There are a rising number of complaints regarding capital ships and how they have begun to strangle the game. One of the issues with capital ships as most vets are aware is that a single dreadnought requires many smaller ships to defeat in an effective manner. It is certainly true that you can hold a given capital in place with a single interceptor while you wait for backup however you will be ignoring the cost of human time and log ins to defeat a single ship that, once insurance is figured, didn’t cost that much to lose. In real terms capitals are grossly over efficient and when reaching the supercap and titan levels of game play it becomes absurd. To be fair however neither supers nor titans get such generous insurance so it’s a bit more fair but in simple terms it’s out of balance.
Some issues we see are things like cynos being used to launch entire fleets on to a single target. Titan bridging is by nature gross and unhealthy. Another is super drops, where these ships are so common and so cheap that they are almost jokingly deployed against frigates just for the entertainment value. Carriers and dreads on gate defense was unheard of once upon a time but now I have begun to see it.
So how do you fix something like capitals from becoming a ubiquitous youmustbethishightoenter gatekeeper ship size? Deterioration. Caps are so large they cannot be repaired for isk like normal ships. This makes sense, in the first case you must build cap parts and then assemble the ship. Normal ships are built directly from minerals with no interim steps. T2 ships are somewhere in between but this is appropriate because of their added power for their speed/mass/application/HP pool etc.
I propose then that capitals require pre-constructed cap build parts to be repaired in lieu of isk and this matches the precedent set by consumables like how fuel and isotopes are also used by caps to operate.
Since we cannot and should not try to artificially stop people from building caps we must discuss other sensible options to address the issue of caps being disposable oversized battleships. With post phoebe being a series of changes to caps which resulted in buffs over all, it is time to think about ways to make the investment in them count for more and stem the massive stockpiles of throw away caps from accumulating as indeed any respectable Corp has. Even my own Corp has dozens of caps lying around with nothing to do most of the time. These are ships whose overpowering nature should not merely be on call but like citadel and sov require at least a bare minimum amount of attention and care lest they suffer inhibited or even zero performance.
Still I like the idea of making caps life harder, it’s just not enough.
Dominant communities, who actualy using caps on daily basis, won’t give a dam about financial expenses because they have excessive ammounts of ISKs.
You’d see surplus caps being stored as materials. They’re easy to build. Unless you plan on making materials require maintenance, it circumvents all but the single one that they’re ready to use.
When they get ready for an op, they’d spin up a few to replace anticipated losses.
And as was said… if you make it expensive enough for alliances to pare back, you make it prohibitively expensive for people outside of those major alliances. Which makes the power creep worse, not better.
very successful fleets will eventually have to stop for repairs/replace old caps, and in the end of it’s like that saying were there eventually will be someone fresh-faced an more effective than you to take your place. eventually a fleet would get bested by a fresh set of capital, whoever those are.
quite honestly, the only way to try and pull low security out of it’s slump is to be more hands on with players, since you can’t ask nicely for the lowsec groups to not drop capitals on small gangs and other forms of seal clubbing, and expect them to say “ok.” and yes that may be advocating for “safe spaces” in a game that, either through the playerbase or their marketing campaigns, have advertised eve as a game with no safe spaces. but getting a more close competitive environment is what threads like these try to accomplish.
They fixed it with jump fatigue and didn’t have to ask nicely. And it’s not many large low sec groups causing issues. Its null sec groups that can freely hop down and back with little effort