So symmetry is important and there is a lot of symmetry between the four faction’s ship trees. But not when it comes to specialized industrial commodity transports: the Gallente get three (Kryos, Miasmos, Epithal) & the Minmatar get one (Hoarder).
Why not let each faction get one instead to make the faction ship trees more symmetric?
I disagree. I think balance and presenting players with meaningful choices are what’s important.
Now, if you think one line is unbalanced, by all means, make your case. However, I’m going to tell you right now that I don’t think that’s the case. For example, Gallente might get some nice specialized holds, but Minmatar gets the fastest industrial. So, even though they have non-comparable advantages, both lines still offer a compelling reason to train them.
The specialised haulers are a leftover from old days.
They never used to have special holds or roles. They used to just go from small to big ‘tiers’. Gallente had five tiers, minmatar had three and amarr and caldari had two. It didn’t matter which race had more tiers because the final tier was always the best.
Roll on 2013 and the industrials are rebalanced such that one hauler for each race is tanky and fast and one is more capacious. The left over iterons and the hoarder we’re given specialist bays as an afterthought because the alternative was to delete them.
https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/3252633/#post3252633
The reason I’m telling you all this is to demonstrate that there wasn’t much design thought into the specialised haulers as much as just finding them something to do. No one thought 'Gallente should have specialised haulers.’ It was more 'these excess haulers need something to do!’
But really, it doesn’t matter which race they belong to either. Anyone can train any industrial in a few minutes.
My solution would be to have ORE license the Gallente ships. They would fit perfectly as an ORE industrial.
I’m not sure what to do with the Hoarder. How much is it being used? Could the Angels steal the “master copy” of the plans maybe?
Ya… globalisation/… what a waste of diversity…
Practically every player trains Gallente Industrial to V and the rest are ignored. If instead each faction had one of the T1 specialized commodity haulers then you would have to train for whichever one(s) had the commodity(s) you interact with. It would be a lot more balanced from a training perspective and also make the ship trees among the factions symmetrical again.
I can imagine lore reasons why the Gallente have a wide range of specialist ships - culturally it is right for them. Lots of specialist businesses with specialist ships. This is in comparison to, say, the Amarr where it’s “this is a ship of God there is nothing wrong with it”.
I like that there are differences between the races, and that symmetry isn’t there as that starts to drive a blandness in the environment.
As you progress as a pilot you’ll quite likely train for a Deep Space Transport, such as an Impel which has a general purpose fleet hanger capable of taking 60,000m³ of any cargo and having the tank to make a ganker think twice.
And you get access to Blockade Runners as well.
If there is a downside to the Gallente haulers is they can encourage a new player to put a large value into something paper thin.
Splitting them isn’t sensible - someone that now wants a T1 specialist hauler for all their possible needs will need to train all races haulers. The casual hauler, who just wants a box to move things will just train their default racial hauler if they can be bothered.
And the person interested in hauling as a living will quickly go for a DST then a Freighter. Then the Gallente ships are irrelevant to them.
No already someone that wants a specialist T1 hauler for all their possible needs needs to train both Minmatar and Gallente and can ignore the rest. Which doesn’t make any sense. Everyone trains Gallente and maybe a couple train Minmatar & the other two faction’s Industrial ship skills are ignored by 99% of players.
“…ignored by 99% of players”?
We could look at kills - though I can think of biases in kills (the specialist haulers do rather advertise what they may be carrying)
Or we could look at what people actually buy:
On Tuesday, the last day available on https://evemarketer.com/ there were more Badgers, the Caldari hauler, bought on the market than Miasmoses (ore hauler)… Even the Sigil sells in similar volumes.
Without going into a lot of effort it appears that each hauler is generally equally used - and because there are more types of Gallente haulers you see more Gallente hulls.
Subjectively - and as an industrialist - of three characters that I operate independently, only one trained Gallente industrials. I’ve a Miasmos and Kryos and haven’t used them for over a year - My Impels get a lot of use in place of them.
The current setup appears to be sound.
I suspect the reason many train the Gallente line if they do us for the Interon mkV which has the largest capacity of any T1 general hauler., And of course the Gallente Industrial skill is a pre-requisite for the Obelisk - the tankiest freighter with a good hold and agility which makes it popular.
No they aren’t.
People train the others because of tech 2 haulers and caldari haulers are useful for having the highest base capacity with no expanders.
Years ago, I brought this up with a DEV during a Fanfest round table.
From what I remember:
Personally… I think the DEVs should just consolidate the hauler lines and put them under ORE despite the inevitable outcry.
It has too many long-term benefits for future DEVs and the game overall.
I dunno if all the hauler lines need to goto ORE but there are two ways to make the 4 faction ship trees symmetrical:
#1 makes more sense overall but either of these two would make the ship trees perfectly symmetrical. Right now it seems the Devs really seem to favor Gallente as they get 3 of the 4 T1 commodity haulers and in ORE wrecks they are referred to as Gallente. I don’t think Gallente Federation is any better/more special than the other three and would prefer symmetry vs what we have now.
Just train gallente indy lvl 1.
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