I’ll keep it simple:
Faction Ships should have situational bonuses in addition to their static bonuses, that come in pairs.
This would be similar to the T3 Destroyer Bonuses, but driven by generic module statuses.
This is in a similar vein to the overheat mechanic, in that you dont adjust the fitting, just whether or not you use modules in certain ways.
The idea would be to grant player other risk/reward options in HOW they fly/use modules on the ship, rather than just WHAT they fit to the ship.
Examples for illustration purposes, I’m not making a claim that these are actually good bonuses:
bonus to alignment and warp acceleration while offensive systems are inactive, bonus to tracking/explosion radius while prop modules are inactive
bonus to ewar if no hardeners are active, bonus to hardeners if no ewar is active
bonus to alignment and web/scram range if no offensive highs are onlined, bonus to self-rep if no web/scram is onlined
maybe a hauler gains bubble immunity if the cargohold is empty but has a much smaller cargohold that is exempt (jetcan to get away, but save one thing)
I think these types of bonuses should be exclusive to faction & storyline hulls to make them stand out rather than just being a T2 sidegrade.
These should also be themed by the faction. Are they hit and run, are they brawly, do they regularly offline things to have more power for other things?
This also opens the door for more Faction variants of hulls that arent just combat focused.
Simple question: Why make a game that already deters a lot of player because of it’s overcomplexity, dozens of exceptions and “special rules” you need to know if you don’t want to get blown up totally helpless, even more complicated? Do the benefits outweight the drawbacks?
In my personal opinion the game should aim to get rid of lots of these “situational rules” instead of creating new one. Content should be easy to understand, easy to memorize but hard to master (skill wise).
What I’m basically hearing is that you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek recently and want situations where you can “divert all power to the shields!”
I get it, and technically speaking you can overfit your ship modules and offline/online them as needed if you really wish to do that, but it’s just not practical except for things like an offlined probe scanner or something to keep from being stranded in a wormhole.
While I can appreciate some complex mechanics that are meant to make a game more enjoyable, this system may not be well received by new players that already struggle to learn EVE mechanics as they are. I could see some faction modules that offer secondary bonuses to other module groups in a similar fashion though (or in this case, only offer the bonus when the module is not cycling).
tbh, what he describes could be (or at least something similar) part of some “T3” Concept. We currently have only Destroyers and Cruisers with a T3 class and both work a bit different from each other. Frigs, Battlecruisers and Battleships are still missing (size wise). Could be a place for such ideas.