Force Auxiliary Balance Proposal - Round 2

What is the balancing factor? Are you saying that people in small groups should remain in HS? If not, how do they compete in a world with larger alliances? Wormhole space was intended for small engagements - but what prevents people from exploiting it by sifting in hundreds of ships over time? Then what can we balance that with if not with fielding higher quality ships, over numbers. It seems there is a clear argument between two groups: one would like to shoot caps in numerous cheap ships. The other would like to be able to defend themselves on an even scale with fewer numbers. Who do we cater to? Should one group be removed for the sake of the other. If that happens, who would the hordes shoot then?

Why provide greater scale if it isn’t to “balance”? If those that would like to shoot FAX easy came with an equal or better opposition - they would win. It isn’t like we are seeing a lack of FAX kills on killboards. So the real issue is combat needs another dynamic employed to allow some skill based activity or group coordination requirements that can be exploited that would allow the battle to be more interesting than just a contest of who can field the most FAX ships.

What is the true argument? “We want to be able to more easily out gun the reps of a FAX ship both in the ability to out power it’s local reps and it’s ability to remote rep!” - It isn’t impossible. In what terms can we balance this if not by investment - then what? Should it be a measure of who can field the most players? “Every ship is equally good”, so the only equalizing measure should be number of players? So the small groups have no place? I think we can come up with a better way to balance that will allow all to play in one balancing factor or another: isk vs players vs tactics… something.

When are you going to remove the abysmal Agency and give us back the journal expeditions tab?

I’ve seen people waste more time trying to find where the ■■■■■■■ escalation went to than it actually took to gate out to the system, run the site, grab the loot, and gate home.

Remove cyno from fax (or even better - in general) and most of its troubles go away. You can’t really use it to save a ratting super - it is only useful when it was on the battlefield all along. You can’t use it to drop on a subcap gang either.
And this is also a trivial 10 second fix that doesn’t require any real consideration - similar to the current fix.

That said, I am in favor of repair nerf, but I am not as much in favor of signature based repairs. I would prefer to simply increase cycle time even further - perhaps double/triple cycle time and suitably increase amount repaired (and cap cost). So, total repair remains similar to the proposed nerf, but target switching is even more devastating for its attempts to keep anything alive, plus it will over-repair most of subcaps so a logi is a much better choice for them (especially if you remove fax’s enormous logistics advantage by ditching JD).

Capital Ancillary Shield Boosters limited to 1 per ship (this does affect all capitals, not only FAX)

The whole CASB “fix” will not really touch the majority of mino pilots in fleets. But it will ruin dread solo roaming and Rorquals.
Kinda misses the point then.

  • All capital remote repair modules duration increased by 20%
  • All capital remote shield booster modules duration increased by 20%
  • Capital Emergency Hull Energizer duration decreased by approximately 25%
  • Capital Emergency Hull Energizer active resistance bonus reduced to 95% (was 99.9%)

These four kinda of make sense and will result in 500 faxes instead of 250 in large engagements and 2 vs 1 in small ones.

  • Apostle and Minokawa bonus to capacitor pool removed
  • Lif and Ninazu bonus to capital cap injector amount removed

These feel like minor tweaks and i doubt it will do more then what the other 4 already do. It will make plexing a new fax pilot cheaper since the main reason to go for carrier 5 is that bonus. Remove it and carrier 1 is good enough.

Except for the CASB fix, i can see these working, but i think the result will be a disappointing one where we just see more faxes.

Removing cynos from faxes would fix nothing. Faxes are what get cyno’d in. Sure they usually have a utility high with a cyno in it, but obviously whatever cyno’d them in to begin with still has a cyno.

As for removing cynos altogether, careful - your capital hate is showing. You won’t find much sympathy to your ideas if they’re built around destroying a class of ship that a lot of people enjoy.

Cost is irrelevant in any scenario where faxes are really a problem (if I lose a fax on a sanctioned drop I get a new fitted one for free from the alliance… shows how expensive they are!), and doubling/tripling cycle time just means bringing more faxes. This would solve nothing, because it’s easy to bring more faxes if you need to bring more. Just means everyone has 2 fax alts instead of 1.

When I look at a fax today it’s bad Logi. You must be a triage to be used as a Logi, but then you can not get help from the other Logi, From my point of view, you should look at how Basilisk and Guardian works, so there must be cooperation between Logi´s.

Logi´s Today in Capitel War, Fax is a ship you jump in to help the others but also sentenced to death, since you have to be in Triage, which means you can not get any help. That’s how it works. If it’s really big, it’s all about DPS to work together, so they only shoot once and then kil et.

You look at it the wrong way. Giving more powerful tools to the “elite” players does not balance small entity vs larger ones because the large entity will eventually have more of these tools. Just look at nullsec.

To balance low numbers vs high numbers, the N+1 problem, you need tools for asymetric warfare. And FAX are the very antonym of asymetric warfare.

While I can agree with the sentiment, there’d have to be some kind of major change to faxes before this could be viable.

As it stands, I can 100% promise that unless you’re literally blapping them before they can get reps, a fax that could receive remote assistance would never die. Which is exactly what it is like in subcap gangs with logistics… you have to either be able to break their logi or alpha through it.

Bring 20 basi/scimi with a 100 man cerb gang, and unless someone forgets to broadcast, they won’t lose a single person to sustained dps. Now in the case of capitals it’s more like 100 faxes with 50 supers. You’d have to blap them, which contributes even further to the need for more titans (DD the faxes).

Bouh, what would an example of an asymmetrical large gang to small gang warfare look like if it isn’t: “we brought everyone and their dog”, verses, “we’ll just slap you like flys with our beast machines”? I think we agree because, my point is that, in wormhole space, if you bring caps (C1-C3 and most the time in C4) you are the only one who gets to play with big guns. So bring on the horde! You have home ground advantage. In this scenario caps are the asymmetric example. While large gangs would typically be able to afford the asymmetric caps in Null and not only bring the horde but the bling for each of their dogs. Both sides become favoring of the larger groups in this case and leads me back to the original point in my last statement were I say, “I think we can come up with a better way to balance that will allow all to play in one balancing factor or another: isk vs players vs tactics… something.” So the solution is no longer nerfing ships that are just fine, but addressing the real issue of N+1 with tactical warfare which gives small groups more of a hit and run tactic (or something else) that the logistics of larger warfare doesn’t adjust to as easy. What do you think is the real solution?

In your scenario the balancing factor is the wormhole mass, not the FAX.

And isk is not a balancing factor, as shown by the nullsec fleets of titans.

And FAX are an aberration. They are an aberration for small gang warfare, and they are for fleet warfare.

Asymetric warfare is guerilla. A small gang cannot take on a too larger gang if they are not drammaticaly better on the tactical level. It must rely on speed and mobility to harass the ennemy.

From this, you deduce that everything that allows to easily kill fast and mobile gangs reduce the possibility for guerilla warfare. And anything that prevent the small, light gang to do damage prevent guerilla warfare.

On the other hand, the large empire must be able to defend itself. So there is an equilibrium to find.

But a ship that is immune to EWAR, can’t be easily killed, and prevent a small fleet to do any damage to his fleet, prevent the small gang to fight. This is the definition of cancer to small gang warfare.

Now the problem lies in w-space. The defender has a tremendous advantage because of the mass limit of the wormhole. Because he can have a cap fleet when the attacker cannot. This lead to the capital balance problem : they are too strong against subcap. The only way to counter caps is a very large fleet or another cap fleet. And FAX are at a big part of the problem, with capital staying power being the hogher level problem.

Removing cynos was meant as removing JD - to get cynoed in. Should be obvious from listed examples.
Destroy a class of ships? Why? Because they will have to take the slow way around, like (nearly) every other ship? The only nerf here is to their insanely high mobility, as there is no point in having a behemoth like a titan be easier to get around than an interceptor.

Cap cost = capacitor cost. Not price of a ship. So, make repairs take ~30s, rep the same per second, drain the same cap per second. So, a mostly irrelevant change for capital fights, but a huge nerf for repairing anything smaller - without any need to do sig based repair.

I am not sure whether this has been mentioned yet, so please bear with me if it has.

It is understandable that some may think a FAX is “overpowered” one way or the other.
After all it is a force multiplier for carriers and - more especially - supercarriers.

That is its job though - right ?
So - some abilities are too strong and need to be reduced–fine.
Like - the core competence a FAX should bring ?
Help
Force Auxiliary - Latin - Strong help
With a reduction in lending its capacitor become healing power and a further reduction of its actual capacitor storage this changes - the very role changes. Are we seeing a nerf of the FAX that will lead to it not being used a lot or at all ?
Maybe so - maybe though after this first step - just like ECM - we see the role transform a little.
In ECM the specialised ships now can take some of the aggression too - lower sig and some better fitting options allow for that.

But what with the FAX ?
Could it receive some “bonus” helping to stay in its role, while losing a bit of its healing power ?
Could a FAX maybe get a bonus for batteries ?
Yat even better - for some basic NEUT resistance ?
Wouldnt it be natural that a FAX is able to preserve its most valuable resource ?

Make FAX great again !

I’d even go further, with your number 2, and change the amounts the following:

Capital: 100%
BS: 87,5%
BC: 60%
Cruiser: 40%
Destroyer: 27.5%
Frigate: 10%

Sick of the payroll milking employee that makes these changes to ships over and over making endless “passes” to validate thier paycheck. These useless make work programs merely create a never ending list of game changes that is not even summarized for the players to be able to read through and get caught up.

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