theres a lot of stuff being thrown around here, however I’d like to chime in, there were a series of mining changes to the game which made a lot of industrial players leave the game, the game is also been rebalanced so that obviously larger ships take more time to manufacture, which is fine in my eyes.
however this means as a miner to achieve any real sense of profit or achievement it takes longer, while combat missions still pay the same.
I am for having Mining Barges having more drones.
Perhaps a resize of the drone bay
HOWEVER change how much bandwidth the T1 drones use. this would actually make that market move better.
to off set this I would probably have to increase T1 mining drone cost by about 12-25% so its a small accumulative drain on a miners finances, I’m not sure if the industrial aspect is set up in anyway to have all resources available in a single region but if you added in a single element into the BP’s that would probably nudge things, something that’s not a massive inconvenience.
on the subject of AFK mining if we’re talking about mining barges being able to use more drones and we can’t go changing the stats, you could perhaps have some kind of mining barge siege module which allows for the extra drone bandwidth and usage which causes barges to anchor and deploy, but have better mining yields, this could perhaps be scaled from highsec mins being the most and the further out you get the less yield it has.
on the subject of a Rorqual being a “booster” this has always irritated me “look I’ve invested so much time and effort into a single ship, it does boosts!” (sarcastic and disinterested “yay”)
we need to stop thinking in terms of “mining” and “boosts” its too analytical, there will naturally always be an analytical side to things but what really needs to happen is the Rorqual, yes, needs to continue to fulfill the boost role, HOWEVER i strongly feel that the Rorqual needs to be entirely re-imagined in terms of its base functionality.
one idea i had was that a rorqual would have a new core drive and system which would cause resources to despawn from asteroid belts and sigs and then spawn around the rorqual, creating an asteroid belt around it, the longer its sieged, the more resources, this way you don’t have to fly around and its worth staying on grid, this means content for big fleet fights and it can piggy back onto existing mechanics such as the C.R.A.B Beacons for capitals. something like a “microgravity environment generator”
we all want the Rorqual to do something else outside of boost but its not a mining ship and isn’t a combat ship even though people can fit them for mining and combat this isn’t the purpose.
so ultimately the ship needs to be re-imaged and probably outside of what we have established in the game.
what if the rorqual when sieged, can allow mining barges bonuses to drones.
instead of actually being a case of mining Yield Rates / ISK per hour, we need to stop thinking about things in terms of the established roles and possibly create a new one entirely
in the real world, capital ships are mainly focused toward Military capability.
outside of this they’re set up as haulers, storage and production.
I would say it would be cool to see the Rorqual be able to fire a powerful laser at resources but I’m sure this causes massive problems with the balance, suggesting only the rorqual should be allowed to mine certain materials too also fails, we have PI for planets and we have the moon drills for moons.
so unless there is another alternative by modifying or even removing some existing game play factor and slapping it into the rorqual I’m not seeing much hope for the ship as a whole unless entirely the concept of it is re-imagined.
I personally don’t see the issue with the concept of the Rorqual being either:
- a resource allocation specialist
- a mobile refinery with resource compression technology.
hell you cold even blag that, saying its only compressed while in the ship, due to “structured nano weaving compression” it goes back to the station and is moved from ship to station, boom now it takes up more space.
the truth is when you start getting into capital ships, these things are basically giant player controlled flying structures.
sort of like how there is a scale of Frigates → Battle Ships → Capitals
Capitals are more like micro flying structures, even a titan is as big and as powerful as a stargate.
maybe circling back to my initial point we need to stop looking at them in simple “boost” and “mining” abilities and consider them more like “micro structures” at least in terms of mining and industry.