I’m sure you don’t, but I’m almost as sure that you’re applying the lens of a real-world navy to Eve, which is a video game, and I’m very sure that you and the dozen other people that have proposed exactly this sort of idea in the last year haven’t thought through the game-play implications of something like this or what it would do to the balance of the game.
As I noted earlier “A smaller than ordinary carrier has to fit in the game and if it is detrimental to the game it is not going to happen”.
I am fully aware that a sub-capital carrier needs to be balanced carefully and, yes, there are many things to consider that may cause problems. Some do not think that it is possible to make a well-balanced ship and others believe that it can be done. I am not saying it is easy. In the end if CCP thinks that it cannot be done without being detrimental to the game then it will just not be part of the game and then that is it.
However, each time the subject comes up some people will suggest “it is called a Dominix” (or other drone based ship). While this may be the closest thing we have in the game to a sub-capital carrier at the moment (and maybe it always will be), a Dominix is a drone based battleship, but still a battleship, not a sub-capital carrier. This may be a matter of definition, but for me a sub-capital carrier uses fighters, not drones. For me this also means that a sub-capital carrier will probably be a class for itself, not a battleship.
Couple of points here.
First, I’m not ruling this whole thing out as impossible. I think it’s possible to make almost anything be balanced. The problem is to make it balanced and be worth using without changing the entire game around it to make it fit. None of the suggestions I’ve seen come remotely close to that and I don’t think the time and effort required for CCP to develop one is worth their time.
At the end of the day a sub-cap Carrier isn’t filling any kind of niche in gameplay, it’s an “I think this sounds cool” thing a few players have put forward for one reason or another.
Also, I wasn’t saying “that’s a Dominix” because I think the Dominix is a sub-cap Carrier, I was saying that in response to the description you put forward of a real-life ship class as it would be applied to Eve.
I don’t think CCP will add a ship that is larger than a battleship and NOT classify it as a capital. There is no niche for this type of a ship beyond “it would be cool”. If you want to use fighters, get out of highsec and get yourself ac carrier.
I think we already have a lot of ships without a niche. What is the niche of the navy versions for example? Being between T1 and T2? Because to me, it seems like they are just better versions of their T1 equivalent, yet people still like them.
Thank you for your points of view.
While I believe that a sub-capital class carrier can be balanced, I agree with you that one of the main issues is whether CCP will use the necessary time, resources, and efforts to make it happen. Currently and for a foreseeable future (if ever), I would not expect that to happen.
As for a niche/role for the ship, personally I am not too worried about that. Today, there is already a lot of overlap between the existing ships, so one more class would not make a big difference. If each ship should have a unique/specific role, a lot of the current navy and faction ships along with some T2 ships could be taken out of the game/should not have entered the game.
Navy versions often have their own bonuses, giving them their own flavor over the normal tech 1 versions. What you are asking would require severe balancing work with no real gains.
Again: if you want to use fighters, get out highsec
While the T2/navy/faction ship bonuses may give these ships a special flavor over the T1 counterparts they still basically do the same. If the flavor provided by the bonuses are enough to set them apart from each other, then a sub-capital carrier using fighters with other bonuses than a drone boat should be enough to set it apart from other sub-capital ships.
As for getting out of hisec, I think that players are predisposed to stay in hisec will just not fly carriers and stay in hisec. Since fighters work different it is not fun for new carrier pilots to spending billions of isk on a carrier and then go out of hisec because he/she does not know how to use the fighters properly. It may be fun for those blowing it up, but not for the pilot. Personally, I think the result will be that such a player stay in hisec and leaves out the carrier experience. And fighters are now i hisec via citadels, although it is not quite the same as a carrier.
I am fully aware that you can test it on the test server, and I have personally trained another character on Tranquility to fly a carrier on Singularity, but that does not mean that the skills will ever be used on Tranquility.
There’s a difference between giving flavor and transplanting capital mechanics to highsec.
I guess I would buy your argument if fighters had not been introduced to hisec via citadels. I know that fighters are currently bound to the locations of the citadel, i.e. they do not have mobility, but the fighter mechanics are in hisec now.
Anyway, I know there are different opinions on this matter, and that is fair enough.
What if we just said the “swarm” was collection of up to five drones - you could control as a single unit or individually.
Some ships would have the ability to control more than a single swarm - if a player wants to micro manage that good on them. If not they can just “F” key all day long.
Though I agree with you here, sometimes, making changes so other things can change can make balancing easier. The fighter mechanic change was a totally different beast than anything ever seen in EVE before.
Also, not sure if your a fan of Stelleris - they are making some major game changing changes in their next planned patch, all for the purpose of making balance easier in the long run.
This is true, the problem with drones is that they aren’t just used for combat and not only in PvP which complicates it greatly. It’s something CCP would have to consider, if they change drones to swarms then it simplifies object management in space, but reduces the weapon system functionality. If you up dps to counter the dps drop from recalling whole swarms that are taking damage, you unintentionally increase the initial dps before any damage is taken (throwing the offensive balance). Change the velocity and you end up with medium drones catching ships they shouldn’t be catching etc.
That’s not to say swarms are a bad idea, just something that would be very tricky to implement.
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Navy ships generally offer a different set of bonuses and options than either T1, T2, or Pirate Faction hulls often at a more cost effective price point than the latter two.
That said, yes a lot of the Navy hulls could use a rework, which is something I’ve said before. In general the Tiericide has glanced over a lot of them, especially the Cruisers and Battleships.
This isn’t really true. Yes there’s a lot of overlap but that overlap is very rarely complete. In the few cases where a hull or class is completely eclipsed there’s generally been a fair amount of complaining until something is done. Carriers already had that issue directly after their rebalance, and T3 hulls have been something of an ongoing issue.
As I said above several of the Navy hulls could use some TLC but the vast majority of hulls in the game have at least one area where they either excel above other available options or offer some kind of unique gameplay compared to other options. Others enable options that wouldn’t be available without the bonuses they provide, like the Bhaalgorn for example.
Of the few remaining ships that are having issues all of the ones that I can think of are older, dating back 10 years or more in their introduction to the game, and have been carried forward from that. None of the hulls that have been introduced in the last 5 years or so except maybe the Primae have no unique use or niche case at all where they perform best.
One thing I can’t understand about the navy upgrades is the complete role-reversal of the logi cruisers. Why? Why did these cruisers become combat ships instead of upgrading the other combat cruiser? It could make sense if the original ship would have some kind of exceptional attribute that benefits this offensive role better, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.
The navy cruisers never made sense. The hull they use used to be mining T1 cruisers so it didn’t make any more sense than it does now.
Would have been better if they used the other combat cruiser hull but vOv…
Basically, I do not disagree with you that bonuses set ships a part and provide some unique options.
However, when considering the current lineup and the bonuses what each ship provides, I think it is difficult to use this as an argument against a sub-capital carrier, arguing that it overlaps with existing ships since this is already the case in many instances.
E.g. many of the faction ships are basically damage dealers (maybe in a unique way), but this is an area that is already covered by many of the base T1 ships.
As for the Bhaalgorn, it is basically a cap warfare platform which is also covered by current Armageddon (although in a different way and with some unique tackling options). I know there is a issue of which ship first had that role.
All what I am saying is that as different as the Bhaalgorn is from an Armageddon, a sub-capital carrier could be from a Dominix (or other drone ship), i.e. with much overlap but also providing some unique opportunities.
This is why I do not fully buy into the argument that a sub-capital carrier cannot have something unique to set it apart from other ships. But this of course is a matter of opinion.
However, as I said earlier, I think the time/effort/resources argument from earlier is valid.
As for the roles of a sub-capital carrier I have thought of some kind of support role:
Can launch 1 flight of light fighters and 1 or 2 support wings (max 2 launch tubes). My thoughts included:
- Logistics support for fighters - i.e. refueling fighters in flight with weapons and repairing damaged fighters (not replacing lost ones) based on a number of charges.
- Cloak detection fighters - i.e. using the fighters to detect cloaked ships like a ship would search for a submarine with sonar. I made a presentation of this idea on the old forums and it is not without its problems either. This should just be on grid.
- Assault boarding craft - i.e. support craft that would “dock” with the target and apply some kind of unique effect while attached for a limited time using charges (effects could be decreased resistances, increased cap use of active modules, add heat when using modules, increased overheating when overheating modules, decrease cap regeneration etc.)
- Support boarding craft - the same as assault boarding craft, just in reverse and for friendly targets.
These are just basic thoughts and may be terrible ideas.
As for the light fighters, I made a test on singularity on the caiman dreadnought (mostly because it has a fixed bonus). Using 1 flight of Locusts T1 and skills equal to mastery level 4 for a carrier using 0-5 T2 drone damage amplifiers (DDA), I got a damage ranging from about 500 dps using 0 DDAs to about 850 dps using 5 DDAs. At least in terms of damage I think that a DPS within that range should be OK. This can be adjusted by scaling the bonus accordingly. However, this is just a test of the DPS output on paper of course - I have not checked the damage application etc.
Those ships had their roles defined before T1 hulls had any kind of remote repair bonus. Those hulls used to be bonused primarily for mining, and their Navy variants are incredibly old, to the point where I wonder if CCP didn’t just decide they wanted more navy ships and used the hulls they had available.
CCP could probably change the model or change the bonuses if they wanted to, but there’s little reason to make Navy logi-boats, and even less reason to toss in the bin any existing user-base or affection people have for these hulls and their bonus just for the sake of a little more uniformity.
That bit you kind of casually dismiss at the end is the important bit. Every hull, more or less, does something unique in some way whether it’s dealing more damage per ISK, at a greater range, with better tracking, or just generally playing slightly differently in how it pilots than other similar hulls.
Really though it’s less that I’m claiming there’s guaranteed overlap here and more that I’m saying I don’t see what niche these hypothetical hulls could possible fill and be balanced.
The general role of “Carriers with less fighters” is either going to leave their DPS anemic or absurd for sub-cap standards, and it would absolutely leave their projection at a ridiculous level for a sub-cap, so there would need to be some differentiation from that general idea. At that point you’re left trying to balance a mechanic, Fighters, that was intended for a capital on a sub-cap platform. The pretty fundamental problem with this is that sub-cap gameplay and sub-cap only areas aren’t designed to deal with something shooting them from 500km off.
If you nerf the range they essentially become glorified drone boats and either eclipse them or fall under them in terms of performance.
If you nerf the damage then you’re left with something that does about 3-400 DPS, comparing it to the DPS Arty or Rails can put out to ~200km+, which isn’t enough to do much of anything useful let alone justify the existence of the ship.
This is a pretty bad example, the Armageddon has a completely different magnitude of bonus from the Bhaalgorn, uses Drones where the Bhaal uses lasers, and gets primarily used as an Amarr battleship drone-boat (often in PvE) where as the Bhaalgorn gets used primarily for its cap warfare bonus to the point of often forgoing guns on many fits.
Also neither eclipses the other at all because they exist at different price points with different bonuses and serving overall fairly distinct roles.
As I said previously my main argument is over the time involved, which you’ve already agreed to. I’m just going to poke a few holes in these to illustrate the scale of the problem here…
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Either ends up being a waste of a ship, too niche to be worthwhile, or pretty massively OP due to the potential it has to massively increase the sustained DPS of a Carrier. The main limit on Carrier sustained DPS is the need to pull back Fighters to resupply their missiles. If you can provide fighters with an almost completely steady stream of missiles or drastically reduce the reload time then their DPS skyrockets pretty drastically.
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This gets into cloak changes. I’m not touching it with a 10-foot pole. Sufficed to say that I don’t think CCP are inclined to affect cloaking in this way, at all.
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The effects you’re describing here range between ridiculously OP (resists reduction, cap use increase) to fairly trivial in most cases (overheat penalties), but the core problem here is that none of this is particularly interesting. It’s basically very expensive E-War since a full flight of Fighters often costs as much or more than a dedicated EWar ship.
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Pretty much the same problem, but in reverse, though the overheating here has the potential to be OP for Super Capitals where the ability to overheat for longer or more effectively has the potential to add millions of EHP or thousands to tends of thousands of HP/s in effective tank.
This kind of outlines the core problem here. Fighters aren’t balance to be on subcaps, and sub-cap only areas aren’t balanced to allow something that applies decent DPS with little delay at 250km. Anything that gets away from this in a lateral direction runs smack into the issue that any new ship concept has, that most of what hasn’t been done before is either OP or too worthless to justify the existence of a module, let alone an entire ship class.
Finding the tiny niches where this isn’t the case, like Command Destroyers, is the trick.
I’m not necessarily saying that we should change the navy versions, but how about changing the T1 versions that justifies the upgrade? Augoror could be surprisingly tanky, Caracal could be the fastest Caldari cruiser, Scythe could be the most agile and Exequror could be… I don’t know, have even better scan resolution maybe?
The point is: give the T1 versions something that makes it logical to turn them into damage dealers.
EDIT: Also, if the navy cruisers were made before the T1 logi cruisers, this means they are also older than the T2 versions right? Seems like this it the same nonsense issue that I have with the Epithal being upgraded to the DST instead of the Itreon V. No reason, no logic, not even any lore to justify it, just random stuff that at best case makes no sense, and at worst case breaks the balance of the other factions/ships of the same category.
This delete the T1 logi option.