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If this is a design decision, I would suggest that it's a poor one...

There obviously needs to be counterplay, but by introducing the need to pray to RNGesus you've turned a potentially solid idea into something that is utterly wasteful.

My statistics are a little rusty... but as soon as the first missile is launched, every other ship has a 1 in 8 chance of being completely wasted, the second has a 2 in 8 chance of being wasted, the third has a 3 in 8 chance of being wasted, and so on. By the time you've got 4 missiles in the air you're just as likely to completely waste your shot as you are to help your fleet.

This is birthday paradox central.

Someone will have to check my maths as I'm pretty tired, but 1/8 * 2/8 * 3/8 * 4/8 * 5/8 * 6/8 * 7/8 * 8/8 means that if you counter 8 bombers with 8 support destroyers, your chance of destroying every incoming bomb is practically non-existent (0.2%) giving a 99% chance that a bomb is going to explode on top of your anti-bomber ship and likely destroy it.

That's from ONE wave... and in any major fight you're going to have 4 or 5 waves minimum to wreck the EHP of most doctrines.

With those kind of numbers, and the number of people required to effectively guard against multiple bombs in multiple waves, with such massively diminishing benefits, I see no circumstance where it would not be preferable to field those same people in sebo'd arty / rail destroyers, sit further away outside defensive bubbles, and try to blap the bombers before their bombs detonate.

I'd love to see new bomb types. Tracking Disruption or Missile Disruption AoE effects would be interesting.

Then you stagger the launch of the defenders. You should have enough time to get three distinct Defender waves off.

At the start, you can afford to gamble two/three Defenders as the chance of two picking the same bomb is 1/n for n-bombs. There's a ~65% chance of three Defenders picking different targets out of an eight-bomb wave.

Second round: Assuming the optimistic scenario of 5/8 bombs remaining, a second wave of three Defenders gives you a 48% chance of picking three of the remaining bombs.

That's a 31% chance of reducing bomber DPS by three quarters.

And you have about five seconds left to deal with those last two bombs.


TLDR. Don't blow your load as soon as you see bombs.

At <15km, there's no such thing as a friendly bomb :P

Glad to see defender missiles getting some love. YAY, more reasons for destroyers to be used.

Not sure if this is the kind of healthy love they need, however. Not sure why the mechanics would prevent this from becoming a proper PDS to shoot down non-friendly missiles, but I suppose it was easier to code it to shoot down slow moving bombs than fast moving missiles.

I see a potential problem with this system however: if multiple bombs are launched and you have multiple destroyers armed with defender missiles: are they smart enough to not shoot the same target? If 3 defender missiles fire at 5 bombs, will 2 bombs survive or 4?

Have a re-read of the posts in this thread.

I imagine it's in anticipation of some forthcoming Battleship changes.

to the above: assuming each bomb is equally likely to be hit [unlikely in practise], the probability of 8 destroyers destroying 8 bombs if all 8 destroyers fire their defender missile at the same time while all 8 bombs are in range is as follows
( 8! / 8^8 ) = .0024~
just under 1/400 basically

all these launchers will do is make bombing require more people, not be harder or more interesting, just more tedious and frustrating as the fc herds a bag of spiders
to make it increasingly likely that a full wave of bombs lands, the bombers have to add more bombs to each wave. whereas before you would launch exactly max bombs per wave, now you will probably want to launch max+3 or 4 to have a high chance of a full hit

this just exasperates all the boring parts of bombing (especially in tidi), where non-fc bomber fleet members literally just sit cloaked for hours. it doesn't provide any interesting game play, it just nerfs an already dying way of 3rd partying or supplementing your main fleet

From a game balancing perspective this makes absolutely no sense unless you plan to roll back the bomber nerfs from 2013.
Bombers with bomb launchers are used rarely in any large engagement now-a-days due to the distributed multi-grid fights across several systems making the logistics and strategy of a bomber fleet quite complicated.

But now you wish to take the remaining and small usability of bombers and throw that completely out by giving an I-WIN button to counter bombs. Where is the logic in this? Usually these balance posts are preluded by motivation for a particular nerf or boost. I.e. "We will that bombers in general are too powerful in the current game play". But there's no such explanation given here - possibly hinting that you don't have a legitimate motivation.

This change will lead to simply extinguishing an interesting and dynamic combat mechanic in EVE.

Yes, removing gameplay options is good. Let's rat, mine, stay safe tethered on citadels and only move out for arranged fun fights :/