You wrote an excellent post, thank you for taking the time to write it, the footnotes make it exceptional.
It’s not. The real jump isn’t from battleship to capital, though there is a definite jump there. That’s also a result of a missing half-step (Small: Frigate → Destroyer. Medium: Cruiser → Battlecruiser. Large: Battleship → ???) that creates more feeling of a gap than the mechanics actually produce. But the problem jump isn’t capitals. It’s supers. Let’s take a quick look at the progression (and full disclosure, I know someone who’s working on a larger article about this and what it all means, hopefully coming out not long after the new year on INN).
Your right, the progression from battleship to capital is immense, in terms of ability, damage, and hitpoints. While I wish to see the ship classes equal across New Eden in terms of accessibility, you speak the truth when it comes to the craziness from battleship to carrier/dreadnaught. Short of massively nerfing capitals, I think several new classes of ship should be introduced starting from the next level up from battleship, to the level down from carrier/dreadnaught. Perhaps these ships could be the ‘hunter killer’ class of capital, designed specifically to be a nuisance to the larger ships.
Suddenly, the increase in damage and the increase in tank are completely decoupled. There’s a reason the only thing that kills titans in any kind of decent-sized group is titans in an even bigger group: nothing else lives long enough to chew through all that ehp. Sure, you might kill 1 or 2 titans with 100 dreads if they’re isolated, but if not? You won’t get the titans. You’ll at best get some faxes or dreads or rorquals while the hostile titan pilots have themselves a grand old time turning you into killmarks. Titans (and supercarriers, too, considering the 46.7M ehp the Aeon sits around) and supers just don’t die unless you pound on them with a fairly hefty group.
I agree, nerfs to supercarriers/titans or introduction of specific anti-capital ship classes could help alleviate this.
As for balancing around material costs… no. Don’t ever fall into that trap. That’s how they were originally balanced when CCP imagined there’d never be more than 4 or so titans in the game. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because it just means the people who are already in the best position will run away with the arms race even more , because we not only have the biggest supercapital fleet, we’ve got the most masochistically single-minded autistic nerds ever assembled all mining their little black hearts out to make more.
Very true, mineral mining cost in 2006 is vastly different than 2020. I believe the mineral cost should reflect the class of ship. A frigate costs roughly what a frigate class, and so on. You pay/build for performance, if you want a titan class ship, you pay or use the minerals for a titan class ship.
This same effect kicks in, only much, much worse , for the ‘pay to enter highsec’ option. It basically ensures that the richest groups, who already have a metric buttload of these things and the ability to generate vast sums of ISK, will have more access to capitals in highsec. Not just because they can afford to pay, but because they can afford to pay and will pay for titans fleets that won’t ever leave highsec. They’ll just kill the capitals everyone else is paying to bring in. Really. Never, ever balance against ‘cost’. It’s a fool’s gambit, and it will only explode in your face exactly the way it consistently has in EVE over the last 16 years.
This is also a good point, my proposal for the cost was to make it more expensive to own it in highsec than in nullsec, so that CCP can make some more money to help their financial situation. However you are correct that the wealthy can pay for the fee easier than the poor, however that has always been the case, the trillionaire player has greater influence in the sandbox if he starts spending money than the player with a few million. However the little man should always have a place he can fall back to, in highsec this will be NPC stations and perhaps if the balance of keepstar dock only does not work, NPC owned megastations, with unique appearances ‘similar to the new Jita IV-IV under construction’, that allow you to park your supers/titans if you end up losing your citadels in war and pvp.
Let me know what you think, I appreciate the effort that you take in this discussion.