Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Last night while playing I noticed that really all the ships in Eve have a lot in common... they all work the same way, with infinite fuel and varying capabilities depending on module and pilot, the ships in each class are almost (not quite, but almost) identical as far as capabilities, with relatively minor differences in fits, armor, slots, etc. This aids in CCP balancing the various ship types, of course.

But how about something *really* different?


I propose a new type of ship (or ships) on which most ship's systems are based on the concept of extremely high energy use. These ships could be balanced like existing ships and tiered like them, but rather than balancing power use with cap/grid limits they would draw all energy from a rapidly draining, refillable, shielded "tank" which provides huge amounts of power for their use.

How would they fill the tank? By diving into the nearest star and harvesting matter :)

Once the tank is full, the ships could move throughout systems and warp like other ships, but their other systems would be rather different. An example would be weapons.

Weapons on one of these ships would work by drawing matter from the stellar mass tank and projecting it at a target. Each shot would be very powerful, more so than existing weapons for the same class of ship, but would have very limited "ammunition" since they draw from the tank. This would dramatically change how they would be used against other ships, because simply targeting a ship and permitting the guns to fire until they're dry wouldn't work... the capsuleer would have to limit active firing to the ranges and situations where the weapons would hit and do damage. Additionally, recklessly drawing down the tank to 0 mass would not only stop the guns from firing but would also lower the shields and power down any other system that was powered by stellar matter, sort of like bottoming out caps in the current ships, but worse. No doubt this would not be a ship type for newbros, or for those who like easy to fly ships.

The tanks would not be huge, for example a frigate might be able to fire ten to fifteen blasts from its cannons before running out of energy. Each blast might be sufficient to one-shot a frigate that does not have resists and three to destroy a destroyer, but the weapons should be balanced with regard to accuracy and other limits... they should have very short range and a slow fire rate in addition to the "ammo" limitation described above.

A pilot in a ship like this would have to behave differently. If they got jumped in a wormhole with a less than full tank, they would have a choice... warp out and escape, or head for the star? In any system, should someone with this ship spend all their time near the star, just in case of attack?

In addition to the differences due to refueling and weapons mechanics, there should be some good advantages to such a ship. For example, the availability of all that energy should make a specialized mining rig possible, maybe permitting high yields of certain limited ore types or gases, but requiring refueling trips mid-mining... perhaps these ships could be used to harvest material directly from stars, too. Maybe they could mount a special high yield tractor beam able to move asteroids around, or perhaps they would have available a special shield that would be impenetrable, but would drain 1% of the tank every second? What POS structures could be fueled by collected stellar matter?

One final suggestion for this ship class... when these ships are destroyed, their fuel tanks would be breached, and I think it would be appropriate for the fuel this liberates to at least glow and preferably detonate when this happens :)

There are a lot of possibilities for having ships that break the standard mold, and they'd add a lot of variety to game play. I'd like to see some in New Eden.

Players will develop tactics to perform massive hit and run alpha strikes in packs to gank superior conventional forces.

What's their weakness? Short battery life isn't enough. I can see the CODE even now, using it. Warp in to gank, didn't land on target, warp out. Did land on target, blap blap super gank no skills needed.

I think every person who wants to present an idea here has to ask themselves three simple questions:

- In what ways can I use this idea to cause maximum chaos and damage with minimal effort?

- How does this not obsolete or "take away" from the "old" things/mechanics?

- Why?

because small efficent engine doesnt make you go faster than big primitive ones.
amarr use more of their tonnage for armor plates/capacitor stuff while minmatar ship are pretty much big engines with some some scraps of metal and guns ducktaped on them with some shield as a protection.

You realize peer review works partly by suggesting ways for improvement and partly by punching big gaping holes in the weak parts of any proposal?

And your idea has at this time more holes that a basketball net.

You don't just get to hand-wave away everyone's criticism of your idea as "Have faith CCP won't **** it up" and "Don't be negative about how the current outline would be horribly abused"

You propose an idea. We tell you why it won't work. You then fix those aspects and we rinse and repeat until we have a workable product. And your idea in anywhere near the current form, will not work.

Short endurance in a fight is nowhere near big enough a tradeoff for being able to deal massive damage with single shots capable of killing same class ships in one blow, or having invincible shields, or super high mining yields, or any of the other crack pipe proposals that are somehow balanced.

"I blap your equally sized fleet in 1-3 shots, but then I have to go refuel at the sun, and that makes it balanced"

No

Firepower of a dread in a cruiser hull... Yep, that wont go **** up.

So it's only horribly overpowered when used in system defense, or gatecamping, or if you get there first? This is a really poor excuse for a downside. It's either far more powerful that anything it meets in it's own size if it's already fueled up, or completely useless.




A frig should not blap a frig in one shot, even under specific conditions.

A certain range is easy to set up, either close or far away. No shields is easy to set up and based against armor frigs. Near stationary targets are easy to set up.

None of these are acceptable drawbacks for letting a ship deal alpha volley bursts many times higher than any other similarly sized hull can do even with max skills, largest weapons, and a rack of faction damage amps.

How about a new capital ship, sort of dread/ carrier hybrid, that can jump 20 LY, but has to refuel at the sun? Cannot be cloaked while refueling either. Can only deploy 5 drones/fighters max. Can fit cap weapons. No logistic bonuses. No triage or siege. Oh, and of course the best part, it doesn't use cynos to jump. It jumps to a solar systems sun, which basically is a giant cyno itself.

Design the Caldari version to look just like the Daedalaus from Stargate and Ill be happy.

^^will never happen, but fun to dream about it anyways.^^

Okay, so maybe limit the uses of the tank power... no weapons, for instance?

The idea is to create a ship type that for reasons must refuel to perform actions like other ships, with a benefit added to compensate for the fact that other ships don't have to refuel.




I'm curious as to why you have this as a hard and fast rule. Certainly there are a lot of larger ships that have the ability to destroy other vessels in one shot, hence the high alpha builds out there.

Perhaps a solution would be to set weapon power so that each class can one shot the next lowest class? The reason I was using the example of a one-shot was that there should be a significant benefit to having to refuel to do things.



True to a point, for some definitions of "easy". For most of the weapons in the game, there is an ideal situation in which they will do their best damage, and this proposal is no different.



Okay.... so, setting aside weapons for a moment..... in fact let's go more abstract with this.

I think the game would benefit from more variety in ships, specifically in how ships fuel and use weapons... the best example in-game is hybrid weapons' ammo. Effectively it's as infinite as energy weapons' power because it's possible to carry a huge amount of rounds.

So I'm suggesting that a ship type be created with advantages over the existing ships in some significant way that balances out the fact that all the ships other than this type have effectively infinite ammo and no need to refuel. This ship would need to refuel which would give it a big disadvantage, so what's a good corresponding advantage?

What I'm trying to do by suggesting this is add lots of variety to play and combat... the more choices a player has, the better for the game (provided they're not trivial ones) so if players can choose to use a ship that needs fuel in exchange for a benefit, that means combat gets a lot of variety with new tactics required to handle the fact that some ships will need to keep combat short or take a break to refuel, and the others will need to change tactics to take advantage of/prevent refueling.

Thoughts?

And there lies the basic problem.

In order for a ship to be forced to frequently refuel, the benefit it gains has to be commensurately as great to make it worth flying. And since it is a very significant downside, it means a very significant benefit.

This locks you into a binary state where a ship either has massive advantages over a similar size ship if already fueled, or massive disadvantages if not fueled.

This is fundamentally unbalanced. It's just not something you can balance, because if the fueled ship is close enough in combat performance to a conventional ship that requires fuel to not cause major balance issues, it's just a ship that has no significant upside and major drawbacks.


Imagine it as a boxing match where one side is your traditional boxer, and the other side flips a coin at the start. If he gets heads, he gets a baseball bat and body armor. If tails, he's stripped naked and tied to a chair for the match. No matter if he get's heads or tails, it's never going to be an even remotely even or enjoyable match to watch.

It just doesn't work.