The Covert Ops fleet is not competitive in the current cap/super meta; not that BLOPs is useless and doesn’t have some good niche, but overall when the cap fleet arrives BLOPs gets squashed.
Adding “Gun for Gun” doesn’t make sense, that is just more of the same big ships, the ship creep we all despise. Not to mention the role of BLOPs is not to “Slug it Out”.
The solution comes from looking at RL. Basic guerilla tactics, get in, hit, get out.
The BLOPs fleet is good at getting in, and hits hard enough for it’s role, but…
Black Ops Can’t Get Out!
Just like every other ship, tackle kill.
.
Solution
Give BLOPs an escape route, a method to get out. So that hit and run is real.
The easy/boring way would be to add some resistance to tackles, instead I have come up with the BLOBs Carrier:
Start with a basic carrier class ship with suitable Command Ship capabilities, limited weapons
No high sec allowed
Color it black
Give it a give it a Bomb Hanger that holds shitloads of Bombs
Allow ships to repair
Allow it to jump to a covert cyno but not bridge
Fairly standard stuff. Here’s the “Get Out” part.
Allow up to ?6? covert ops cruiser class or smaller ships to attach to it with the pilots
The ships can attach while in combat
The BLOPs Carrier can Blink Out (Cloak) along with it’s 6 ships while in Combat
The Blink only lasts 60 seconds, the BLOPs Carrier can Jump to a Covert Cyno while blinked, the Blink has a long cooldown
Counters:
Ships within 2500 can still see the ship
If a ship is within 2500 the carrier can’t jump
The ships attached are still subject to damage but cannot use modules
Even when blinked the ships are subject to AOE (non-empire space)
Honestly, if your blops are on grid long enough to get mass scrammed and dunked by capitals, you’re probably doing something wrong. You shouldn’t be there long enough for anybody to be able to assemble enough scramblers to pin you down.
And if the enemy is already formed and prepared for you with a counter-drop, I don’t see why you should get a magic “escape this successful trap” button to click. Just like an unprepared target shouldn’t get a magic button to escape your drop, a prepared target/bait shouldn’t be deprived of kills so you can magically escape. There must be balance, and your suggestion sounds like it would tip that extremely decisively to one side.
Putting aside the majority of your post for a moment (mainly because I don’t think it’s serious), I do have to say that I’m intrigued by the idea of a capital ship that can equip bomb launchers, along with a dedicated bomb hangar. There would be (potentially massive) balance issues to work out for sure, but it could make an interesting twist on the role of anti-support for capital forces.
Having said that though, I rather strongly feel that bombs should only be allowable where bubbles are also allowable, so unless you want to allow bubbles in losec, I’d have to say no to bombs in losec.
I tend to feel the other way around. I think we should let capitals (not titans or supers) into hisec in a limited fashion. Many would call that power creep, I call it orders of magnitude more capital ships dying daily.
More ship options, for more tactics is a good thing, but lets work on addressing the issue of being able to call on capitals at a moments notice as well at least.
You may wish to make the ship have a local area displacement doomsday of sorts. Once the deed is done, you and the nearby lads blip to a random point some AU away. From there you can light bridge on said carrier or whatever ship, they go home, you go home after.
Since these mechanics already exist, it should be an easy add.
