Player Features and Ideas Discussion

I can easily justify medium autocannons.

They have lower DPS but better damage choice. They have higher DPS than heavy assault missiles so that's a win. They have good tracking. Their range isn't great but you can take advantage of the way it works and just use the shortest range ammo along with tracking computers/enhancers and get nearly twice the bonus that pulse lasers get from those modules. And best of all, they have super easy fitting cost.

Autocannons are up there with Beam Lasers and Railguns as my favorite turrets. When a ship gives me a choice of the turrets to fit, I almost always choose either Beam Lasers or Autocannons.


I'd change projectile ammo to reduce the range of short range with autocannons while increasing the range of long range with autocannons. And that's somewhat of a nerf--more power to the player but you have to use that power to make up for what you don't have anymore.

But seriously, railgun DPS should be nerfed by about 10%.

I guess that heavy assault missiles are actually in a worst state than autocannons

Not really. Aside from railguns doing beam laser damage projection there's not much of an issue with autocannon damage. Missiles are supposed to have lower damage because of their huge projection and damage type advantages. What people don't seem to get is that you need a higher multiplier to compensate for a smaller base number if you want to arrive at the same point. Ships with their missile damage focused on one type should receive a 10% damage bonus instead of the 5%, or if they are a type to receive a 10% bonus they should get 20%. I'm looking particularly at the Corax and Drake here. If they don't have their damage bonus doubled, then their skill damage bonus is worse than the skill damage bonus of other ships.

If you don't see the discrepancy yet, then consider the following:
Ship A is a turret ship and has a 5% damage bonus to this turret type--it's some turret with the same range as missiles and higher DPS because it has no damage selection. It has 240 base DPS, or 300 at max ship skill.

Ship B is a missile ship and has a 5% damage bonus to all types of missiles. It has 200 base DPS, lower than the turret ship but that's fine because it can choose its damage. With max ship skill its DPS is 250.

Ship C is a missile ship and has a 10% damage bonus to kinetic missiles only. Its base DPS is 200. With max ship skill its kinetic missile damage is 300 but with any other missile type it does 200. On just about any target it'll deal more damage with kinetic missiles than with any other type, so it doesn't really have a significant advantage from its ability to select damage aside from remote cases of a ship having a huge resist hole and the Ship C pilot somehow figuring that out.

So Ship A and Ship C both have a similar weapon system: similar range, similar damage, similarly lacking in damage choice. Ship B is a different thing: it has lower damage but can take advantage of the knowledge of an opponent's specific weaknesses. Its damage with alternate missile types is lower than the high end of damage of A or C, but higher than the alternate missile damage of ship C.


Think I'm spinning my logic too far away from the reality of the game? Well if you compare weapon systems, you quickly find that the rations vary hugely between different size categories. For instance, heavy pulse lasers with ultraviolet ammo match HAM range, likewise small rockets match range with small focused pulse lasers using ultraviolet. In the case of the small weapons, the laser hits significantly harder while in the case of the medium weapons, the missiles hit harder. Now the rocket launchers save on CPU better than the HAM launchers do, but ultimately there comes an issue here in which HAM ships must be weakened compared to medium pulse laser ships to compensate and/or rocket ships need to be stronger compared to small pulse laser ships.

The difficulty in comparing all of these things stems from a lack of a backbone representation of how all turrets should compare to one another. One ship is found to be too weak and tweaks are made without digging deeper to the heart of the problem. Thus it's a bandaid fix and the problem lingers, waiting to crop up and strike again later when some other ship tweaks are made. As time goes by it becomes more difficult to compare weapon systems in EVE. Long ago I had compared them and, based on the player opinion of which ships were strongest against what, I formulated a backbone idea of how weapon balance should work. It was much closer then than now to what the weapons actually look like.

Here's an example: Before the hybrid buff I had seen that the bigger problem was that hybrid ships weren't given enough powergrid to fit their weapons--railguns in particular. It made sense that railguns had low DPS, after all they had extreme range. Their DPS was higher than artillery despite a lower powergrid cost and longer range with the longest range ammo. Now I'm speaking primarily of large turrets here but the comparison wasn't so far off with the smaller types. My solution was to consider that all three long-range turrets cost both more powergrid AND more CPU than their short range counterparts while they didn't need to be more expensive as they were already balanced by having lower DPS and tracking. So to match the powergrid/CPU layouts of the ships that use the weapons, I cut the powergrid cost of artillery and railguns, and the CPU cost of beam lasers. I tweaked the powergrid/CPU of the turret battleships a bit--ignoring the weapons, seeking only to make their amounts sort of line up. This was because the Hyperion and Rokh then had far less powergrid than the Maelstrom and Abaddon while not having significantly more CPU to balance. I cut powergrid from the Maelstrom, cut CPU from the Abaddon, and increased powergrid on the Rokh and Hyperion. Now the Rokh had the smallest powergrid and largest CPU, Hyperion was next up in powergrid and next down in CPU, then Maelstrom, and Finally Abaddon with most powergrid and least CPU. A match. So I try fitting the tweaked weapons--they fit kind of tight but all fit about the same tightness. Snug. Now I could balance their specific traits without worrying about the fitting costs.

I know this has been a wordy post but my point here is that if we cut down deep to the heart of the problem and fix what has really gone wrong, we can build a game that is far more tweakable, so that instead of making a mess we can gradually clean it up as time goes by. It'll be a lot easier to introduce new ships and new concepts if it's easier to tell how it fits into the existing game, as opposed to this convoluted mess we have now where you just have to throw it on the test server and see how it works.