Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Not entirely true... back in the deep dark days (actually, only about a year and a half ago, before my little one hatched) I would often mine solo in deep null with a hulk, while my alt flew a BC with a harvester optimization link and provided rat cover. Every two hours or so, I'd switch the alt to an iteron v to haul back to tower/station, then go back to the BC. Similar story when I lived in a class 3... BC for protection (and a finger busily on d-scan), then flipping to a hauler as needed.

2.) A tool tip when hovering the pointer over the strip miner icon telling you exactly how many units have been mined, to be used in conjunction with a survey scanner. I like to try to shut off my strips when they would be otherwise wasting a portion of a cycle, but there is still alot of guess work involved. The increased efficency would also promote non-afk game play?

Fair 'nuff... to me 'solo' is however many accounts a single human can reasonably control without resorting to click replication software (eg. ISBoxer) or other non-biological means.

.......... -220 scan res for the Procurer and Skiff. This is being done partly to ensure that the Hulk has a small relative lock time advantage and partly to avoid making the Procurer and Skiff too powerful in combat. The lock time of all barges and exhumers is still obscenely good.

No... wait... this is actually the right kind of crazy.

Give them a special cloak which allows use of mining lasers, (each needing a special targeting prompt to engage passively while cloaked).
For the targeting, just click on the laser with nothing locked, it already does this by default.

The hostile, warping to the belt, looks for the tell tale of lasers hitting rocks, and heads over to get closer.

This is the good part, follow carefully here.

The miner, KNOWING they are cloaked and cannot be targeted, has no reason to run.
The hunter, seeing the laser, gets closer to the miner.

The hunter needs to decloak, in order to do ANYTHING offensive.
By decloaking, they immediately alert the miner, who kills the mining laser, effectively removing the only clue to their whereabouts.

Now, IF the hostile is decloaked and has smart bombs, they can set them off, and hope their target is in range.
The mining ship should be trying to back away, out of such range.
(Time to call friends, if applicable)

It kind of reminds me of the old grid and peg game, battleship, where players try to guess each others location for combat.

I would love to test out encounters using these details.

Quick suggestion, would it hurt balance too much if the hulk and the covetor had 12000 m3 ore bays bringing them in line with the procurer. They'd still be varied enough in performance to not overlap but the hulk and covetor might see some more use.