Here i am! Straight out of the shop! My head is engineered with superb combat knowlegde and abilities. Nothing can stop me now! I’m slowly rolling out in my brand new tank, stuffed with all the highest tech that could possible fit inside! My wallet is several billions lighter, but I am now 60 tons of pure annihalation on wheels! With this power, i can take on up to 20 other war machines alone, without even breaking a sweat…! All that is left now is getting to the actual battlefield. It’s quite a journey, and with this much warpower, i ain’t exactly fast… but i’ll get there eventually.
But wait! Now what is this!? A fleet of scooters suddenly catches up on my sides. What do they want? I doubt they’re looking for touble… After all, the mere rev of my engine would be enough to tumble them over. But they are.
I wake up, but not as i normally would - I’m in another body, it looks like me, but it doesn’t feel like me. I’m in a clone. The last moments of my former life flashes before my eyes; It all went so fast. At one point i was in a mighty war machine, the next it was gone… Destroyed by mere pebbles thrown by the scooters, just before they themselves were executed by the police. How could this have happened!? For so long i had been saving up to build this beautiful war machine! Hours and hours of earning! Billions! Gone i seconds, to a fleet of scooters that all combined weren’t even worth a 200th of what i was piloting.
Every man for himself, but how does this make sense? How does the fly, or 10 for that matter, beat the lion? How can this be just!? I pray to the gods of New Eden; May they see to that the phisycal laws are uphold to a point that makes sense, for else i am affraid i am forced to forfeit my believe in them.
OP, little did you know you and your new shiny tank were in a Winter War headed out against the Finns towards the Mannerheim, and what you saw wasn’t scooters. Instead it was just a few Finns who had just finished lumberjacking a few fresh logs and were getting ideas about where to stick them.
Tortured analogies aside, EVE is not and has never been about “bigger ships always beat smaller ships”, especially when more than 2 combatants are involved.
I don’t like just making a snarky post, so I want to show that you can compute how many “baby ships” it takes to blow up your “big ship” just using the in-game fitting window. We’ll need the amount of EHP being actively repaired by “big ship” and the amount of DPS being per “baby ship”, and that ratio is going to tell you how many “scooters” your “tank” can handle.
EDIT: I had missed that in the analogy, the scenario is ganking. OP, to compute your actual survivability for a gank scenario, all you need to do is:
take your EHP from fitting window
simulate DPS from paper-thin Catalyst (or gank ship)
Divide EHP by DPS, which gives you “N*T, or how many N gankers have to apply damage for T seconds”. Adjust N and T to see how long/little gankers let you live – noting that T has to be shorter than the CONCORD response time for the security status of that system.
It’s not 100% accurate, but something to give you a starting point to think about.
Below is the not-gank active-rep brawling scenario, which I had originally thought was the case. Please feel free to skip over it.
/Edit
You’ll have to plug the actual numbers but the math goes like this, based on the in-game fitting window:
If “big ship” is shield tanked, work with your shield resists, shield booster number, and passive regen number
If “big ship” is armor tanked, with with your armor resists and active armor rep number
So:
Take the average of your 4 resists. This is a rarely realistic calculation, but it is a good approximating one. Adjust it to be a decimal between 0 and 1 (eg: 1 would be 100% resists, 0.25 for 25%, etc)
Take the HP/S metric of your active repair. For Armor, you’re done as it is just the active repair amount. If you’re shield tanked, take the sum of both active repair and passive peak recharge number.
With your number from step 1, compute the damage an attacker would apply by computing 1 - resists. That means an attacker hitting you with .25 or 25% resists would apply .75 or 75% of its damage, for example.
Take the above number, and divide it into your HP/S number from step 2. If your HP/S was 100 and .25 or 25% resists which was 75% applied damage, then 100 / .75 = 133.3, which is the EHP/S you’re gaining.
This is the “big ship” number for your big ship tank.
For the “baby ship”, just open a fitting window for the hull and slap on a bunch of high DPS guns and ammo and rigs/mods for boosting damage. You’ll get some X DPS.
Simply divide your Step 4 EHP/S number by that DPS number, and that’s roughly how many “baby ships” are needed to blow up your “big” ship. It is not an auto-win “infinity”, and the low number may surprise you.
While illustrative, this is an inaccurate computation for the following reasons (and I’m sure more):
Not taking into account the actual resist profile to match the incoming damage
Not taking into account overheating
Not taking into account drones
For shield tanks, it doesn’t account for the possibility of missing peak passive regen due to burst DPS from something like arty volleys
The in-game fitting window doesn’t account for “what-if” skills, only your characters’
Not taking into account actual gun/missile application (speed, signature radius, distance, angular velocity, etc)
Bigger ship should never just beat smaller ship. Just like a tank probably never would be able to hit a scooter driving around it. But then 10 scooters should be able to just delete a tank in mere seconds either.
The problem is that even if i make a big ass tanky battleship that can litterally afk in level 4 mission with auto target missiles and never get close to dying, I still can’t survive a fleet of suide gankers in ships that are cheaper than what i make for said mission.
And it’s come to a point now, that active tanking doesn’t matter anymore, you’ll get instant neuted to 0, so your best bet is to stack passive EHP, and even a big fat commandship is dead before Concord arrives.
I don’t mind the whole ganking thing, i just think it staight up stupid, that 10 x 1mil ships can destroy ships worth billions and far bigger than them, in seconds… its like 10 or 20 water jets being able to tip over a ferry… simply doesn’t make sense. Sure the ferry can’t do ■■■■ about the water jets, but atleast it doesn’t just explode on contact.
I’m sorry you forgot to lock that hatch on top of your tank, but while you were mocking my friends for throwing rocks at you for driving over their house and killing their families I got curious about what this little round nasty looking green thing would do if I dropped it inside your shiny new tank.
And if one of the economy elite with a Trillion ISK and ten thousand battleships, flooded the BS market and bought up every single Catalyst, would you still be mad that 10x 1billion destroyers destroyed your 1x 1million far-bigger ship? Perhaps the idea of them spending billions to gank you makes you satisfied, but it could be they built the Catalysts and modules from minerals anyway, and it turns out the market was a bad benchmark to begin with.
You’re simply comparing cost and capability in EVE gear. Prices are up to the players, so there is no such thing as a “true” price besides whatever you want to believe. In practice, the market shows it usually roughly offers gear quality on an exponential scale (similarly for ships along ship-size axis).
To illustrate with fake numbers: The gear that gets you 90% of a max-stat costs 1% of max-stat gear. The gear that gets you 99% of a max-stat costs 10% of max-stat gear, a 10% improvement (not even 2x the stat) for 10x (that’s ten times) the cost. The gear that gets you 100% (a +1% improvement) costs yet another 10x cost.
Ships are harder to see but not too different: a battleship might be 100x the cost of a frigate but only has 10x the base HP.
Gankers leverage these economies of scale by utilizing the bottom end. Solo mission runners don’t scale along that dimension, so they tend to need the critical extra few percents to have their blitz-mission-completing capabilities while “playing alone”. Hence, most experienced mission runners use the least bling needed to get the job done – none at all being preferable.
My dude. I’m not mad, i just think it’s stupid. And if 10x 1 billion destroyers could as easily kill a 1 mil BS, i’d think the same…
It’s not about the money, it’s the fact that zero skill small ships can kill long time skilled big ships with ease. How’d you feel if you trained for over a year to get into a titan, and the moment you’re done building it and jump into it, 10 BS warps in and pops you in 2-3 seconds? Cus that’s pretty much exactly the same. It simply doesn’t make sense.
Hell this is a game with tracking, velocity, signature radius, rate of fire, fall off, flight time and many other insanely cool real life physical mechanics that other games neclect. And unlike other games where the difference between sizes are like 2-5 cm of height, we got so much diversity! We got small ships and we got ships so big that they use the small ships as drones! We got ships so big they can’t even fit into a stand that holds thousands of other ships. Personally i think its insanely cool…! But then why destroy this diversity by making small ships so strong compared to bigger ships?
Sure big ships shouldn’t just be able to run over small ships, but neither should small ship tumble big ships this easily. Again, who the hell would ever build a titan if 10 battleships could just pop it before it could even lock target on any of them…?
I know the feeling sucks, but that’s what’s great about this game: the challenge is meaningful, the highs are high and lows and low, everyone experiences it in their own way. What you do about it reveals a great deal about one’s self.
Yea, i agree - And it’s not really about the money. Sure ants can take down a spider… but not a freaking cat. It’s the proportion that i think is sad. I’m fine with 10 Catalysts being able to take down a BS, just not in less than 2 seconds.
And i didn’t lose a ship, i’m just discussing my opinion with fellow pilots, so please…
But wouldn’t you think it would be lame? Why would anyone ever build those big ass cool ships, if they could just be rolled over by anything smaller?
Don’t know about you, but i wanna see fights with all kinds of different ships! not 2 armies of Tristans going at eachother…
