Here's the first part of some ideas for mechanics changes to Eve's PvP system. I feel this still needs a lot of editing, but I might as well throw it out there to get things started.
Overall Problems with Ship Combat:
As it stands now smaller ships have minimal value in combat. The larger the fight, the less ship types are valuable, and the faster smaller the ships die. This goes against some basic concepts of what combat in Eve should be about:
- All ships have roles
- All ships are valuable in fleet combat
- New players can serve a valuable role and enjoy combat in that role in all scales of combat
- Veteran players can serve a valuable role in any type of ship -not just the largest
- Capitals need sub-capital support fleets and should be supporting large sub capital fleets –not the other way around.
There are some specific reasons small ships are less valuable. In particular these are:
- Drones of any size can be fit on any ship thereby giving large ships a powerful and often unending counter to any smaller ship class.
- Energy Neutralization does not scale well versus smaller ships. One shot from a large neut and your frigate or cruiser is out of cap.
- Capital class ships are effective against smaller ships. This is in part due to the formerly stated drone problem. However Fighters deal significant damage to cruiser class ships, while Titans can single-shot anything –and do.
- ECM does not scale well. Smaller ships have weaker sensor strength and fewer slots to counter ECM. It is an “I win“ button versus smaller ships, and most T1 ships.
Many of these issues need to be examined holistically. They cannot be dealt in an individual way. Let’s being with drones.
Drone Size Restrictions:
Endless light and/or medium drones on large ships are a problem. The larger the ship, the more drones it can hold. There needs to be some changes to how drones deal damage, and restrictions placed on what type of drones each ship can carry.
- “Drone Slots” need to be added to the game.
- Smaller ships would be limited to light drones.
- Cruisers and Battlecruisers would be able to carry only a small amount of light drones (less then 5), and mostly medium drones.
- Battleships would carry a small amount of medium drones (less then 5), and mostly heavy drones.
- Capitals could only carry heavy drones and fighters.
One exception to these rules would be the Gallente drone boats. These ships have less high slots, turret hardpoints, and a limited power grid. Their alternate toolsets for fighting smaller ships is much more limited. Therefore these ships would be allowed one full flight of 5 drones of a smaller type. This would be quite potent, but limited to only one set. As an example, the Vexor would have 5 light drone slots, while the Dominix would have 5 medium drone slots.
Lets give some specific examples to help visualize these changes:
Megathron: 3 medium drone slots, 5 heavy drone slots
Vagabond: 2 light drone slots, 3 medium drone slots, drone bay increased to 30m, bandwidth unchanged
Drone movement, tracking, and damage dealing:
All drones should be able to shoot their target if they are in range even while moving. The issues with drones warping, to stop, to shoot, to warp needs to end. However the amazing accuracy of large and medium drones that are not in warp versus smaller targets needs to end, as well.
- All light drones should be effective at dealing damage to frigates. This means some tracking boosts to Acolytes, Hornets, and Hobgoblins.
- Medium drones should deal some damage to frigates, but not an overwhelming amount.
- Large drones should deal next to no damage to moving frigates. They should deal some damage to moving Destroyers, Cruisers, and appropriate damage to moving Battlecruisers.
- Sentries should exhibit the same characteristics as large drones in this area.
- Fighters, should deal solid damage to battleships. As the target gets smaller, though their damage should reduce down to nothing quite quickly.
- Fighter Bombers should deal no damage to moving sub-capital ships.
Energy Neutralizers:
In their current form large Neuts simply destroy smaller ships. One shot takes a small ship’s capacitor to zero. Overall neutralizers are quite strong and give a very high reward for simply being in rage of the target. Lerger neuts certainly should give some advantage to larger ships without completely making fights one sided. To this end I suggest neuts remove the lesser between some percentage of a target’s capacitor or the neut’s maximum given value. Lets give a specific example:
Current Large T2 Neut: Energy Neutralized, 600 GJ
Suggested Change: Energy Neutralized, 600 GJ or 40% of Target’s Capacitor, whichever is less
This change would cause all ships to lose less energy as their cap got lower. 40% is still a significant amount of any ships capacitor, but conversely, as targets grow larger the base flat values would take over meaning smaller neuts could not overpower larger ships. Ships with bonuses to neutralization would see all bonuses given to both the percentage value and the flat value. On a side note, because of the way Energy Vampires work I believe the framework to implement this change already exists.
Challenges with ECM:
As Stated above, ECM scales terribly in its current implementation. Additionally, unlike tracking computers and sensor boosters, the modules used to counter ECM serve no other purpose. ECM drones are also incredibly strong with little skill investment required, and in many cases even stronger then ECM modules, themselves.
The design goal of the following changes are to continue to allow ECM to be a strong EWAR platform (ECM is all the Caldari do so it better be good) while allowing smaller ship some chance of not being completely countered. It’s also important to maintain some sort of sensor level advantage for T2 ships and larger combat ships such as battleships and carriers.
To begin with, I would like to see the current sensor strength of all ships removed and replaced with a percentage value. All T1 Ships up through battlecruisers would have a base value of 100%. T2 ships and those larger than BCs would gain sensor strengths greater than 100%. Specific values could be played with.
Second the ECM modules themselves would have a base percentage jamming chance. The calculation for jamming success or failure would be (ECM Strength/Ship Sensor Strength). As an example, an ECM module with a jamming strength of 20% would give .2/1 versus a T1 frigate, which is obviously a 20% chance.
Next, the racial strengths and weaknesses to jamming would be moved to the ECM modules. So Caldari percentages would be lower, while Mini percentages would be higher.
Finally, ECM drones would see their percentages lowered to 1/4 of the ECM module counterpart –so somewhere around 5%, give or take some percentage points for drone size. This would lower the odds, but hopefully not make ECM completely useless.
Overall the goal is to get smaller ships back in the game, while maintaining ECM as a strong platform.
I'll post more parts to these suggestions as I get them ready. Comments appreciated!
MJ
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