Ships & Modules

This has a decent chance of being a good long-term fix (we'd have to think about it some more), but it's too large in scope for this release, unfortunately.

dude, the problem is not sig radius the way you've suggested.

The problem is that tracking gets better over range because of your formula. There is no penalty for a ship being further away and thus appearing smaller in reality.

So while I can always choose a smaller ship to counter sig, I cannot choose a smaller ship to counter tracking. There's only 2 ways to counter tracking, get closer, or get faster.


The issue is this. If I pull out my gun and try to hit a pumpkin from 2 feet away, I'm probably going to hit it because it's very large in my view. But if that same pumpkin is 100 yards away, it should appear a hell of a lot smaller. This does not happen in eve. The sig size always stays consistent. So there is no penalty for sig according to range, and tracking gets progressively better at range.

For a huge ship like a titan, this means that if you have 10+ on the field, their shear size (30km+ across each) is going to spread them and the enemy fleet out more... meaning more range and greater tracking. Sig matters a hell of a lot less in this case. And in addition, you can add webs to targets in addition to that range factor benefiting the titans and you get very high results.

The solution is to inflate weapon signiture over range for all ships. You should not decrease damage directly like falloff... that's a horrible solution. If you just inflate the signiture according to range for the weapons, this means that smaller targets get progressively harder to hit.

My solution in another thread a while back is to give every gun a base range for their signiture to apply at. So a 425 railgun might have a 50km signiture range where it's signiture is 400 like current. But for every % further from that 50km base, the signiture of the gun should increase.... IE at 100 km range, the sig of the gun is 800. This means it's harder for the gun to hit smaller ships as range increases. This would not hurt titan v capital, but would likely affect titan vs anything else and reduce the effects of that 60-100km zone of combat where webs can't reach, and titans still struggle to track.

In particular, it would hurt the close range high tracking titans because if their base sig range was low... (IE 15-20km for Giga Pulse as an example), at 60km range, they would have 3x the sig or 3000 sig compared to the BS they are trying to hit....

This makes sense because distant objects are supposed to be harder to hit. So please implement a mechanic that makes sense not just for titans, but for all ship class warfare. Because quite honestly, frigates should have a lot better survival rate vs bs according to their sig/speed advantage...and you just don't see it currently. I mean, smaller ships are already penalized enough for small defense and smaller offense and range.


***** As a side note, the above suggestion adds a huge new feature for gun balance where you can make proper mid range weapons, close range weapons, and long range weapon. This means that every solution to the artillery vs rail vs beam or the blaster vs auto vs pulse doesn't have to come down to direct damage and tracking... you actually have a mechanic to make each range and gun type specialize with it's signature in a certain zone.... So rails might have 3x further range than pulse for their signiture to remain normal, thus boosting their efficiency with mid range ammos and not forcing you to apply a **** patch where damage is boosted like the last one. Artilleries might have huge alpha, but a pretty small window for sig (30-40km), meaning more struggles hitting moving ships due to the sig inflation of the guns(which they need btw).

By god, you fixed rails.

Until thе devs realize that their fоrmula іs **** аnd that all turrets need to be balanсed based on a gun signature to range comparison‚ combat in еve will cоntіnue to be broken. It just mаkes 0 sense that the frigate that is 100km distanсe away looks exactly the same size to my guns as he does at 1km range, while my tracking is literally 100x better at 100km range.

It seems like it'd be just as easy just to introduce a sigrad-based damage scaling on XL turrets, which takes you to approximately the same expected DPS in most situations but in a more consistent (ie, less burst-prone) manner, and with the advantage that we can use much simpler math (linear/quadratic scaling) so the average user has a better chance of being able to estimate the likely outcomes. In either case though, it seems like a lot of effort to go to just to force people to fit target painters to their supercarriers; furthermore, the decision we've made is based partly on a desire to avoid special-casing so this sort of approach isn't really on the table right now.