture here. This character is my alt booster that I started about 6 months ago. He currently has about 6m SP in Leadership alone, and isn't even remotely close to being done with it. Still have 13 days to take armor/info warfare to 5, 51 days to take those specialties to 5, 30 days to take wing command to 5, another 30 days for fleet commander to 5. That is about another 4-5 months of training purely into Leadership with charisma remap to be able to just use the boosters, and apply them to a fleet. Then he will have to use a remap, and add another 3-4 months in training to get his cores/comps/spaceship command skills up to even be able to use a ship effectively. That doesn't even take into account taking gunnery/missile skills/supports to t2/5.


That being said I do think off grid boosting is a huge problem in Eve. If you try to solo PVP you never know if you are fighting one person, or a person with their booster alt giving them +50% resists, shield hp, and excessively long points.

There is a fairly straight forward and simple solution to the problem. While CCP nerfing t3's/buffing command ships is a step in the right direction it really doesn't address the main problem with boosting, being off grid. Now, all they would have to do is make the amount of boost that you receive dependent upon how far away from the booster you are. If the booster is on grid you would get 100% of the bonus. If the booster is 200k or so off grid you would get 50% of the bonus, and if the booster is off grid you would get 25% of the bonus. These are just random numbers off the top of my head but I think you get the jist of the idea. I also think if this were to happen CCP would have to drop some of the training times on the actual boosting skills, and give people who had them trained the SP difference. I believe command ships would also need a complete rework on slot layout/bonuses since it is extremely hard to fit more than one link and still be viable for combat. Maybe introduce a new line of command battleship (tech 2) as well.

I have suggested this solution a few times over, but I doubt it will ever actually happen. The amount of account subs lost if CCP nerfed off grid boosting would be more than they would want to deal with.