Lore Text: "After many years of service, House Ardishapur has given permission to the loyal Nefantar of the Mandate to build ships suited to their own needs. Dealing mostly with piracy and smuggling, the Nefantar required fast moving vessels with the ability to lock down potential suspects. "
Original Concept Ship bonuses:
Minmatar:
15% reduction in cpu need for stasis webifier per level
10% reduction in signature radius per level
Amarr:
10% reduction in capacitor need for lasers per level
15% reduction in capacitor need for energy neutralizers per level
Role bonus:
99% reduction in ship and cargo scanner cpu need.
100% bonus to laser damage
Ship Bonuses Based on Feedback from the Thread:
Minmatar:
5% reduction in heat damage for prop modules per level.
10% bonus to velocity modifier of overheated propulsion modules per level.
Amarr:
10% reduction in capacitor need for lasers per level.
15% reduction in capacitor need for tracking disruptors per level.
Role bonus:
99% reduction in ship and cargo scanner cpu need.
100% bonus to laser damage
Note: if we’re going to focus on td instead of cap warfare, we could probably get rid of the extra utility highs and give the ship and extra low slot. As it is now, the ships are designed to have 2 extra utility highs.
(Names are based off of arms and armor from the swiss army from the 15th and 16th centuries. Due to the fact that the swiss guard still operate in the Vatican I believe these names are fitting for the Ammatar Mandate.)
Frigate: Degen (swiss short sword)
4 high (2 turret)
5 medium
2 low
Yeah, maybe. I’m sure CCP would end up tweaking it regardless, even if they liked the idea.
A big part of the design for these ships is around the scanner. I always felt that it would be cool to fit a ship scanner on a pvp ship, so you could feed intel to your fleet about what your target has on board, but it’s almost never worth it.
Because of that, it would probably be good to get a different bonus than the cpu reduction for the web too… since I could certainly see people just using 2 webs and a scram instead of using the scanner.
The Ammatar factions uses mostly licensed technology from Amarr and have research collaborations with them.
Ammatar might supercede Amarr in technologies that Amarr considered insignificant or not sufficiently scaling with their large scale operations focusing on the conquest of new eden, but they won’t be able to develop an improvement to the firepower of Amarr weapons without Amarr also obtaining and deploying the same technology on their mainline (navy) ships.
Amarr’s solution to a potentially dangerous or potentially hostile “neutral” is to remove the “neutral”, they’re a major power and their commanders get away “accidentialy” blasting the “wrong” target after all, while Ammatar commanders might face political fallouts of being involved in “accidents”. Likewise, the amount of vessels the Amarr Navy can field, lose, and replace, is significantly larger then the numbers available to Ammatar, making the individual elements of the Ammatar Navy less sacrificable then their Amarr counterparts.
For this reason, Ammatar should focus on technology that can protect their vessels while they “investigate” potential adversaries, rather then focusing on technology that enables them to create wrecks to do forensics instead.
Their focus should be weapon disruption. It’s an Amarr nieche technology that is barely deployed by Amarr doctrines these days, and it also works great against Ammatar’s primary adversaries: The Sansha Pirates, the Angel Pirates and the Thukker Tribe.
Capacitor Warfare isn’t the primary choice against Sansha and is mostly useless against Thukker and Angels, but is very popular with Amarr mainline, so a technology that enables Ammatar to a massive improvement of energy neutralizater capacitor efficiency would be finding it’s way back into the Amarr Navy.
Instead, focus on the “speed”. Thukker (Minmatar), Angels and Sansha are “fast”, Thukker and Angels natively and Sansha by their Afterburner bonuses. So unless Ammatar are “faster”, they’ll just get kited. For example, a bonus to Propulsion Module overheating is a nieche that is available in limited extends to Amarr with the Interceptor and Legion Propulsion Module, but doesn’t scale out into large mainline deployment as it comes at the risk of breaking the modules. It provides, for a limited time, an effect that is superior to Ammatar’s main adversarty’s passive abilities, is easily counterable, and will be decisive in quite a number of engagements nevertheless.
In “recent” times, Ammatar (and Khanid Kingdom) have supported Amarr in pushing back the drifter invasion. In order to face drifters, unless “dropping 3 capitals per emeny cruiser” is an option, is about avoiding getting hit by their strike weapons. The strike weapons aren’t reliable against ships orbiting closely, but can easily obliterate anything that has transversal low enough for them to hit.
Again, Weapon Disruption and Heating props until you’re in orbit, has been an effective tactic used during the drifter invasions, which might cause Ammatar leadership to focus on these technologies, while Amarr has well been documented to face the Drifters the brute force way by dropping enough Capitals on them, and despite taking heavy losses with that strategy, still has the numbers left to opt continuing mass-slaughter while also having some technology to disrupt the drifters should they decide to change tactics.
Ammatar has more claim to have it’s own ship line then Triglivians, Edencom, or the Sisters of Eve, and uses classic weapon and ewar mechanics rather then newly invented spool up guns that ignore various basic game mechanics, or multitarget chain lightings.
triglavians are to stong and the best example of unbalanced ships !
edencoms are to “weak” and the best example of unbalanced ships !
sister of eve ships have 2 okish ships like astwero ans stratios and the nestor is also a good example of an unbalanced ship !
as you can see there are lot of unbalanced “new ships” ( i know they are not realy new but they came relativly late ) ! ccp cant / wont balance and i dont know why … the same like marauders ! with its RoF bonus they are to strong !
If we follow a speed and hit first doctrine ammatar eventually might aim to increase efficiency and decrease energy need of abs mwds to be able to do longer sprints while running lasers.
Minmatar bonus
+5% ab and mwd speed
-5% ab and mwd capacitor need
Additionally they might technologically aim to increase hit ration of lasers through increase of falloff [compare beam laser with ammatar version]
and tracking:
Much of what you say here mirrors my own thoughts as well.
This suggests a desire to use non-lethal force when applicable. ie: neutralizers, tracking / missile disruptors, webs, warp scramblers, and ship / cargo scanners (since they need to make sure they’re not making mistakes.)
This suggests the Ammatar would focus more on anti pirate police action and skirmish action rather than large fleet action. It means Ammatar ships should be fast, as you suggest, but I think it also it places less importance on tracking / missile disruption (not that they wouldn’t use it, but it would be less of a factor in their doctrine compared to other things.)
Remember, the Ammatar still have access to the Amarr ship line, so for any fleet action, they could still make use of Arbitrators and Crucifiers for disruption.
So even if their ships have bonuses for it, they wouldn’t boost the effectiveness or range, but probably make it take less resources. (cap/pg/cpu) But really, that’s what I focused all of my bonuses on, efficiency. They’re a faction that needs to do a lot with the left overs from the Amarr Navy, so they would have had to learn how to make do with what they have.
So I guess this is the main place where we differed in our philosophies, but you make an excellent point here.
My thinking lead me to to the conclusion that an Ammatar ship needed to be able to completely lock down a target. Nuke its cap which not only turn off offensive modules, but also turn off hardeners and prevent most forms of active tanking. They would also want to slow the target and prevent it from warping.
I choose the 100% damage bonus based on a similar design philosophy as the Sansha ships, but instead of a 150% bonus to the output, it merely has a 100% (marauder) bonus. The Ammatar ships instead make up for this deficiency in utility.
This is a technology the Amarr have, yet mostly choose not to use (except for in the case of the Paladin.) Even so, the Ammatar ships output less damage their their Amarr Navy counter parts. The Slicer and Navy Augoror each have a 125% at level 5 bonus, and the Apoc forgoes the damage bonus entirely in favor of extra application. Yet even without the damage bonus, the Apoc still has the same raw damage output as the proposed Ammatar hull.
It might even be theorized that the Slicer and the Navy Augoror use this same technology, since the 125% match the damage profile of the Paladin. (100% role bonus + 5% per level of Amarr Battleship.) And if so, it means their tech is actually superior on this note.
So I think we can safely say the 100% damage bonus is ok to use in this case. The frigate, in particular, has the same damage output as a punisher. It’s just a bit more efficient on capacitor, because efficiency was the gimmick I was going for with these ships.
This is an interesting idea. Perhaps a bonus to both the effectiveness (so the ship goes faster than normal heat) and to taking less heat damage on afterburner modules. Or maybe just less heat damage in general. I know that’s generally a t3 thing, but it’s not unheard of for a ship to have a t2 bonus.
It also fits in line with my concept of the ships being for skirmish action rather than large fleet work, so I think it works well what that idea.
You do make a good case for the tracking disruption. I’ll have to ponder on it a bit I suppose. Part of me hesitating on it, is the amarr don’t have any non-AT frigates or cruisers that are bonused to energy neutralization. The only thing in that lower end is the Dragoon, and it’s a relatively slow platform for it’s size class.
I suppose that is where the Khanid ship line could come in… if they were to get Navy or Fleet ships. But their t2 ships aren’t exactly known for their speed either.
Thanks for your input.
While a prop bonus would be good I think, I wouldn’t want to use both bonuses for it as it would be a bit too limiting. At the moment, I’m thinking it might be good to replace my original sig radius bonus with the prop overheat bonus Moko suggested. I think that would accomplish much of what you’re suggesting here as well.
I do think this is more of a mainline Amarr bonus, and probably isn’t very fitting for the Ammatar ships. They need to focus more on utility and efficiency than just outright damage or application.
Anyway, let me know what you guys think. If we can get something that works better bonus wise, I’ll make an update to the original post showcasing both the original concept and the updated alternative.
Also I wold change the naming doctrine to a dagger (ideas for a name could Khanjar, Kris, Korambi yet better bayonett) then a sword (Xiphos, Spatha, Kopis) and then a spear or pike (pilum).
Model design wise I personally would orient the frigat towards a trimeran as amarr already have a katamaran.
I’m sure CCP would end up deciding on their own names based on the lore of that faction. They likely would do their own ship designs too, unless something really stood out to them.
My idea for the frigate is partly inspired by the Saber class frigate / destroyer from star trek, just flipped vertical. My initial thought was a remodel of the Talwar, but I thought the model would work better as an Ammatar ship since it’s a bit more solid than Minmatar ships tend to be.
As you can see in the picture the initial idea actually fulfills the katamaran idea that you have. I’m really only filling in the interior spacing (probably for shield emitters.) But I also like the idea of that front edge being flat, like a wedge or an axe.
after all your “nice” work its only one thing left to say … we dont need any new ships ! neither then a new faction … we have the 4 main factions ( ammatar mandate is part of one of it ), we have pirat factions ! we have triglavians, we have edencoms and we have soe … all these factions have a reason to be there…
you are “creating” a shipline out of a part of the amarr faction with minmatar boni ? oO why ? its not a pirate faction and only pirate factions have boni from 2 different factions !
Plalyer fiction is for storytelling and roleplay not creating and presenting story and gameplay elements … perhaps ccp needs to introduce a “I wish there would be in eve” forum section eventually.
Neither Mordu’s Legion or the Sister’s of Eve are pirate factions, yet they also have 2 bonuses. This establishes that not just pirates can use the 2 racial bonus option for their ships. Those factions are minor factions though, so running two bonuses should be a minor faction thing, not something to add to main empire ships.
The ships themselves are bonused in such a way that they focus more on utility, rather than damage. (The ships may have 100% bonus to damage, but roughly half the normal turret allocation. A Punisher with a glass cannon build will actually out-damage a Degen - Ammatar frigate.)
Once again, Mordu’s Legion, SOE, ORE, one could even argue Serpentis fall in the same category since the Angel Cartel are actually the ones who run security for them.
Khanid are also another group that could easily use a shipline as well. But the importance of giving them one is less, considering a lot of the T2 Amarr ships come from their faction.
Some other potential options are the Black Eagles - Gallente and the Valklear - Minmatar. These are special forces groups, so they’d probably focus on cloaky assassin gameplay. Possibly something in association Vanguard.
I do agree that we could use more balance passes on the existing ship lines, but not everyone is going to agree on what that means. Furthermore, new ships make the player base excited, so there will likely never be a time when CCP stops making ships. It’s the same philosophy behind why League of Legends has hundreds of champions or why black desert keeps releasing new characters.
So it would be better for CCP to get ideas for ships that make sense to add into the game, than some random ideas.
they are part of amarr faction !