They’d never apply it in virtually any circumstance. Caps already kill subcaps easily… you want to make it orders of magnitude easier to kill these. They’d be volleyed off grid before they could do any real impact… at a substantial price, I might add.
They’ve got poor mobility and big sigs so they can’t sig tank HAW dreads. They’ve got poor buffer, so they can’t buffer tank carriers and big sigs so carriers can apply to them very well.
You want to kill caps? Bombers. Regular bombers. There’s a magnitude of cap killmails out there to demonstrate that it’s viable. Load voidbombs and you’ll have zero issues killing any cap.
You want to stand up to them in a symmetric(ish) fight? Battleships. Regular ones. Even something stupid like a Raven fleet would mop the floor with them… slap some RHMLs on them and go to town on the fighters. Once those are dead, they’re screwed.
Just my 0,02 isks but thinking back on a previous game, why not make those heavy bombers launch “torpedoes” ( like IRL torpedoes not the short range guided missile we have in game) and not “bombs”.
Right now most of discussion about heavy bombers faces those problems :
If we make an heavy bomber, it will replace the present bombers. Since both would have an AEO bomb, people will go for the bigger version.
If we rely not on bombs but oversized launchers for max dps, it doesn’t fit the anti-cap role since bombers are not meant to stay on grid.
Why not a mix of both ? A “fire and forget” type of weapon allowing your to “de-cloak, launch, warp” but as the same time which wouldn’t have a area of effect like bombs ( keep present bombers in their current use).
The idea would something similar to IRL torpedoes : you fire it, it goes in a straight line, doesn’t track or change direction and if it hits something it deals massive damage.
For balance and avoid face-hugging strategy, the “hit if meeting something” would be become active only after a fixed amount of time. The shell would appear on overview, allowing people to change course to avoid it.
For instance : launch the torpedo, torpedoes flies during ten seconds and if it meets something doesn’t do anything, then during a window of 10-20 seconds it becomes active and deals massive damage to the hull it meets.
It would make those new weapons something not usable against sub-caps ( no area of effect and easily avoidable) while dealing huge blows against capitals ( gameplay wise, it would also put forward manual piloting and trajectory guessing).
The server’s shitting itself just thinking about this. The collision detection would be a nightmare for Eve.
About the closest you could realistically get to this is a dps version of a focused bomb… which isn’t needed, because bombs already fit the bill perfectly (although certainly far from meaningful amounts of damage to a buffer fit capital).
Thanks for your answer. Serve wise i thought the bumping mechanism was already implemented in game as collision detection.
Void bomb drains 1800 GJ whereas the focused version drains 15K. Unbonused Shrapnel Bomb does 6,4K damage so if we made a focused version keeping the same ratio it would give 53K raw damage, 66K with max hound skills.
Of course that is if we keep the same ratio,
But for this level of damage, a new and more expensive hull would be needed. With a 50M hull, it would break the game balance.
It is. But remember that for collision detection to be a thing, that thing needs to be “in space”. Stuff like ammo/missiles, for example, are not in space. There’s no hit detection. Missiles were, at one point, and got removed for performance reasons.
Once you put it in space, you’ve gotta track a bunch of other stuff with it.
I dunno what quantity of these would be on-grid, but if it’s what I’m thinking of, it’d run counter to the design choice to remove projectiles/missiles from space.
What I was thinking of was just one “torpedo” each launch as it is now for bombs.
In the video i linked, each volley has several torpedoes because in this RTS game it’s a way to deny a trajectory/diagonal to your enemy with only one ship. Eve being a MMORPG a single bomber shouldn’t not be able to do so : if you want to apply this kind of grid/area control, you would have to coordinate with fleetmates.
But as you said as far as fighting bigger hull goes, a focused dps bomb would do the same job.
Thinking about it, the only difference i would see with a “torpedo” model would be the control you would have denying a portion of space with a big enough bomber wing.
You wouldn’t blast entire fleets to oblivion like with current area of effects bombs, but it wouldn’t be either a one target=one bomb like the focused bomb. It would create a “death corridor” where only a few ships would be hit but hit so hard even the bigger hulls wouldn’t be unscathed.
Another potential issue you’ll run into with this, is the server ticks. The server ticks once per second. A fast-moving craft could in concept pass right through it between server ticks. And while the idea’s intended for shooting capitals, “Emergent Gameplay” is Eve’s middle name - and that would end up feeling really buggy and exploity.
Not knocking on the idea as a concept, just not sold on the technical feasibility. As a concept it’s not bad at all.
That’s not how ticks work. Ticks don’t update the whole game every x seconds or you’d find ships flying through each other with no bumping and DPS would mean nothing. Ticks just register player input every x seconds and deliver the commands. Collision already exists and launching a weapon that damages the first thing it collides with should be elementary to implement.
Personally I wouldn’t create focused damage bombs, instead give these new bombers a role bonus that reduces explosion radius and increases bomb damage by a lot. I think this would make them differ from the current bombers enough to not interfere with them too much.