Hello there capsuleers! I had some fun ideas for a new class of ORE Ships. I know it might not be anything groundbreaking or new but I thought it would be fun share some ship ideas with you all.
I think generally people really like the venture, and its ship variants, and the game-play opportunities they allow. And when it comes to mining we already have some great ships for that area of the game. The new ORE ships I thought about would be more like the SOE ships in the sense that they combine two great game play styles.
Where SOE combines exploration and combat capabilities, these new ORE ships would combine mining and combat. Without further bloviating here are the ships.
MINING MARAUDERS
Tech 1
BULWARK
A battlecruiser or battleship sized ORE ship
about the same mining capabilities of a procurer or retriever.
Larger ore hold size than mining barges for longer stays in the belt
Ship bonuses to offensive weapon systems similar to a gnosis or praxis and bonuses to mining similar to a procurer or retriever.
Room to fit a full complement of offensive turrets and mining turrets.
Tech 2
RENEGADE
Everything the same as the Bulwark
decent align time and great warp speed. Something like 8.00 +AU.
It would look different than the BULWARK by having large engines.
For Traveling miners, looking to relocate or head to hostile space.
SUPERVISOR
Everything the same as the Bulwark
Have the abilities of a command destroyer, Command bursts, and Micro Jump Field Generator.
Enemy fleet jumping your miners? Boosh your fleet to a better position either away from or towards the enemy.
What role would these ships have?
Combining mining + combat.
Good for a more active mining play-style.
They are NOT to replace exhumers, as exhumers should retain better mining capabilities then these ships.
Good for PVE, belts or anoms could have more target rich situations.
Good for PVP, miners can ship into a ship type that wont give them better mining per hour but will allow them to fight back against enemy fleets.
Balance the ship by making them worse at mining than exhumers but just as good as mining barges, make them pricey, and make them have a bad insurance payout,
Thanks for reading my ideas! Feel free to destroy them in the comments below.
I am not trying to troll, just sharing some ship ideas.
The main thought is combining combat+mining like Sisters of Eve ships combine exploration + combat.
You are completely right, they would have to be balanced. I did not want to spend time getting into the weeds of that topic, the point was just to get some ship type ideas out there. The Tech 1 version doesn’t seem too unbalanced to me.
Multi role ships do exist and seem to be beloved and used a lot by some. Again take a look at the SOE ships. two ships can do what the one SOE ship can do but better.
The idea of the ships would be to go the same way as the SOE ships did but with mining. their were a whole class of cosmic signatures that were added that have a more combat focused exploration site that utilized these ships well. Same could be done with mining.
other than the balance issues, which of course they would need to be balanced, dont you think a ship that combines mining+combat would add some nice flavor and gameplay oprotunities to the game? How would you do mining+combat in one ship, like SOE did with combat and explo?
From game’s perspective SoE ships are dual faction ships as any other pirate faction. So they are a a little bit better than empire T1 or fleet/navy. But they dont have T2 ships (AT rewards are an exception).
ORE on the other hand is not treated as pirate faction but rather as non-player Empire faction - you have mining-skewed set of T1 and T2 ships to choose from and exclusive skills.
You do realize that 8AU/sec is warp speed of interceptors, right?
Yet it doesn’t. At best it promotes alt play.
Escort duty sucks at the best of times.
Making all mining (& industrial) vessels combat capable (at say 75-80% of a dedicated vessel) allows you to do quite a few things.
It allows you to generally up belt rat danger. Which decreases afk play.
It allows you to increase the gank timer. Which again decreases afk play.
It allows miners to move in convoys effectively self escorting without having nothing to do the rest of the time.
It increases player skill levels required to keep track of everything and increases apm which given EVEs normal low rate is good for increasing engagement.
Now yes, the OP is being silly with their requests. But the principle of combat capable industrial ships shouldn’t be ignored just because the Ops details are silly.
If you exclude some of the ships from the treatment you can’t do most of the changes without just making those excluded ships pointless. So it’s really an all or nothing treatment needed.
(Note, I think baked in stats are bad, and that people should have to learn to fit barges also, not just have the proc have all the bonuses on the hull and basically no slots to fit).
That said, yes 60 orcas is silly, but if you nerf their mining by very much you need to give them more actions to be taking instead somehow. And that clearly can’t be shooting. Though I guess it could be logi if there is enough regular damage in a belt be it from rats or rocks. Rocks doing damage when they get mined out might be an interesting way to slow down locusts fleets… hmmm…
But then again brings us back to all ships having enough fitting for active reps etc also.
Not really. They can do ok DPS, if they stop all mining. But they can’t sustain any kind of reps or active tank for long, and they can’t fit very much utility at all.compared.
So they aren’t really combat capable, just ok when it comes to turkey shooting rats or idiots.
