A thought for Battleships having alternative mobility

I’m told that the battleship doctrine is unfavored; in the realms of jump-drives, bridging, and that of much more mobile fleets this is the current ‘meta’. I have an unorthodox proposal, don’t change their speed, nor their warp speed, nor give them a jump-drive. Instead give them a hyper-drive.

Give battleships the ability to warp to a system directly without needing gates. I’m not suggesting something instantaneous, nor something as far reaching as a jump drive. I’m suggesting giving them a range that’s a quarter of the reach of a typical jump drive (range can vary). As well as a wait time (time can vary in regards to LY distance) before reaching said system where it would’ve been instantaneous to use a gate.

However not all systems are linked to their near system counterparts on the map via gate and this would give an alternative means of tactical mobility and set their own niche between different extremes in mobilization. For the sake of balance I would caution against being able to warp to wherever in a targeted system unassisted, but something like that of warping only in range of the system’s Sun or specific planet. A curious addition could be like that of a cyn- “pinpoint” module from a supporting member for more specific warp locations for such fleets.

Numbers can be tweaked, restrictions can be made, either way, just a thought to make the battleship relevant tactically and uniquely.

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I think we could call them Black Ops and give them a fuel bay like capitals do.

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honestly i feel battleships need more base durability and firepower than mobility, let it be slow and cumbersome to get into the fight but once its there, let it be able to hang in the fight alot longer and be able to deal the damage at the longer range you would expect from them.

right now they are to overshadowed by smaller faster ships that can easily get EHP just as high and still deal around the same if not more damage at similar ranges to battleships and those that cant get the range can easily reposition and dictate range because of there speed, the battleship should be able to reach out across a vast majority of the battlefield without having to use up most of its fitting space to do so and be able to stand there ground.

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Also a very interesting direction and refreshingly different from how I thought about it until now. My lines of thought are more:

  • Give BS’s lowsec to play with by keeping Titans and supercarriers exclusively to 0-sec;
  • Remove cynowarping for anything except the black/cov ops ship-lines and jumpfreighters. This means the supers can still jump (to celestials, structures and…?), but their smaller non-super-ship support fleets will have to travel gate to gate and might run into some battleship trouble along their way of teaming up with their jumpdrived supers again.
  • Speed up the warpspeed of BS’s
  • Together with the ideas of @Xuixien of adding dual weapon systems so they can actually become real “Ships of the Line” in holding the battlefield against a wider variety of shipclasses;
  • and further many of the suggestions already made here.
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That’s the thing though… they have more than enough firepower to wipe out a cap. Lets be generous and give a dread a 5m EHP buffer (it’s closer to half that in practice, even ignoring stuff like neuts). At an average dps of just 750, you can wipe out that 5 million EHP in a minute with a normal sized battleship fleet. Meanwhile, those battleships can easily apply that much damage from outside of HAW range assuming it’s haw-fit at all.

They could have more tank, but would it really help? If they could die before, they’ll continue to die now, it’ll just take a little longer, which doesn’t really fix the problem in this situation. Your average bomber fleet will still break the 12" dildo off in their backsides. Capitals will still destroy them. Other battleships will still destroy them.

On the other hand, give them more mobility, and now the damage they have (which is already sufficient) can be applied correctly through proper piloting. Tracking a cruiser fleet becomes easy when you vector appropriately. You can get out of bomb range before they blow you to hell. You can control range on capitals far far easier. All while having not spent the last 20 minutes trying to slit your wrists getting them to the fight.

Take battleships on a roam. Invariably, the problem will be that a hard counter was formed and they either chased your ass down or bottled you into a pocket and are now camping your only exit, after you have spent an hour roaming what would have taken you 20 minutes in a cruiser fleet. Since Eve will and should always have hard-counters, more tank won’t change this, it’ll just change the comp. Meanwhile, you never caught jack ■■■■ because you showed up on intel a long time ago and you can’t shotgun your way through the space before people get wind that you’re on the prowl.

If you want people to use battleships, you need them to not be so amazingly painful. You need them to not be the fatass that slows the fleet down.

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Yep, EVE has had a power creep problem for years with several ship classes untouched so now you have cruisers that are better than battleships on every stat.

Tech2 should be a specialized option that expands one ability on a ship at the expense of others, not a straight upgrade from tech1 (which should be more generalized).

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I would disagree with your wording, though I know what you meant. On paper battleships are way better. They’ve got bigger buffers, higher alpha, higher sustained, more cap, etc.

It’s only in practice that you see smaller ships slagging their buffers, sig tanking their damage, and generally just swarming.

My biggest criticism can be summed up as “although bigger isn’t better in Eve, smaller shouldn’t be better either”. And right now, for the practical implications of mobility, smaller ships are invariably better, both tactically and strategically.

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