I kinda think otherwise. I think we’re not going to see capital fights escalate as much after this as we would have beforehand. The way this plays out—to me at least—is that fleets will carry 2-4 force recons with them whose job is to stay cloaked until it’s time to bring in the triage or dreads, and if there’s any concern about an escalation pathway, there’s another half-dozen waiting on a titan to come in and scatter as well.
Absent those 10 alts who are just there to be cynos (as opposed to now, where HICs, Command Ships, T3Cs, etc have other roles, and capitals themselves can provide cynos for an escalation pathway)… there’s no escalation. You see an enemy fleet, the first thing you look for is Force Recons. Kill them all, if you can.
But groups will be a lot more likely to just write-off the initial capital drop. After all, why are you going to drop a small force of supers and titans when you can’t be sure that you can bring in more? Look at what happened in Tribute. Look at what’s happened with every major war. Supercapital escalations are in-the-moment decisions of ‘do I think I can out-escalate the other guy?’
And with this making that more of a risk… it will happen far less. Which means those supers and titans won’t be blowing up. They’ll be home, ratting someplace where they can have 3-4 Force Recon alts in the same system, because 3-4 different players who are ratting in the system all have one. And… because it’s ‘home’, there’s a lot more of them able to get into position if the super/titan can live more than 2-3 minutes (which they can).
So the supercapitals become safer, and only put at risk in a war when their side is going all in. Which means there will be ever more of them, because they’ll keep getting built in numbers that exceed the rate at which they die.
Capital ratting becomes supercapital ratting. Faucets, which had been closing on their own, get opened wide. For a bit more on that, I’m gonna go back over to the Blackout discussion thread, because that’s what it relates to…