I am in the game for Narrative enrichment, roleplaying, world building, storytelling. I am not particularly interested in OCD level forcible “game balance” or such matters, and I will ignore arguments on that last premise. Eve is a simulated universe, not a chess board.
Having established that premise, I think it is time for new types of Titans, for starters (…) a second per faction that already sports these ships. No, I don’t think the time is ready to start thinking about T2 Titans, don’t be daft john. Also I will personally not likely ever be bothering with Titans myself. But my heart races, skips a beat, every time I see one majestically fly by, like the old Brontosaurids of yore, ah the splendor. They are the pumping lifeblood of this game, the crown jewels of the story. Having new Titans ™, with sigificantly different applications and features from the existing ones, ah Id be just overjoyed and elated. I might not sleep for days with the sheer excitement of seeing one the first time.
well there are significant changes being worked on behind the scenes at the moment. i’m not sure how i feel about having a second titan, as you say, not a T2 but i imagine then just a varient of what already exisits.
personally when it comes to titans, I think there should be some kind of portal effect given to fleet members, here let me explain in more detail.
the real world equivilent of a titan would be an aircraft carrier.
the whole point of an aircraft carrier is to specifically apply force multipliers beyond the horizon.
this is in fact replicated in EVE Online by the fact a titan can bridge fleets.
however in reality, an aircraft carrier has to have its fighters return to it, due to the nature of how titan bridging works in the game this is not the case, however, i feel it would be more appropriate especially for operations if the pilots who jump through a titan bridge, we’re subject to some kind of “tempoary portal effect” where the fleet who were bridged are then additionally bought back to the titan, this would make for a much more realistic sense of how a titan and an aircraft carrier operate in my mind.
which in short would mean, the jump portal is much more how we think of warp technology in actual science at the moment, space has been bent so traveling there is fast and effective, however this is effect is only held by the titan pilot, who can cycle down the effect and thus recall the fleet.
carriers used to work in a similar way with fighters being able to warp across whole solar systems engage a target and come back, but this was removed a long time ago, the scale upward from that is bridging players to other systems, I think honestly think there is probably a way of achieving this and i think would be more fitting if a titan for example was only capable of bridging a fleet for so long, it would mean large scale fleet fights COULD then have some kind of fixed or set timer dependant on the titan pilot. I would argue this would also help with server stress loads, pilots who need to re-fit or re-ship would also then have the chance to do so before being bridged again.
I think this would be pretty cool for the titans already existing in game
Part the first: what role would these new Titans fill that existing Titans would not? It is important to note here that “having a shiny new thing to aspire to” is not a role. Introducing a new ship without a well-defined role is generally a bad idea, especially in the realm of capital ships.
Part the second: before CCP introduces new Titans (aside from possibly new faction ones), they would be much more prudent to introduce new Dreads instead.
A few years back, CCP very wisely separated the combat and logistics aspects of carriers into different classes: Carriers and Force Auxiliaries. With Dreads, they have a single platform that serves the role of structure basher, anti-capital DPS, and anti-battleship support. At first glance it’s easy to look at all three roles and say to yourself, “Pfft, they’re all DPS roles, what’s the big deal?”, but when you look at how you fit and fly Dreads for these different roles, the need to split them like was done with Carriers becomes more apparent. Existing Dreads could be kept as largely static, anti-structure and heavy anti-capital DPS, while the newer, second class of dreads could serve as “more” mobile (as much as a capital ship can be) DPS with bonuses geared more towards HAW weapons in order to serve in an anti-support and/or capital ship harassment force.
While not as clear cut a situation as with Carriers and Faxes, I think there is a much stronger case for adding a new set of Dreads long before there is for adding a new set of Titans.
