Battleline boosting ships don’t lock themselves in place for 5 minutes and receive no penalty for remote repair. Orcas are not exactly fast to align or in warp either.
And if you are worried about capital fights, those tend to involve dreads, so the stationary boost Orca will just explode once a dread decides to cough in the general direction.
not disagreeing, just saying what might be their reason.
Nice that compensated for close range ammo buff, and active resistance modules nerf. All normal now
That is my point almost exactly.
Orca has max skills, other 4 miners 3/5, nothing special.
Now 5 Gilas afk(not really afk similar activity level as mining fleet) in l4 missions would outperform small mining fleet aswell in gathering minerals.
But a single Marauder does it already depending on mission choice.
In null, we can discuss but Orca is 2 billion+ Can it ever survive long enough to pay for itself? I think not if you play for fun… if you sit afk all day and mine in safety probably it does eventually if no gankers show up, but how realistic is that?
In short I wont be training mining skills anytime soon. 30 minutes every 5-6 months is booring enough.
First impression of a gas-miner.
Prospect Orehold is bigger now. Thats a good one.
The new graphics of the gas huffing looks very good.
What I don’t understand is the new gas cargo hold on the Hoarder.
It can hold 33.000 m3. Like 2.5 full Prospects.
The Miasmos can still hold gas in its cargo. And it has 10.000 m3 more.
So what is the point of the Hoarders new gas cargohold?
OP Updated:
Orca Industrial Command / Level bonuses:
The above adjustments will be live in TQ within the next few days.
Nice to see now it has better bonus than the Vexor 
Not to look a gift horse in the mouth or anything……. But where is the 2% coming from?
Is that an estimate based on drone speed or something?
Y’all actually hurt procurer yield. You went from reduced duration of 10% at max skill for a strip miner (which amounts to + 11% yield over time) to +10% yield at max skill.
That’s not “significantly boosting yield” for that ship, and ehp actually went down, which is not “significantly increasing” the ehp of that ship, either. With the loss of 2 mid slots, you kind of gutted the utility of what was a tough entry-level exhumer and made it into the red-headed step child of mining ships
On the positive side, the Procurer can now use 5 medium drones, which is a significant damage increase.
Actually a decent Battleship or an Ishtar can do that. No need for a Marauder.
The procurer is a barge rather than an exhumer, but yeah… I noticed that too… my procurer will just stay parked now… or maybe I’ll reprocess it, but it has no valid use now
Good luck trying to tank a gank fleet in null , or at least hit a ceptor with those medium drones has no point. It needs only few seconds with you untill the pack land on you
What about your other 10 alts? 50 medium drones sounds pretty beefy.
that’s a step in the right direction… but it’s not enough.
Bring back drone mining yield +100% from the Role bonus.
give +50% yield to LiC T1
give +100% yield to LiC T2
give Mining Drone velocity increase of +50% LiC T1 100% LiC T2
^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 10% and 12.5% is not enough with those current belts. also that is a "GLOBAL" drone velocity bonus. the combat drone and utility drone speed is fine as is , they are not the one having to cover 20km/60km for the next asteroid to mine and return meanwhile consuming fuel on “dead trips”.
Make it a “COMMAND SHIP” that COMMAND drones
Make the ORCA Unique.
Make them meaningful for SOLO MINERS emphasis on the word SOLO meaning no alt accounts. Risk VS Reward, Reward VS Investment. QoL VS Asteroids Belts f*ckery you guys did.
If you think “yeah but then someone can just get a fleet of Orca in a belt that’s too good!”
Then Implement a limitation of how many Orca can be present in a given belt before you warp them !
“The mass is too great cannot warp there!”
Fixed…
during the TiS @Kenneth_Feld was saying that Orca pilot was afk mining sending a drone on an asteroid and going away for 3h… Besides “Ice mining” i don’t see how that is realistic on normal Ore like Veldspar <— highest density in high sec asteroids belts ores Btw. which takes ~15-20mins to break down with a single drone on it. very far off from the claimed “3h”.
No drone speed makes sense for Ice Mining cause you can just warp close to one and mine for hours on end before that ice chunk gets depleted.
Normal Asteroids Belts tho they do get depleted and fast. Meaning you have to go seek a new Veldspar rock to mine. With the current “revamp” of asteroids you guys did that’s great that you doubled the ore amount of them that’s fantastic. What is not fantastic tho is the spread out of said ores. Before the change you could warp at 0km and get bumped maybe 5-10km then slowboat to close of 3-12 veldspar in viccinity.
Now what we get ? You warp at 0km you get bumped out 20-60km away because of the size of the veldspar chunks and because of the mass of the Orca… Not great. having to make 20-30 precise bookmarks for a SINGLE asteroids belt is insanity. But if you do go ahead and do the bookmarks anyway cause you like suffering for some reasons. You get rewarded with 1-2 Veldspar ~10km apart from each other in the best case scenario. Meaning breaking them will force you to warp out , warp back in rinse and repeat. THAT IS TERRIBLE.
If the only change you guys have done was the addition of the LiC , sure then the 75% Industrial Command Ship bonus + the LiC T1 / T2 bonus would of been fine. But alas you have created a new problem with the changes done to belt which mean that NO MATTER what you give in yield bonuses , we still lose by ALOT. Example warp at 0km you scan , you find ~3 veldspar ore within 15 km, you mine them out , look at the next set of Veldspar ore they are ~30km away with a drone speed of 962m/s… that 30km away ores will takes ~ 6 minutes from the Orca to the Ore and back to the Orca + an additional minute for the drone mining cycle , so we are now at ~7 minutes in travel time + cycle, that’s 3 cycle of the LiC down … 1500 water wasted on a single trip… so what… i should “disable” the LiC wait for my drone to be in range of an asteroid , activate the LiC to get the bonus yield , then turn off the LiC when the drone comes back so i don’t waste fuel ??? Comeon dudes that’s so stupid.
^ Fix for that problem can be done in 3 ways…
Procurer: I am still displeased for the loss of 2 mid slots. The choice to level all T1 barges to the same fitting (they all have 2 mid slots now) is just a step back in game playability.
The “developer comment” in the patch notes talks about the lack of fitting choices for miners as a drive for the current change. Now, how does that statement play with leveling barges’ fit to the same configuration for all of them?
As a side note: The Retriever in TQ now has 2500, 2500, 2500 hull, armor and shield HP, unlike announced.
OK, I may have said 3 hours, but that is obviously teasing - but they can do it for at least 30 minutes period
If you snuggle up to a moon rock on a 30+ day pull probably even longer
The point is a barge or exhumer on the same asteroid can go a matter of minutes before something has rto be clicked or moved except maybe a retriever/mackinaw and even then only if it doesn’t have boosts
They are essentially able to mine AFKish - there is no disputing this. period!!
Just warp 10km instead of 0km, workarounds the issue
You can also combat probe one of the pods belonging to players that didn’t sign in for years but are still not removed from the grid and sitting in the middle of a sun, warp zero there, and get pushed by the sun to move faster subwarp then some ships can move while in warp…
lol that do sound fun