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Um, wow, please tell me where to get my free capital ship. I guess I missed the memo and I screwed up buying the 3 I currently have and the other 3 I have sold. The only thing I have ever been given by my glorious evil masters, is a T2 Triage and that still cost me the T1.

Honestly though, can we please actually focus on the changes being proposed and not on nonsensical rhetoric, that is mainly falsehoods and speculation.

Cause lets face it, finger pointing and name calling, only makes each of us look like we are trying to tilt the game in line with our goals, when many of us actually would like to see functional ships. So if you actually want to be heard, try stating constructive ideas and point out flaws for the ships in question rather than look like fools crying to mommy.

Example:

The FAX in theory is a good idea to break up the over powered slowcat into 2 ships that have value. The biggest issue is making the FAX either too weak to use, being effectively on its own in a fleet fight, or making it into a platform that is more in line with other logistic class ships, with an option for Triage to make it even better at the cost of massive vulnerability, as with the current shape of dedicated Triage carriers currently. If FAX are more like current carriers of today, without the combat option, then we can maintain the effectiveness of capital logistics.

In regards to the argument that FAX would just make Titans and Supers immune to most incoming fire because of N+1 RR is a untrue argument. No matter the number of possible FAX you can bring, a Titan and Super can only ever tank up to and no more than their max EHP. While these can be rather large numbers, they are by no means unreachable. Furthermore, if you are unable to reach those numbers, you can kill off the FAXs, which will undoubtedly have much smaller total EHP and thus be much easier to kill.

Trying to reduce capital fights to a point that, for example, 10 Dreads can alpha a FAX, just means that you tell each squad commander to choose a target for his squad and fire. Thus a 250 Dread group can kill 25 FAX per volley and then focus on the combat ships. Durring which the other fleet only has Dreads to kill, which also take about 10 dreads to alpha, but that force being made up of 100 Fax and 150 Dreads, can only kill 15 enemy Dreads per volley. Before long you see that the all dread force, even using the stupid tactic of killing the FAX before dreads, maintains the highest number of damage dealers and wins the fight. Though in all honesty, what would happen is both sides alpha each others Dreads and the FAX either try to run for dear life or just wait till the end to die in a fire.

Now if the FAX can RR with current % of power out of Triage, and with the current style bonuses in Triage, that fight would go a lot different as the use of carriers is viable, being as they can get decent reps as needed, and can offer multiple options in the battle. So now the 2 fleets will have to test each other, look for either weakness in the combat ships or in the FAXs. This moves the fights into both about tactics and numbers. It means having good sub-cap support is needed and being properly diverse ensures more success rather than just a bunch of guaranteed losses.

Guaranteed losses does nothing to help the game, as it makes both sides decide to avoid conflict rather than chance a fight do to an FC who thinks he can defeat the other with better tactics and fleet comp. Currently, this is the issue more than any other in the game, no matter the class of ships. We all know the this comp beats that one, and another beats that. Its more a game of rock/paper/scissors and the group that can reship first is the winner.

So rather than making fights about force losses and forced mechanics, why not make ships more about balance within their classes. So yes cruisers will make life hell for a Destroyer, and Destroyers eat Frigates, but Battleships can't effectively harm Frigates. This is all good, in the sub-cap realms. In the capital realms, these are all basically the same, with Titans/Supers being king, but at the same time are so costly, the cost modifiers are as much a balancing as anything else.

Btw, CCP, Hand of God is a very creative and even weird idea, I really like it!
This weapon works like push force, but do you plan to introduce pull force weapon? Something, that creates gravitational anomaly and attracts ships towards its center.
This will be very handy for compacting enemy ships to shoot them down with another capital, bombing run or even pipebombing BSs.

They're planning a 'ship tractor beam' weapon just like this for the new structures.

i think carrier have 'other' siege mode. that is mean incrase control range, increase max drone(or fighters), and Electowarfare range.
why focus logistic? it have drone role, focus that.

and,
how does revenant? Is that have AB bonus? (SUPA SPEED?)
Navy faction capital? is coming?
how does marauder? marauder not capital. but have siege mode. capital role change, where BSs going?

This is adorable. It's like the community is permanently 2-3 years behind actual reality.

Your argument may gain some more traction if you actually describe what vaunted game features merit more importance than this. Talking in vague terms then trusting your audience to understand your particular vignette implicitly doesn't work.

So your thinking is, when large blob group drop 5 Fax, 20 supers and a few titans, a small group is going to be able to kill them? Small group of what, 100, 200 or 1,000 if as they usually do the large group have backup on call.
The large groups don't risk their capitals, if they aren't sure they can have complete dominance, they won't drop them. Smart game play but not very interesting for their victims.

A super or A titan, a small force can kill now - Most of them don't belong to the blobs though, they come from NPC corps or smaller groups and are caught trying to move around with limited jump ranges and fatigue establishing choke points. These changes actually make Supers and Titans harder to kill for smaller groups, unless you manage to catch one alone, then chances are it won't be a member of the dominating groups that gets caught.

Removing moon mining would be the only answer to stopping the large groups feeding off it - that hurts every group equally.
The only possible way to balance Goo would be to make moons a depleting resource. So every few months you need to go look for new moons and take them as your existing ones run out of product. (Give Rorquals a use - Specialized moon mining ships, tethered to a moon for X amount of time until it depletes then move on)

As for attrition - When you have players who can rat in relative safety and make enough for a super in a couple of weeks (if they aren't trying to hard), attrition will not be an issue for the large groups.

I dont get why many of you are acting as if this FAX change was to favor bigger groups. But the current remote repair system is this all or nothing situation where you either break the rep of all the logi ships combined our you don't. Or you have enough alpha to kill a target before reps can land. Which is kind of hard with capitals.

And that favors the larger group as their potential combined repair is better. CCP explained that very logically.

Current situation : 5 carrier, 20 supers and a titans have such strong rep that you cant break any of them. Unless you bring a even bigger force. So you ether die without killing anything, or you just dont take the fight and leave the grid to the supers. Effordless victory just by overwellming rep potential. No attrition.

New situation : The 20 supers cant rep anymore. FAX can only rep when in triage. The 20 Supers can be spammed with ewar. You are probably still not able to break a super or the titan but you can break a FAX as they can only selfrep. And that is no matter if there are 5 or 500 FAX.

The smaller force will probably still lose. But at least you were able to inflict SOME damage. Isnt that better than NONE ? At least for me it sound like a step in the right direction.

The bigger force my escaltate and bring in more members. But that still means they have to be there, and cant be somewhere else at the same time. Huge empire is huge.

So a bigger force will still win the individual fights, but suffer attrition.

Unless every lost capital can be replaced without any problem, making them spammable. And as long as the major blocks can park their asses on those money fountains, this problem is not going away. Beeing it moon goo or something else.

As for #1, the cost of T2 goods is fairly immaterial. Most of our doctrines are T1 ships. Since Technetium was nerfed, the ability to cartel moongoo like the olden days is fairly impossible. Even we, with our vast range of available moongoos, have to import the R32s and R8s that we can't mine in our space. I am probably misunderstanding the question, but T2 prices just aren't that big of a deal. T2 prices being high does affect our bottom line, but we've been forecasting a moongoo nerf for years now. Hell, we led the last major nerf to Technetium! Suffice it to say that our finance team is ready, willing, prepared to have moongoo nerfed. I should know, I'm on that team.

As for #2, we redefine coalition members fairly often -- it usually happens at the end of a war or other defensive campaign. We use paps and other metrics to redefine spoils, and in some cases, accept or expel member alliances. The standards are pretty lax, however -- you have to be a monumental screwup to actually get expelled from the Imperium. (Insert list of expelled alliances here for amusement.) Sometimes folks leave of their own volition and with our blessing; see [J4LP].

If by "redefine," you mean "expel member alliances simply for the sake of reducing our own power," then that's trickier. Even when we do end up losing member alliances (such as Fatal Ascension,) a large number of the constituents of the alliance bowing out end up being absorbed by the rest of the Imperium's remaining alliances.

Ironically, a part of why reductions in size don't work in practice is the availability of virtually risk-free, unlimited PVE in the form of L4s (both highsec and nullsec,) highsec incursions, and capital escalations in wormholes. There's definitely an upper bound to the amount of PVE and Industry available in any given area of space, and thanks to Phoebe and Aegis, there's definitely an upper bound to the amount of space that any one entity can hold without driving their logisticians and leadership to suicide. However, thanks to external, anonymous forms of PVE, a "blow-off valve" definitely exists to allow an organization to scale to any size. Frankly, Goonswarm Federation and the rest of the Imperium member alliances are fairly novel in that they actually bother to do PVE in their space in the first place.

I don't understand what "move" means -- are you suggesting that it matters which particular spit of sand we call home?

As for "redrawing borders," this already happens. Remember how we used to control Cloud Ring, Fountain, Delve, Querious, and Period Basis?

Thanks for the responses, approximately as I would have imagined :)

Well, borders are redrawn as a result of mechanical changes (mostly), I would doubt that many of those areas would have been ceded without phoebe/aegis. I was more musing that if, by means of game mechanics changes that border redrawing became a necessary part of life. Again though, I don't think it's realistic proposition. /shrug. Perhaps.

Yes, "move" meaning up sticks and relocate - I can't imagine a reason to ever do that. I asked because I think (and this is conjecture/reading between lines/extrapolation) that some would prefer if the game splintered into smaller, nomadic groups - but of course such a concept would never work because NOT working together is...well...it's dumb. Plus moving is a monumental pain in the ass at the best of times.

As interesting as it is to mull, however, overall it seems to me like a lot of people want empires to topple but won't put in the effort to create their own - it's as if they think the current powerhouses sprung into being overnight.

But I/we digress, thanks for the reply