I always found drones to be one of CCP’s worst ideas. They introduced them when they added tracking to the game, before that all guns had basically perfect tracking, (well it still had rng’ish stuff) so battleships insta-owned frigates all day long. (Of course back then battleships were the titans of eve.)
They should have just added the option of putting FLAK type weapons onto larger ships that did massive damage to smaller ships while doing nothing to larger ships. Same general effect as drones, but none of the extra server power needed to handle them. (Plus much improved fitting options.)
PS: Not mention how utterly STUPID it seems to have a dreadnought with nothing but 3 massive guns on it, when any realistic dreadnought would have a massive array of weapons of every size and caliber.
The flak thing is basically what I talked about above with the undersized guns ad rapid lights. Rapid light missiles are good against frigates, crap against anything your own size or larger.
Using examples I know would be what I said above to rebalance weapons where you have the smallest cruiser sized guns like the quad beams to be like rapid lights and good for smal stuff. Crap for everything else. Heavy beams good damage against everything but crap tracking like they are now and then regular mediums are balanced/average with a mix of both and they overlap.
Smallest frigate guns kill drones, mid frigate guns for frigates, large frigate guns for uppunching to cruisers.
But small cruiser guns to counter frigates would have better tracking than the largest frigate weapons. And the small Bs guns for shooting small stuff would be better than the largest cruiser weapons.
Then if you had a hypothetical secondary high rack with say 2-3 slots for a undersized guns you wouldn’t gimp a 200m + battleship by having an anti frig option.
I like the point defense that citadels have. I’d like to see that implemented for dreads on a smaller scale were you have little guns all over the dread firing aa/flak at small stuff.
heavy energy neutralizers. they go on battleships.
Standard fitment to a geddon. Sane fitment to a pvp domi. The thing that goes in the utility slot of any battleship with utility slots (like a hyperion). Things you find on a bhaalgorn or a marauder.
Also, drones from a domi or a geddon are not pleasant for frigates. Doubly unpleasant for neuted out frigates.
Smartbombs need a redesign but that’s not what anyone’s talking about with the lighter version of small, medium, and heavy turrets.
Smartbombs don’t require targeting and hurt friendlies but functionally the point defense is a smart bomb. Just needs to be altered slightly.
From a gameplay design they are a horrible choice for what they’re supposedly for as defensive tools. The whole pipebombing thing as an offensive tactic was.much more interesting and allowed assymetrical warfare between small groups. Shouldn’t have been nerfed. Not sure why CCP had a problem like that when they say themselves they want small players to have a chance to upset the order and drive conflict. That’s a great guerilla ambush tactic to use on a large fleet from the rooks and Kings videos.
A large ship should have sufficent counters to small ships. Smartbombs are inefficient and it’s silly most all ships have drones as the other choice. Drones should be more exclusive and not used everywhere to counteract shortcomings in ccps balance on guns. There’s very little variety on that front and pretty much it’s only really attack battlecruisers and dreads who dont get drones. Not sure why other gunships have all these drones instead of more focus on actual guns.
You have tons of drone ships, tons of gun and drone ships and almost no strictly gun ships. And no gun based counter as the lighter let’s say “counter” turrets like I’ve explained aren’t effective in the sense the counter missiles are by Sig radius with rapid light.
My version of a cap point defense mod would be like the reactive armor hardener.
Lock a target in range, turn it on with ammo loaded and it deals damage, if you lock two targets it split’s the damage between both. Up to the target cap. 3 targets 33% damage. It would be in the gunnery tree and count as a gunnery weapon with tracking and range and such.
But really it’s just simpler and more eloquent to add a second rack of guns you can toggle to in fitting that can only be used for undersized “counter” guns of varying layouts by faction with no additional cpu/pg to facilitate fittings. And there’s never been a valid argument against it when it’s how common sense dictates large ships should operate and not be at the mercy of a few small ships.
I agree that battleships have a much smaller scope of engagable targets than frigates.
“Bigger isn’t better” has long been the message CCP wants to convey. Sadly, the meta is “smaller is better”.
Insta-warping combat ceptors and T3Ds run amok.
They’re too fast for bigger things to hit, they’re nice and mobile, and in the case of T3Ds they’ve got a significant amount of punch for their size.
Smartbombs are not helpful here, I would argue they’re all but useless in most metas. It’s incredibly easy to avoid smartbombs in any kind of PD situation.
I still believe that increasing the PG and damage output of medium and large guns, say for example mediums getting a +50% PG and +25% damage output (knowing that a cruiser cannot fit a full rack of them) and larges a +100% PG and +50% damage output (again knowing that they cannot reasonably fit a large number of large weapons, though such is possible with reactors and the like) you’ll see battleships especially gaining medium turrets, which would help them increase their engagement profile substantially.
The same is true for dreads, and battlecruisers. They’d almost instantly wipe out a T3D at that point, which would be comedy gold.
Pretty sure that would make pipe bombs implode… imagine a nano battleship doctrine in fleet fights. HICs keep them from warping away, grapplers keep them from burning away, smartbombers absolutely face ■■■■ anything smaller than a battleship that tries to intervene (even logistics cruisers would get alpha’d off grid if they were anchored in range… but that’s a piloting error there) while your actual dps-fit ships would do what they do best.
Personally I’m thinking about scorpion pipe bombs, with rigged burst jammers. Keep your arty doctrine 75 off, time the volleys with the smartbombs. Logistics would never be able to keep up with that. The HIC wouldn’t need a target lock, and it sure as ■■■■ wouldn’t be dying with that many burst jammers breaking locks.
That and it remains incredibly easy to avoid a smartbomb in anything that it is intended to defeat. ■■■■, a smartbomb can’t even hit an unbonused frigate scramming said battleship.
I also was thinking about some form of PD (I prefer to call it CIWS).
The way I imagine it is not a turret, but a support module. I was thinking about it being used by battleships, but a capital version should work too. Let’s call it L and XL CIWS, these aren’t available for small and medium ships and I think I wouldn’t allow the ABCs to use them either. Their potential damage, tracking and range should be comparable to 3 or 4 small, short range guns in case of large CIWS.
My version would benefit from the turret skills, but not from ship bonuses or modules, so they can’t effectively replace any intended weapon.
They could be scripted for 2 functions:
auto fire: this has longer range, and automatically tries to intercept missiles that were launched against the fitted ship (maybe extend this to bombs in case of XL CIWS)
manual fire: functions like a regular turret and needs a locked target
These modules would function like the civilian turrets by generating their own ammo. The limitation of their use would be basically a local overload: you need to turn them off periodically, otherwise they would turn off for a few minutes when they reach their limit.
The Dread’s role is high-damage, while being able to sustain an assault. While filling the high-slots with medium guns is, in-fact, insane, it does lead to some interesting thoughts. In ‘reality’ the ship would probably be able to defend itself against smaller ship types.
I think it’d be great to keep the highs for Dread guns, but have a second set of highs for sub-cap guns which would be dictated by rigs. 3x small gun rig would give you 6 slots. 3x med gun rig would give you 5 slots. 3x large gun rig would give you 4 slots.
With some sort of mix and match system in between.
You know what… I like this. It’d require some UI work, and who knows what kind of god-awful back-end work may be needed, but as a concept, very cool.
Rigs on caps are of critical value (not that they aren’t on all ships, but as a function of scale they make the biggest impact on a capital). Trading them for the ability to accurately fire on subcaps would require sacrifice. You’d certainly be less effective against other capitals, but you’d no longer be utterly helpless against smaller subcaps.
Personally, I disagree. In real life, battleships, carriers, etc. which people want to put into the category of “one purpose and one purpose only” actually have different sized guns and can do different things. They do fulfill a ‘role’ so to speak, but it doesn’t mean they don’t have some kind of flexibility to do other things.
For those who will say ‘real life has no bearing on Eve,’ that’s total nonsense. The reason it works the way I just depicted in real life is that IT MAKES SENSE. Similarly, there’s no reason why Eve also shouldn’t make sense. Just because Eve is a game and not real life doesn’t mean it can’t ever make sense or can’t for some reason ever draw inspiration from real life.
Actually, I don’t think does (or, at least it shouldn’t). I’ve always hated the concept of rock paper scissors.
A bigger class of x (let’s call it X) should be ‘better’… at killing and EHP, anyway. Worse at cost, time to skill into, maneuverability, and (arguably) top speed.
In this respect, I very much disagreed with CCP when they made this decision, and still do. In their jihad against ‘bigger is better,’ they actually created ‘smaller is better,’ and relegated battleships to nothing more than level 4 mission runners and PvE ships. I said it back then, and I say it now.
Could you please remind me exactly which 2 of the 7 pirate battleships have bonuses to medium turrets specifically? The best medium weapon bonus I could find is missile based.
The idea of a fitting bonus to medium turrets on a battleship is in my opinion meaningless. Unless by “fitting” you mean stuff more than one into a single weapon slot. @Old_Pervert could you give a bit more details about what did you mean here please?
Truthfully, I had intended on this originally for Dreads and Titans, at a cost of their HAW packages. I dislike the design of the HAWs and I feel that they take what was intended to be a dps-shitting machine and turn it into the stuff of larger subcap nightmares. Which is exactly what a Carrier is supposed to be (cruisers and larger are hard-countered by carriers). By giving dreads access to medium turrets, they really aren’t a risk to battleships which can both dicate range and handle that level of damage (with logistics), but cruisers and smaller would really need to watch out.
It removes some overlap while being much more realistic (in a space submarine game), and it allows dreads and carriers to support each other. As (most) subcaps don’t have jump drives, I feel this would benefit capital fleets which would then be able to support themselves. More projection means more forays into combat, which will compliment the incoming jump fatigue changes very nicely.
I do believe that battleships should simply lose the “large” part on their weapon bonuses (better tracking always comes at a cost of projection, which is a MAJOR strength for a ship that will always be too slow to dictate range against smaller targets) I wouldn’t say that battleships really need more than the ability to efficiently use smaller guns, which they could definitely do if “large energy turrets” was just “energy turrets” (for example). IE a Nightmare would get a 150% bonus to energy turrets, along with their 7.5% tracking bonus.
While this would of course mean mixing guns, which is currently a faux pas, I think that a fleet swapping out one of their tachs for a heavy pulse (reducing their beam damage by 25% but giving them a gun with an absolutely insane amount of tracking on a battleship which would easily repel smaller ships). The nightmare of course has a tracking bonus which is why I chose medium and not small in this case. In the case of a ship with no tracking bonuses, small would be a smarter choice for the intended impact.
Of course, this is a massive meta-shift that would need to be heavily scrutinized to avoid becoming Battleships Online.
And this is the answer. The Barghest missile speed and damage bonus is for all subcapital missiles and launchers.
The thermal and kinetic damage bonus on the Rattlesnake also states that is for all subcapital missiles and launchers.
She also comes with two command sh- errm heavy drones.
Though the Armageddon can do the same for even less isk.
If you put the rapid bajeebus launchers on a Barghest and group 3x2 launchers, you will vaporize everything that is smaller than a battlecruiser.
You do not even have to stop firing while 1 or 2 of the groups are reloading.
I’m not starting an argument about this, I just want to point out that both Old Pervert and me were talking about medium turrets on battleships. Missiles are not turrets.
It’s quite interesting though that the bonuses of Mordu and Guristas subcapitals apply to all sizes of missiles (or the UniWiki needs a serious update). Is it bad that I can’t tell if this was intentional or just an oversight?
Given the recent rebalance to RLMLs, particularly in the reduction of their efficacy outside of intended ships (cruisers) I have to imagine it was an oversight to be honest. Then again…