Assembly Hall

I don't do well with elaborate explanations so .. here goes..

I think that roles should be defined by the manufacturer of the ship. Tech one, tech two .. anything.

Tech one ships get a defining role by the corp that invented it. This is defined by that corp's "mission statement." So, for instance a Domi BPO would be purchased by capsuleers from CreoCron. CreoDron focuses on drones, obviously, and this shows. So, if Roden Shipyards were to make a Domi BPO, the mission statement of that corp would change the loadout and bonuses.

This would provide a way to focus tiericide and, eventually allow for customization based off of the parent corp's influence.

To take the previous example further, let's look at Marauders. The Kronos was invented by Duvolle Labs. But what would happen if CreoDron licensed the BPO? Well, they would apply their influence to it, bonuses would change, and more importantly .. they would more than likely use their own hull. So now, we have a layer of complexity that adds .. interesting results. A Kronos could be a Mega .. or it could be a Domi!

But the kicker is that this "Influence" ... It can be balanced vertically. In other words, the mission statement dictates how effective the ship is at specific functions. Any Change to the mission statement changes ALL the ships that corp has designed. The concept is both unifying and able to add depth to the game.

Remember: "a rose by any other name ..."

This can be applied to the current Teiricide effort. One corp may prefer support, whilst another prefers attack. This would be in their mission statement. So the hulls line up that way.

Interesting, but it'd be a major balance headache. Essentially, you're talking about adding at least two extra variants to most of the ships in the game (presuming that the baseline models would fall under one corp or the other, and since each empire has three shipyard corps). That's doable, but adding all that many different hull variants seems to me like it'd primarily serve to dilute role definitions... if a given hull has so many variants, it's harder to tell what a given ship actually does... especially if that information isn't visible at a glance (in the way that different variants of a given tech2 ship normally are).

The basic concept (adding more options for each role) isn't bad, but this isn't the way to do it. A better way would be something closer to how, say, assault frigates work. The Gallente have the Enyo and the Ishkur... both are assault frigates based off the Incursus hull, but both fly rather differently, being from different corporations. Does that mean that there's room for a third AF from Duvolle? Maybe, maybe not (in particular, there should not be a third AF based on the Incursus, though there might be room for one based off some other hull).

That said, the idea would especially be interesting to add more options to other roles, especially those with limited options. As an example, a CreoDron-type Logistics ship, designed to support with heavy drones instead of large remote reps, would be interesting.