So we have "The Monitor" coming

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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It got me thinking. Flag cruisers are all well and good, but, there’s another option. Particularly for super-large scale fights. I’ll say this now, I literally thought about this while I was driving home. But I wanted to get it out before it got jumbled up and lost in my brain.

Jump Freighters, Titans, etc, they were all intended to be alliance-level assets at some point. And of course, creep/inflation took their toll, and now everyone and their dog has all of that.

Cue the CIC class. Command Information Center. I can’t think of a good name, frankly that’s moot at this point. It’s a coordination platform. A true (at least in today’s terms) alliance-level asset.

The CIC-class ship would have:

  • Roughly the same Offensive capabilities as a Titan
  • Roughly 1 billion EHP (not really a huge problem to kill if you cut their support off, intended to not be headshotted. If they can live long enough for friendly reinforcements to arrive, even better - the fight just got bigger/better)
  • Cost roughly 1 trillion isk to build (aka they’re alliance level assets, and they’re extraordinarily valuable, and this excludes fitting costs). I know that there are players out there who can afford that themselves… they are outliers. Most large alliances would think very carefully about deploying a 1T isk ship onto the grid.

So far pretty boring, right?

It would have a new UI with the ability to see the stats of any ship. Resistance profile, cap, cap regen (modified by neut pressure), HP, sensor strength, EWAR status, locking range, basically all the numbers that are useful for strategic choices like what kind of ammo/fighters to use.

It would be able to open the system map and have all ships visible in their locations (use a heat-map to show quantities of ships in space). Not probed, you couldn’t fleet warp to them, but if say bombers were to continually warp to planet 5 moon 5 after their bombing run, said CIC pilot might notice this and be able to arrange for a welcoming committee the next time the bombers warp out after their bombing run.

Lastly, and this is a big ask because it would take a boatload of dev time, but the ability for EWAR modules to be “slaved” to the CIC by the pilot of the ewar vessel. The CIC can then direct EWAR out in a coordinated fashion by controlling the modules themselves. The ship’s modules are still subject to the same limitations, optimal/falloffs, capacitor requirements, etc, which would be visible via said UI to the CIC pilot, and the EWAR pilot could un-slave their modules any time. The goal of this is to allow EWAR to be properly spread out (no reason for 5 falcons to jam the same fighter for example, all ewar has its “too much” situation).

I feel this would provide a HUGE advantage in large scale fights. Which would be worth the utterly enormous cost. They should be tanky enough that killing one would be exceptionally hard to do without wiping out their support first. Never the less, they can still die the same as any ship. Until they do, however, they have an incredible potential to coordinate the parts of a fight that are really quite hard to coordinate on account of stacking penalties.

The hardest part would be designing the UIs. Each would have to be very intelligently designed, in order to reap the benefits without requiring a PHD in wrist-slitting.

Thoughts?

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The price of something would never be a way to limit people from geting more and more of said thing.Also all that you ask for ship capabilities seems complicated to balance within the game and some stuff seems downright unfair.I’d say if you think of an idea that you hope CCp might implement keep it simple the simpler it is the more likely it may get looked over.

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Even in the romans times people realize that multiple people is needed to control battlefield.

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If you need some “command center” for battle, maybe it’s better to invent command center not for one but for many? With hidden reinforced bunker, AWACS spacecraft, reserve regiment on standby? Each one piloted by real people?

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At the very least, handing control of modules to another player is a no-no.

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You can already hand control over to another player. Drones, fighters and likewise all the associated support modules. No sacred cows.

As to whether it’s a good idea… it sounds like an dev expensive idea, which is probably a deal breaker. If we ignore that and take this as a mental exercise, I think the idea has merit. Price is high enough that it would hurt to lose with its advantages over a titan being almost entirely support. I guess I don’t have enough personal experience with the lag-hell fights to know how practically useful its special stuff would be in the circumstances where it would most likely get used, but it doesn’t sound particularly OP.

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Cost is a balancing measure. Always has been. Consider Keepstars; they’re the only places that supers can dock. Why isn’t there one in every goon system? Because they’re damn expensive.

Now consider that this hull costs more than a bling-fitted keepstar (Keepstar | Free Space Explorers | Killmail | zKillboard). A single ship with greater cost than what is already an obviously significant strategic asset.

Yes the uber-blocs can afford 5 of them. They’re uberblocs, they kind of deserve 5 of them if they choose to spend that isk. I can promise you though that it’s a substantial investment even for them that they would not consider deploying lightly.

On a side note about cost, imagine the market reverberations if one of these pops. A trillion isk worth of materials gone.

I said Combat Information Center, not Combat Control Center?

Structure combat is aids. Deploying a bunker somewhere just means more structure combat. Consider that a large scale fight is 99 times out of 100 for a keepstar (aka you’re already fighting a structure) and ask if you really want two structure bashes.

This also fails to meet the primary role of the ship; it’s meant to be an anti-headshot ship for large scale fleet fights. While you do address a combat information point, you completely miss the FC headshot.

As the FC is the one calling the shots this ship is intended for them. Yes there are multiple FCs, but this information would generally be of greatest value to the cap/supercap FC, for things like focusing DDs or identifying which FAXes are capped out to DD them before they can cap up. Or identifying that a hostile ship’s hardener just burned out and their resistance dropped by 20%.

Drones. While I agree that it’s kind of a murky area, perhaps a different approach would be to enable pilots to see what ewar your target is receiving? Kind of like when something ECMs your fighters, you can mouse-over the ECM icon on the fighter and see which ship(s) are ECMing it. What do you think about that as a different (and probably MUCH easier to implement) approach?

Same for you, what about the above? That feels like it would be a much less dev-intensive approach. It still provides a magnitude of data to ewar, making it extremely useful and possibly allowing a great deal more ewar effectiveness on-grid.

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Not just one aspect of it, every aspect.

Consider how “easy” it looks to make stations where you can take an exterior view while docked that they do with citadels. It turns out, that was very very hard/dev expensive. Like that, every brand new feature is automatically expensive.

Routing the information the way you are saying, there are no mechanisms in place to build on, it would have to be done by scratch and adapted to systems that are designed to NOT transmit that information. There’s the UI work, and it would take a HUGE UI investment, which as we’ve seen in EVE, has never ever gone well. There’s the work on the map (also a perennial loser for CCP), and as there’s nothing else in the game that can be repurposed it would have huge dev costs, and probably even more expensive for the server-side back end. Not to mention the normal costs of adding a new ship such as artwork and balance. And for all these one-use systems built especially for this ship, you need to do a whole lot of QA work to make sure it functions at all but especially under tidi, all the work fixing it because it doesn’t work under tidi and there’s no way they could have known that, all the future QA work that will need to be done every time a dev so much as glances at any of the systems that touch it (and probably won’t prevent problems slipping through anyway), all this and more for a single hull that basically nobody uses.

It would be ridiculously expensive to dev this idea. While the results may have value, and may even be balanced, it’s a matter of cost:benefit to EVE as a whole. I’m not sure it provides enough value to enough people to be worth the cost.

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I would propose something other than isk but build cost:

  • 750 million tritanium
  • 700 million pyerite
  • 725 million mexallon
  • 800 million isogen
  • 2.5 trillion megacyte
  • 5 trillion morphite
  • 50 million crystalline carbonide
  • 47 million fermionic composites
  • 75 million fernite carbide
  • 105 million ferrogel
  • 112 million fullerides
  • 118 million hypersynaptic fibres
  • 225 million nanotransistors
  • 350 million nonlinear metamaterials
  • 475 million phenolic composites
  • 495 million photonic metamaterials
  • 643 million plasmonic metamaterials
  • 677 million sylramic fibres
  • 732 million terahertz metamaterials
  • 746 million tungsten carbie
  • 776 million tungsten carbide
  • 700 million construction blocks
  • 200 million spiced wine
  • 600 million freed slaves
  • 575 million angel diamond tag
  • 575 million guristas diamond tag
  • 575 million Sansha diamond tag
  • 575 million Blood Raider diamond tag
  • 575 million Serpentis diamond tag
  • 575 million Rogue Drone 42-X Nexus chips
  • 575 million Rogue Drone 43-x Nexus chips
  • 575 million Rogue Drone 46-x Nexus chips
  • 975 million carbon
  • 2 trillion ectoplasm
  • 335 million soil
  • 1 trillion janitors
  • 877 million marines
  • 1.333 million Amarr Empire starbase charters
  • 1.333 million Ammatar Mandate starbase charters
  • 1.333 million Caldari State starbase charters
  • 1.333 million Gallente Federation starbase charters
  • 1.333 million Khanid Kingdom starbase charters
  • 6.666 million minmatar republic starbase charters
  • 478 million antikythera elements
  • 786 million dairy products
  • 823 million holoreels
  • 543 million neophite
  • 987 million small arms

And a fully researched blueprints that takes 365 days 12 hours and 45 minutes to build at ME10 TE20 a sotiyo and the manufacturing implant.

No more “blitzing” missions, no you will need to work to make this thing.

And for the love of Jamyl, make titans and super cost only half of that and 185 days to build, no more candy for kiddie kittens.

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“less” dev intensive :slight_smile: That said, I can definitely see from what I’ve heard over the past while that outside view would have been difficult to implement.

Not entirely true. You can mouse over a fighter to see the effects being applied to it. Granted fighters and players are very different entities, but at the end of the day fighters, ships, drones et al are simply rows in a table. Buffs and debuffs are rows in another table, with relationships between them. Selecting the hostile debuffs is merely a function of passing the id of a different entity.

Server load, absolutely a concern. That’s why I initially wanted to be able to “slave” ewar modules; the load would be infinitely smaller than enabling thousands of pilots to hit the server for yet more data.

Regarding the overall dev expense, you’re right. It’s big. Very big, enormous even. But it’s also a lot more interesting than an uber-tanky shuttle with no cargo hold.

Lastly, value… I would contend that this would be of value to many thousands of players - consider the keep battles in A24 and 9-4, with their respective 4600 players and 6600 players. I can promise both sides of both engagements were wealthy enough to own trillion-isk ships. Tri less so than Horde, but still definitely something they could have financed before their war with the DRF. Those two battles would have seen a collective 11,000 players gain benefit from this.

Flag Cruisers on the other hand would have been all but worthless in these fights… yea they’re tough, but I’m guessing they aren’t going to be able to eat a DD; one DD to headshot an FC (or three) before you engage in shenanigans is a very small cost.

Monitors are good for medium to large gang. They fall short in tidi-level fights.

I said isk to reference the materials in some overarching and simplistic way. I’d see a few hundred billion get soaked up in NPC materials (isk sink), but the vast majority would be a mixture of all of the ores, PI, etc. Specific to the build time, a year is perhaps excessive. 6 months would be more than enough to prevent an alliance from saying “meh it’s already replaced” unless they’re literally building them in batches (unlikely but never underestimate eve players).

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:slight_smile: that’s why my proposed build requirements are the way they are.

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I’m kind of indifferent about the CIC capital, but I like the idea of an AWACS type ship.
Could be a T2 frigate, or a third T2 recon cruiser variant with insane range to ship and cargo scanners (at least 100% bonus).

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Not within the scope of the thread specifically, but I agree an AWACS type ship (if not the CIC I’m talking about) would be interesting. But like I said… kind of out of scope, as this thread’s intended on a more interesting/useful headshot resistant ship than the Monitor.

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I greatly dislike the idea of “the Monitor” and any ship specifically made for fcing.

cause you know like slaved deadspace fit damnations aren’t already a thing and anyone in a massive battle that isn’t using multiple chars to stay on field, or you KNOW like have actual other real people to take over. is like bad. or something something.

HOWEVER! I do like the idea (probably a diff thread, meh) of a class of ship bigger than a titan just for the lelzs.

Call it the deathstar. (

Just make it a super rare bpc drop (whatever the rarest drop is now, make it 50 times rarer)
make the time to build it 4 years (even with all indy stuff L5), make it crazy crazy amounts of minerals and items to make, at least 500 bil in material costs and give it crazy stats.

like 5x ehp of a titan no fitting, 16 highs, 14 mids, 14 lows, can use Seige, can fit anything (Save foir structure items), can launch 20 fighters, fit 4 dooms days. Can fire all 4 dd’s at once, can 1 shot any citadel. etc.

Requires all racial dreds, carriers and titans to 5 to even get into, can not dock anywhere, not even keepstars, can’t use gates, whatever the highest max jump distance is, times 10 it, 95% reduction to jump fatigue, etc.

the only wormhole it can jump through is a C6 and it instantly collapses.

Basically i want a hull that is the deathstar and that if one ever was made and died, it would be like a 10 trillion isk lose. or whatever, cause you know, eve. why not.

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The proper name is keepstar :stuck_out_tongue:

They even have a doomsday lol.

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Yea I know, but a ship that can jump and while it could move, moves at like 5 m/s .025 au/s warp speed. just cause.

Edit: oh you know I think ccp had this in game already, Cockroach? maybe.

But you know, an actual massive ship, that would maybe exist at some point.

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FC doesn’t need to be in resistant ship. He need to be able give orders and watch battlefield.

So anti-headshot solution may be:
make FC behave as “ghost parasite” which receives all info from chosen ship in fleet and only can send broadcasts/warp-to.

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You got the resistant part down good, but that will be as much fun as flying a ship that can’t shoot anything. Also known as… not interesting.

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It’s a fair price for being untouchable.

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You’ll note at no point did I suggest that that the idea be untouchable. More specifically, I suggested that it not only be killable but that it be an incredibly significant loss amounting to more than most fleets are worth. THAT is the price we should be paying for being headshot resistant.

Untouchable is boring. Flying an untouchable or nearly untouchable ship that cannot do anything fun meets the need, but poorly so.

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Nope, because what you are proposing is a ship that would have to be attacked and destroyed in order to attack other titans in the system thus giving the CIC the ability to generate almost 99.99% resistance to any titans laying siege to a system.