Player Features and Ideas Discussion

To begin with, I quite like the concept of an industrial super. There are a few points you might want to consider though.

1) Industrial ships tend to be ORE rather than empire faction so considering the differences your proposing for your 4 different models it would be simpler and in keeping with the current industrial ships to just have one ORE super factory ship.

2) Being able to compress ore kind of treads on the toes of the rorqual. Considering it's a factory ship and it's primary role is building ships you could swap being able to compress ore with being able to uncompress ore on the fly whilst building. That way it could receive compressed ore (thus use a lot less space for materials) and build straight from it.

3) Considering it's the equivalent of a super, perhaps add being able to create a jump bridge for industrial ships?

4) Weak version of a POS shield - Make the shield use fuel and only allow 2 hours of strontium. This would mean that once the shield is beaten the ship remains stationary and unusable for 2 hours. The aggressing fleet will have to stick around or come back but this gives the industrial fleet the ability to call in a support fleet within that 2 hours. It also means you could deploy this in a belt and therefore have a rorqual on grid to provide on grid bonuses and ore compression with at least some protection.

5) Drone/Fighters not deployable if the shield is up.

6) Make it cost more than a Rorqual but not as much as a super. If too expensive no one would actually use them.

Just my tuppence worth, mind. I don't think CCP will do this but I do like the idea. It would make alliance ops more viable if only because it would give the mining fleet time to reship into combat ships to come back and try to get the super out. It would potentially create some pretty awesome battles.

Most interesting idea...

And yes it needs to be ORE ship if something. Wormhole dwellers should love this one.

+1 just because you mentioned Homeworld.

I like the idea of a 'real' mobile home. Though i´d like to see a fully industrial specced ship. Saying this means: No drones on that one (or at least no fighters).

For the ore compression thing:
Give it the option to access a friendly rorquals hangars automaticly when the rorqual is within x km AND the rorqual pilot decided to allow it (add this option).

Mining fighters? You not talking about [Code.] i guess? :P Ah, my bad. That would be fighting miners.

For regular Fighters: no. Le why?: Because it´s an offensive weapon which can be passed to fleetmember.
Mining "Fighters": no. Le why again?: Because it should be specialised in using materials to build things and NOT be able to gather them on itself.

Obviously i care.

If it´s realy something like a "mining fighter"-drone that would mean they can be assigned to other pilots.
I see swarms of frigates mining with fighter support (read: low risk) while the factory ship sitting inside pos bubble.

The idea, while intriguing, is overpowered in and of itself.

* Refining - not in this ship, as it's a factory. Make another that refines at 35% base (kick POS to 40% base, no arbitrary 75% cap -- maybe we'll get that with odyssey)

* Manufacturing - no, BS are too big. This should be more like the Homeworld carriers (limited to fighters, corvettes, and frigates), so cruiser or MAYBE battlecruiser, based on skills. For example, L1 = drones/ammo/other small stuff, L2 = frigs, L3= Dessies, L4 = cruisers, L5= BC. Shouldn't have more than 5ish slots. Though you also have to remember that stuff takes FOREVER to build -- a single siege cycle (5 minutes) is just enough time to build a single run of ammo.

* Fighters/Drones - this might be to OP with fighters (assuming carrier bonuses), though maybe a max of 5. Drones are OK if it can spit out 10.

* Clone Bay - stepping in on the Rorq's territory here. Not sure if it's actually necessary

* Hangars - large corp hangars are OK. Ore hangars are not necessary as the ship shouldn't have raw ore in it (something else should do the refining).

* Mineral Compression - no. This is the rorq's job.

* Jump - maybe, maybe not.

* More slots than a POS - no. POS are the "settled" claims on a system, so they have better facilities. If we're gonna talk about their use in W-space (because it's the closest we have to the "wild west"), they're the first things in. Then POS get set up as the beginnings of the settlement. Outposts come later (yes, I know you can't put them up in w-space), as the "settlements" become "townships" and then "cities".



And for the negatives:

* no research slots - agreed.
* siege mode for mfg - agreed. However, as siege modes are short (5 minutes), and build times are long (hours), this will either need "lowish" fuel usage, or a longer siege timer.
* slow speed - well, duh, it's a capital. 1AU/s warp is sufficient.
* No cap components/ships - fair enough, though the cap components could potentially be made (I don't see why you would ... but then again, Battle Badgers).
* expensive - no, this is bad. should be about the cost of an Orca (~1bn), otherwise people will just use POS for what you propose.
* vulnerability - should be somewhere between an orca/rorqual in EHP.
* limited to lowsec - maybe, maybe not ... perhaps the capabilities are limited, but not the ships.


If these are intended for use inside W-space, they should have mass around that of an orca, so you can get them INTO a C3/4 wormhole, rather than need to build them inside. You'd still bring a POS and relevant modules, but instead of starting off with a "refinery POS", "production POS", and whatever else; you're just bringing the towers and defenses until your needs outgrow the capabilities of the Orca/refinery/factory ships.

I sort of envisioned this thing as a step between the Rorqual and a POS. It needs to be able to build BS's to be capable of operating in deep space by itself. The idea is for it to be a mobile base of operations.

Production Slots: The reason my idea was to give it more production slots than a POS is to make it worth having. Because it's inherantly more vulnerable than a POS, it needs to have a trade off that makes it worth maintaining and risking. If it has a very weak shield in siege mode that lasts maybe an hour or two, it would be a priority target for enemies as opposed to a POS.

The same thing with the fighters. It needs to have some defensive capabilities because at the end of the day its more of a capital ship than a POS. It needs to be able to defend itself in some capacity.

It should be able to do refining and do it slightly better than a POS. Yet again, if it can't refine ore or do compression nobody is going to use in over simply maintaining a friendly POS and a Rorqual because they would be safer under the POS shield.


The fact that it can be a better jack of all trade industrially than a Rorq or a POS is that it is inherently more vulnerable than a POS and much slower and harder to escape in than a Rorq.


The Cost should be higher than a Rorq but much cheaper than a POS.

If you boost the building capacity too much, then you run into "why would anyone ever use a POS array", so somewhere between station (1.00 time modifier) and POS (0.75 time modifier) seems about right.

For comparison, base build times (per chruker, probably off by now):

ship - station / pos (note, rounding a bit)
BC - 4.33h / 3.25h
Cruiser - 3.33h / 2.5h
Destroyer - 2.5h / 1.8h
Frigate - 1.66h / 1.25h

Times will vary a bit between each "tier" of ships (yeah, yeah tiericide ... but I don't think they levelled the build times).

@ Harbonah's new post:

Production slots - can have all the slots in the world, but if you're asking someone to sit in siege for 4 hours (or 2 hours, or whatever), it's going to go unused because there is no "set and forget" ability. In that same vein, if it can build a BC in 1 hour, it's grossly overpowered with anything more than 1 BC slot (due to it taking 3-4 hours for one BC in a POS/Station).

Fighters - I dunno here, a rorq puts out 5 drones with the hitting power of like 20 or 25 (max skills). So 10 sentries should be enough here; the ship isn't gonna be needing to defend itself by itself for any stretch of time (unlike a POS).

Refining - no. This is a factory ship, have a twin ship that's a refinery-only. Again, this should be WORSE than a POS, due to physical limitations of ship-borne refining facilities, though no hard cap so it's "possible" to get perfect refine (through the use of max skills + implants).

Ore Compression - no. This is the rorqual's territory.

i do some industry and any suggestion of production only working while in siege and thus stuck in place will result in making the ship a pos ornament just like the rorqual with an exception of high sec if possible

main reason being nobody is going to risk a 1bil ship in low/0.0 if it can't move for over an hour

with the amount of suppercaps already in the game the moment someone spots one of those in space in siege it will not take 5 min before there are 50 suppers on it to kill it

i would suggest give it 1 manufacturing slot for ships with a time modifier of 2.0 or so without the need for siege or make it possible to pause the manufacturing at any time so you can move if needed
and then a second slot for ammo only with a time mod of like 0.5 making it perfect to supply deep space missions with ammo and an occasional ship if needed

i would also like to see a refining slot that takes a while to run with a limited amount of ore something along the lines of a 5 min cycle for each batch batch size something along the lines of max 10X the min amount needed to refine again making it perfect to refine small amounts needed for ammo production while taking a long time to get the materials to build a BC

as for the price of the ship anything above 1 bil will make it hardly used i think

this is just my idea if there are holes in it pls let me know what they are :)

well, you asked:

2.0 time modifier on ships -> so that BC that normally takes 4 hours now takes 8 (I believe you meant a 0.5 modifier on ships)
0.5 modifier on ammo -> no, this is already fast enough. Most ammo only takes 5ish minutes/run (possibly with Amarr being an exception).

Refining slot - still no on the factory ship. Having a "refinery" ship would be a better solution, IMO. Your batch size limiter is the space in the Ore Hold (rather than an arbitrary "10 refines", which makes the limit 333 m3 of veld, or 32,000 m3 for ABC). A bay size of between 25,000 and 35,000 seems about right, with a 5-10 minute cycle time and 75% cap on refining.

This is under the following assumptions:

1. POS Refineries stay at 90-120 minute refine times, but end up getting un-capped refining (30 or 35% base refine)
2. POS Factory and Refinery setups end up costing more than a projected 2.25 billion ISK on top of the cost of a "standard" deathstar.
3. Orca plus factory and refinery platforms costs approximately 2.25 billion ISK total (so, about 750m per ship)


it's OK if these ships are stuck in the "POS Dweller" role, they just have to be "cheaper" than the addition of a refinery/factory to that POS.

Cheaper can mean raw isk (i.e. 700m vs 1b), or logistics (can be hauled into w-space easily), or risk to the POS (refineries have huge fitting requirements), etc.


@Lina -- I believe the "and it should be a supercapital!" has been thrown out at this stage.