In Eve there is no such thing as a fair fight. In order to win you need to bring either superior firepower or superior numbers (preferably both). While this could never happen in real life I was thinking about ultimate firepower against ultimate numbers and came up with the following hypothetical scenario and was curious if anyone had an idea about the results.
Imagine a lone titan (the ultimate firepower) getting hit by an insanely high number of corvettes, who would win? Admittedly the number of corvettes is an issue, infinite corvettes would be infinite firepower but the server can’t do that. So to narrow this down to something that might be calculable… Assume the titan has no support at all (completely alone, no help coming ever) but has good shields/armor/etc. to protect itself with, and the corvette team have unlimited numbers but only use the default civilian weapon they come with, how many corvettes would it take to overwhelm the titans defenses and kill it? Is that number less then what the server can handle (meaning it could theoretically happen) or would the corvette swarm kill the node with it’s high numbers before enough of them joined the fight to kill the titan?
I admit it’s kind of a silly question but I’m curious if anyone has any answers to it or at least an idea as to what could happen.
Assume a travel fit titan with no smartbombs or doomsday, then I’m sure that… in this extremely hypothetical situation… a reasonably large (as in, hundreds or so) group of corvettes will be able to kill it.
You need enough dps to overcome shield regen, and then just time…
At first glance the answers is obvious: yes. The Titan has a finite shield regen, and finite buffer. Corvettes have civy guns which use no ammo. Assuming either the titan took no steps to kill the Corvettes, or the Corvette pilots simply reshipped (it’s not like they’ll run out…) the Titan will eventually die.
But then I started thinking about the number of Corvettes you’d need. And with numbers comes the dreaded TiDi. That would complicate things dramatically. The Titan would still die, but I have to imagine that the numbers would have to go up even higher to account for lag, which in turn would induce even further server-side issues. It would snowball from there.
I’d be interested to see where the snowball stops. All we need is about 20,000 pilots and 1 titan.
Exactly, a finite titan vs. infinite corvettes, infinity always wins. But you can’t have infinite corvettes because of server limitations. So it becomes a question of “how many corvettes does it take to get to the center of a titan pop” and is that less then the server can handle even with TiDI?
More to the point, how many corvettes does it take to get to the center of a titan pop before downtime. We have a finite amount of time as well.
Lots of variables, but if we choose:
a Levi (strong shield tank for fun) with a passive regen of 15k EHP and a buffer of 60 million: https://o.smium.org/loadout/80377 (not my fit but it seems reasonable enough)
An average DPS of 20 for the corvettes (I believe this is more than they can do, but hey, it’s fine)
We would need:
750 to break passive regen
128,000 to burn the buffer down in 23.5 hours
Net sum 128,750 corvettes on target at all times applying 20 dps each. That would undoubtedly crash the node.
So in practice, no. Corettes alone would never be able to kill a shield-fit titan.
Very nice analysis, using that same example and math it would then take at least 3,010,000 corvettes to one shot said Leviathan by themselves. Again that’s even less plausible for the server to handle but now I’m laughing imagining if the server could handle it, some group setting that all up and giving said Levi pilot the greatest “WTF just happened?!?!” moment in Eve history.
Based on hourly pricing, you could spin up 3 million corvettes on alpha accounts via AWS EC2 for about $22M.
I’m sure other options are cheaper. I’d love to see the CCP network engineer’s eyes when the logged in player count spikes to 3 million.
/engineer grabs the phone and calls the fire department, warning them that the servers are about to spontaneously ignite and burn down half of Iceland’s GDP.
Edit: No I’m not serious, Iceland’s GDP is like 20 billion. Skins can only sell for so much
And you could probably run 2-3 clients per workstation, so you’d be able to do it for like $7.5M. Best 7.5 million ever spent, that would be downright hilarious.
Now I’m picturing the thread on ISBoxer… “help, I’m trying to broadcast to 3 million game clients on 1 million AWS VDI workstations, any suggestions?”
An impairor with t2 lasers, t2 heat sinks, and t1 multifrequency crystals (infinite ammo) does 86 dps.
If you’re willing to deal with ammo reload (and you may need a lot of ammo) a velator with 2 t2 blasters with void, t2 mag stabs and t2 hobs does 182 dps.
and since they all need to be Omega you’re paying an additional $45.15M for 1 month subs for all of them on top of the $7.5M for the servers… unless of course you don’t think CCP would get suspicious with the sudden influx of all the “new” Alpha accounts.
20(DPS) * 23(rounded hours) * 60(seconds per hour) = 27,600 (Corvette Damage per Day)
60,000,000(EHP) / 27,600(Damage per Day = 2,174 corvettes
Add that to the 750 corvettes needed to break regen and you have a semi-plausible 2,924 basic corvettes. Round that up to an even 3000 which if I remember right is roughly the current node limit even with TiDi. Since TiDI would absolutely take effect it would slow down the corvettes DPS, requiring more of them, and most likely crashing the server after adding more to account for TiDi. So the titan still continues to win this hypothetical scenario but if you can get 3000 players on grid without TiDi then the corvettes would have a chance to wear it down over an entire day.
How are you getting that number? I came to a little over 500 impairors.
86(DPS) * 23(hours) * 60(Seconds) = 118,680(DPD)
60M / 118,680 = 506(rounded)
So that’s 506 impairors plus whatever it take for that fit to break tank. Even with a full 24 hours I still come to about 485 impairors to kill the titan before the server resets.
