Balance Suggestion: Nerfing mass-fleet booshing without harming other booshing playstyles

PvP Gameplay Center Warfare & Tactics
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Summary

I’ve come up with a suggested balance change for reducing the ability of a single command destroyer to boosh around a friendly fleet of hundreds of people.

In my opinion the game would be better off if it weren’t possible for players (including myself) to repeatedly boosh their large fleet around a citadel grid, staying out of range of the defenders while still being able to shoot the citadel. However, I think that booshing (and chain and excavator booshing) are interesting aspects of the game that I wouldn’t want to nerf.

Balance Change

Lore

As Destroyer-class vessels, the reactor system on Command Destroyers is only able to generate enough energy to perform a finite amount of movement.

Mechanics

When the Micro Jump Field Generator (MJFG) of a Command Destroyer finishes activating the server determines the ship in the 6km radius of the Command Destroyer. In then sums the mass of the ships in range and uses that value to calculate the distance that those ships will be moved. For example:

  • A small fleet, for example 100 frigates or 20 cruisers or 10 battleships: Jumped the full 100km
  • A medium-sized fleet, for example 50 cruisers or 20 battleships: Jumped only 50km
  • A huge fleet, for example 50 battleships: Jumped only 10km

I would expect this function to be a sliding scale tuned by CCP with a maximum of 100km (so you don’t have to worry about booshing a single frigate off grid) and a minimum of 10km (so booshing always at least has SOME effect).

Outcome

This change wouldn’t affect excavator booshing because they don’t weight enough mass to have an impact.
This change would make huge fleets more resistant to chain booshes, but there is counterplay by the booshers targeting a side of the fleet blob rather than the middle.
This change would make it harder for a single friendly boosher to boosh huge battleship fleets around – now they would only move ~10km. Players could still get around this by splitting their fleet into multiple small battleship groups each with their own boosher, but that would require a higher level of co-ordination and be more susceptible to counterplay.

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Railguns. The Rokh excels at them, and given the fact that they’re hitscan weapons with no travel time, you can’t outrun them.

Or if you’re worried about cruise ravens booshing around outside of railgun range, just make MJD affect missiles the same as warp does. If you warp off, your missiles “disappear”. That severely harms the tactic.

Your fix is defeated by bringing more MJFGs. The groups that use the tactic are more than autistic enough to do that.

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When a ship gets booshed, it should also recieve a cooldown on its own jumpdrive.
So 2 commanddestroyers can still start their jump-spool-up at the same time to keep stuff like spearfishing.

This way fleets can still use 6 command destroyers to jump 600km in one go, however once the first jump is done all destroyers should be on cooldown so the fleet can be catched. The permanent kiting at 100-300km will be disabled this way.
Of course a fleet work-around would be to keep CDs on pingspots and only warp them on the fleet when a jump is required, however that would mean the HIC Bubble can not be up all the time and the fleet can be combat probed and warped to at 0.

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Or just shift it off destroyers where it never should have been and make it a battleship module like it always should have been.

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With a bit of thinking I can come up with ways to catch them. No need to change it.

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sure, you probably just had some great ideas to counter this noone else was able to think about before

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