Since CCP just showed that it has balls of steel by changing core mechanics I think Ill just post this idea of mine, just in case… I dont want to be very specific to give as much freedom of interpretation as possible. Its just a basic concept to be developed, please pick it up and give it your own spin.
Add a negative target painting effect to turrets/missiles so when you shoot somebody its signature decreases
This will work as a “incoming damage stacking modifier”.
The purpose is to turn fights from “everybody shoot the primary and he dies without a chance to do anything” to a “chaotic melee where everybody shoots everybody”, just like in the movies.
You may or may not have hard “caps” to sig radius to adjust how it behaves in bigger battles or small fights
It already has counters in game, In the form of dedicated target painting ships.
Can be tuned both aiming at small gang or big battles, using stacking penalties or other similar mechanics.
It will favour smaller organized fleets vs mindless blobs, since target calling should be split to X ships per target or damage would be wasted. Becoming a counter to the n+1 problem.
If logistics are too strong you may add a positive target painting on remote repairs. Sensible tuning will be needed for sure.
Suicide ganking still possible, you just need to shoot in cannonade instead of volley. It may give a chance to counterplay if target is not asleep solving the problem with ganking while still allowing it.
Code wise, it almost cut/paste from target painting modules.
etc.
From the fluff perspective you can say that its the explosions, thermal footprint of laser, etc. that affects aiming. This was real in the dreadnought era, when splash from multiple ships among other issues made hard to aim, so in Jutland for example, fleets divided fire instead of shooting a primary, even if they had the range.
Its not by chance that humans fiction presents space battles as naval battles of the age of sail, be it starwars or any other there are always various ships trading blows “a tocapenoles” because it left room for heroics, just what we want on a video game, also it sucks to get instakilled when 50 people shoot at you.
Lets say you have a sig radius of 100, and each ship shooting at you takes 10%, the 11 th ship wont do damage to you. But then comes a target painter and brings you sig back to normal and you die a horrible death. (numbers not important, just the general idea).
And by the way, a year ago i posted to make local delayed mode and they did it. Have faith in CCP
Nuclear explosions, EM waves from shield blocking damage, chaff, thermal signature of lasers beams, magnetic fields of plasma from blasters, debris from ship, if you manage to watch 10 minutes of eve valkirie without puking you will see plenty examples.
Plus, we don’t even have real physics, if its good for gameplay, then just do it.
If you have stacking reduction on damage then this will affect a volley synchronised for one server tick but seeing as how reload times are, and accounting for how sloppy “F1 monkeys” can be , the damage will likely be spread out over several sever ticks.
Hmm , well so if i didnt undestood wrong, ur asking for a sort of ship damage cap ,unless ur target get “painted” or something like that to inrease the cap. well it would change nothing beside adding some dedicated painters to larger fleets, it would generate some exploitable issues (friendly fire as already mentioned) and an obiviously balance point between potential damage taken and damage repaired, wich would drive people to use spider reps fleets for indestructible ships.
Here is a spin on your idea - have civilian guns fit in utility slots and create civilian-gun and/or drone chain to artificially pad sig-reduction mechanic.
I assume that the effect would last like target painters several seconds. So the damage that gets in the server ticks after the first would deal reduced damage, as intended. How much last this effect would surely be one on the main things to balance, so this is a very valid point to make.
Im asking for a negative target painter effect on weapons so shooting something would have the effect of reducing its sig radius. This is not a damage cap, but smaller ships receive less damage. There can be limits to sig reduction, perhaps a 30% or 50% much testing would be required of course.
There cannot be friendly fire exploit since you need to shoot at somebody to apply the effect its very obvious that a imparior shooting a civ-gun would not have the effect of a tornado shooting 8 big ass artys.
My personal opinion is that the sig reduction should be tied to damage taken, so when you get your sig reduction from being shot, you receive damage reduced in the next server tick, making your sig reduction less significant for the third server tick, thus reaching a balance on sig reduction and damage taken.
I believe that if you make the sig-reduction/damage a not linear relation, you can make it pretty much self-balancing. Plus remember that can be limits to the sig-reduction.
To balance the problem with logis, I would add a effect to remote repair that restores to normal the effect.
Well as far as i know sig/damage is not linear already, a cruiser with lets say 150sign radius takes way more than double damage than a 75rad frigate, same speed range and transversal. So maybe it would create some weird stuffs out there es: a 120k ehp legion who fly trough and kill a whole fleet due to a ceptor signature.
EDIT. Dont want to point only at eventually downside but IMO modifing the stat of a ship depending on what it will encounter create only a Random factor on all the fit planification and related tactic planned.
You are right, but im sure it can be dealt when devs get actual hands dirty with the idea.
Well, I consider this a good thing, a little less determinism in the part of planning allow a greater importance of what actually happens on the field. Specially if it comes down to what the pilots does with his ship.
Anyway, your critic is constructive and valid, and can be used to improve the idea, so its much welcomed.
This doesn’t seem likely to substantially impact blob warfare. You would have the same blobs (sharing logi and boost resources) with squad level target-calling. You’re not going to actually split up the massive fleet, you’re just going to need more TS3 channels.
And without additional changes to both logi and boosts to accommodate, you’d be pretty likely to end up with a nothing-dying stalemate scenario, as it’s now impossible to outDPS or outBurst reps. The proposed solution to this is ridiculous and inconsistent with the foofoo explanation for the “idea” in the first place.
You’re also begging the question in purporting to solve “problems” such as suicide ganking without actually establishing that they’re “problems” in the first place.
, the damage will likely be spread out over several sever ticks.