I miss that series, especially the first season.
1 Like
As someone who only became aware of the game around that point in time, why do you believe this to be the case?
Edit: And where’s that Discord screenshot from? It’s not any of the channels I know about. Something only EvE veterans get access to, maybe?
I don’t, it’s more a meme than fact. I feel some things were better before 2008 - the lore and its focus on vast human empires instead of flavor of the year existential threat, or low-sec without hot-drop-o-clock, say - but a lot of things were utter crap, too. (TiDi is bad but trying to do that stuff without TiDi, oh boy.)
Edencom Defence Initiative Discord, which is public, here: EDENCOM Defense Initiative
Trigs also have their public community, go to here and hit Discord: Invasions ▴ Kybernaut Clade
And yes, EVE community has this culture where devs are very forthcoming and friendly in their communications with players (good) - but the places where they do that or ways to get them to join a place are not exactly advertised, let alone advertised officially, so as a new player it can be a bit difficult to get into that scene (bad). Reddit, Discords, Twitter are all worth following. Not too much a fan of this barrier myself, which is why I try to pass some info here, but it is what it is.
What was good about this? The fact it was static, or the fact it was cribbed?
The potential for non-static, non-black-and-white storyline development was great, and in my personal opinion the story was more interesting than humans vs aliens. But opinions vary, obviously, and we’re off-topic now. 
1 Like
Do sites change to match nullsec in those conquered systems?
If you say so.
I cant imagine how theyd have done that with the backdrop they wrote, or how in a universe where players will always have more agency than an NPC, but as you say, opinions will vary.
No, they are high sec without CONCORD in all other aspects.
Scripted pve content has no place in a player driven sandbox.
1 Like
So… Low level rats, data sites, AND relic sites? Why do people work for this then? If it was adding nullsec rewards to high sec I could understand a bit better.
Imho…
Because itll go back up to HS once Trigs are made the 5th Empire properly
But also, more LS the better for several logistical reasons
As I mentioned in another thread - it’s pure enthusiasm.
Disruption and chaos are most popular reasons for siding with trigs.
Not everyone is isk\hour minded
But enthusiasm is already gone after two weeks … the only thing what can bring back the numbers is Niarja being contested or any other otherwise vital highsec system.
1 Like
Don’t see numbers as something necessary, those are stable after initial hype calmed down.
Okay, that explanation makes sense.
Thank you.
…oh FFS, Discord! Why the frak do you limit people to 100 channels?! I have widely varying interests, dammit!
I think the idea is that in a universe with literally tens of trillions of inhabitants, even capsuleers can only effect so much change. Mind you, CCP has often fallen into the usual sci-fi trap of not understanding scale, and the way they wrote the Amarr makes it all but impossible to see them as anything better than a very, very dark grey.
Tbh everyone is equally grim dark. Hence the incineration of millions of crew on a daily basis by all sides
I have observed how Caldari have lost quite a few systems more than other Empire and based on observations, it seems to be clear that State NPC navy is simply much weaker in resisting Triglavians than other nations and require much greater numbers than Trigs to achieve anything. I repost few of my observations here from another thread.
I have observed these personally and read what is written Kybernaut guide. If I have any misinformation here, feel free to correct me.
EM hole: Trigs do Omni damage and basicly EM damage sinks into Caldari NPC like hot knife through butter. Perhaps someone ought to tell Caldari Navy that EM Shield reinforcer rigs are on market and quite cheap actually (Or at least fit a damage control)
ECM changes/unoptimal use: Right now the whole fleet jams the primary target which achieves exactly nothing in terms of fighting. If the AI could actually jam multiple ships at the same time with several ECM ships, this would reduce incoming damage from Triglavians and actually help.
Heavy missiles: Simply put, the application of heavy missiles is not good against trigs with their remote repping and only one Caldari NPC at the moment webs their target to help this application.
Damage: Inferno is best all around damage against Omni tanked Trigs but only an interceptor actually does it. Rest do various damage types.
All this results in that unlike other empires, which can fight Trigs and contribute to defense, Caldari fleet is something that needs to be actively protected by player actions to keep the influence % from plummeting when fleet derps itself to a fight it cannot win.
For example, our alliance mustered a response to Passari where we had 15h operations to kick up the % only to lose essentially all of it during our off-time despite little or no Pro-Triglavian activity, going down from 72% to 38%. In the end whole attack timed out and we did not even get Minor Victory out of our troubles.
So in summary could we perhaps get something like this.
-
Some of the ships could have RL launchers instead of HM launchers (Rook by default and perhaps 1/3 of cerbs) to enable punching through remote reps with burst damage.
-
Make it so that ECM is split across entire enemy fleet.
-
Put drakes to do thermal or increased kinetic damage. Alternatively the missile damage done by CalNavy NPC could just be random
-
Raptor should have a web like Kitsune
-
Increase EM resistance of the shields (assuming EM rig and DC around 30% does not seem too out of place)
-
Add Moas/Eagles to fleet with webs and hybrid turrets. If you have the old NPC code, Moas could even be old split-weapon system Moas with randomly inserted light missile launchers and neuts.
This would at least help a bit for Caldari navy to resist invastions. Of course optimal case would be just have State purchase rapiers and hyenas from minmatar and paint/web trigs and then blow them to bits with missiles but that does not work at the moment.
5 Likes
System of Manjonakko was lost in less than a day just now. According to information, only presence in system was few Pro-Edencom people attempting to delay the capture with rest of the people taking a breather after three day grind in Passari. So clearly the NPC navy did not form even a mediocore obstacle for Trig NPCs.
Passari was a uniquely good place to measure the effect of players and rats on progress. Being a small lowsec system, we knew exactly which player fleets were running at all times. The system had pro-Edencomm fleets for the extended EUTZ (around 08:00 to 23:00) for two days, and was (almost) NPC only for USTZ. This split makes each effect obvious.
The data shows that:
- Without players, trigs win around 3-4%/hour (here, 30-35% over USTZ).
- Small (10-20) pro-edencomm fleets can reverse this, with a similar progress gain while running.
It follows that:
- Caldari systems will fall in around half a day if no players get involved. This is consistent with trig NPCs winning Manjanakko (right after) in less than 12 hours.
- Defending Caldari lowsec with 10-20 people needs an around-the-clock effort (at least 12 hours a day or so) just to ‘draw’ with the trig NPCs.
In my opinion, this is not balanced or a good player experience.
There are not enough players to regularly contest the trig NPCs in Caldari lowsec. There are fairly few lowsec FW groups that can repeatedly field 10-20 players for 12 hours a day for FW (nullsec, stop sniggering in the back), and even fewer who could for essentially PVE grinding against rats. If they do, it’s frustrating to watch progress disappear whenever they inevitably pause to sleep etc.
The consequence is that most lowsec Caldari systems will quickly fall uncontested (as we’re seeing). These trig systems then make it progressively harder to roam lowsec or do/resupply FW, both of which reduce content. For example, there is now no easy way to fly from Caldari highsec to the current flashpoint systems, which is especially hard on the new players for whom FW is perhaps intended. This will get worse as invasions continue.
Besides the consequences for FW (which, in fairness, is the kind of shake-up CCP promised!), players need to matter. To matter, the NPCs (trigs vs faction) need to be roughly balanced. While ‘balanced to within 10 players’ is pretty even for highsec, that’s a huge skew in lowsec when you consider the player-hours needed.
I would make the same argument for the kybernauts - if the trigs are getting auto-smashed in, say, lowsec Amarr, I think that would also need tweaking. Maybe someone else has data there.
Some choice quotes from Discord:
I feel the effort that we had to go through to save this system was utterly ridiculous
it’s a real uphill battle, that is no fun…
wtf, waste of 12 hours yesterday
We actually timed out a Caldari low sec in Passari, considering how bad is the State, it was a massive win for Edencom
Caldari sucks butt
@CCP_Delegate_Zero @CCP_Convict Thank you for working on invasions and talking to players. I hope the data is useful. You can verify the weak Caldari Navy easily enough by spawning an invasion and letting it run.
Some notes. Progress was reconstructed from timestamped posts on calmil and EDI discord. Edencomm fleets were approx 10-20 people. The Kyber fleet had approx. 25 people. We assume the rats are a constant effect. Data does not include the first day, because we didn’t post about it.
9 Likes