Specialized Industrial Ship Redistribution! Also, Upwell and ORE

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

All four factions have a pretty balanced no. of ships across the board - everyone has options when picking a ship for a role in every empire… except for industry, where the Gallente have all the fun.

When it comes to hauling, all factions have their basic and upgraded haulers - one with small capacity and one with large, like the Caldari with the Badger and the Tayra, but when it comes to dedicated holds, only the Gallente and the Minmatar have them - with the Gallente reigning supreme: nobody really has any reason to pick Caldari or Amarr Industrial skills other than as a step towards Freighters.

I have three ideas for this, one with just the Empires, one involving ORE and one involving the Upwell Consortium.

Idea No. 01: Empire Redistribution

So, I propose a small redistribution: taking the Gallente Miasmos and Kryos and handing them over to Amarr and Caldari, respectively. This would even-out the number of industrial options to all four factions, help bring some incentive to branch out into other factions, and deal with the usual “Wanna go industry? Pick Gallente!” mindset.

The Caldari look like the type that’d need to set-up quick military staging points, so they’d build stuff on-site like an RTS, while I can see the Amarr, having the largest empire, having dedicated ships to haul ore to/from various production sites all across the frontier.

Idea No. 02: Upwell Consortium Ships!

The Upwell Consortium is already part of our daily lives - with all those vital citadels and engineering complexes. We could deal with this discrepancy in empire dedicated haulers with a simple option: taking all of them - the Miasmos, the Kryos, the Epithal and the Hoarder to the Upwell Consortium!

Upwell really seems the logistics type - what with the already existing citadels and stuff, so it would seem fitting for them to have the dedicated ships. You could even have MORE dedicated haulers under “Upwell Industrial” or something, like a dedicated Capsuleer transport or a Marine/Janitor/Livestock ship.

Heh, you could even have an Upwell Freighter, for moving packaged citadels around! Or move the Bowhead to Upwell, since it’s about moving fitted ships, and not raw materials, while making an ORE Freighter with a massive, dedicated cargohold for raw ores AND minerals - that would be WAY more fitting to ORE than the Bowhead, I believe.

With this option, I guess you could have the Miasmos and the Kryos moved to ORE instead, since it would make much more sense.

Idea No. 03: Move everything to ORE

ORE already deals with Industry and all, so you could solve this difference in empire specialized industrials by simply moving all of them to Ore Industrial. The only people using it today are miners planning to get the Porpoise, the Orca and the Rorqual, people moving out of a system and incursion runners looking for the Bowhead, of the salvage junkie going for the Noctis. That could draw more utility to the Ore Industrial skill for the common man.

This option would have the side-effect of drawing attention out of the empire industrial skills however, so while being an option, I wouldn’t favor it much. But it’s here anyway for appreciation.

Sure, having everything in one place is convenient, but it’s not cool, man - gotta share the fun!

I think this would be really cool, so looking forward to hearing from you guys!

2

How do you propose people who can currently fly the ships are compensated?
Do they get the skill for free to their current racial level, or does CCP give three+ months warning and people need to train it in that time. There is precedent both ways since it is a short train where CCP has not always given away skills if they are quick to train.

1 Like
3

I think it’d be more appropriate to just hand out the skills to the current racial industry level, if the person doesn’t have the target skill already, say if you go with the ORE idea. It’s not going to be that much SP I think.

4

Reasonable response.
I believe the idea of making all the ‘extra’ haulers belong to ORE was proposed during the initial tiericide also if I remember all the discussion correctly.
I can’t recall the counter arguments but if you search the old forum you will probably find them. Though I was in support of them all becoming ORE I do know some of the counter arguments were fairly solid points as well.

5

Didn’t know about that previous discussion, will look for it!

I do believe handing out the SP to existing users would solve any problems, though - the only ones I can foresee having a problem with this would be the Alpha players, which are restricted to their empire’s ships, but even then they’d be able to “phone it in” for the Miasmos, the Kryos and the Hoarder with a max cargo fit for their empire’s large capacity hauler, plus alphas can’t do Planetary Interaction anyways, so anything that happens to the Epithal would be of little consequence to them.

Another solution would be coming up with MORE specialized haulers for the empires, but it’s difficult to think of other stuff people would need dedicated haulers for: the Amarr could have that Livestock hauler idea since they deal with slaves and stuff, while the Caldari could have that ship maintenance bay hauler from the other thread, I guess? But that would still leave them, along with the Minmatar, behind in the industrial utility scope, with one ship each to Gallente’s three.

EDIT: That fuel transport idea from the other thread is glorious, and I think it’d fit well for Upwell or, if creating more haulers for empires, either Caldari or Minmatar, though leaning more towards Caldari. Maybe a dedicated drone/fighter hauler for Amarr too, though it does seem more fitting for Gallente.

1 Like
6

Nobody hauls Livestock around, are you kidding?

The reason the Gallente have the specialized haulers is because ORE is a Gallente corporation which focuses on resource extraction. Frankly, the Miasmos/Epithal/Kryos should have ORE livery by default, like the T2 Roden Shipyards craft do.

As for the Hoarder - the reason it’s a Minmatar ship is because the Minmatar are the only race who would conceivably need a ship just for hauling ammo, since they use so much of it and some ammunition is quite bulky.

Specialized T1 hauling ships exist mostly for the sake of allowing low-SP characters to haul around high-volume materials (ice, ore, PI) easily. A hauler specialized for fuel would make sense, but that’s about the only thing I can think of where adding another specialized ship would be useful.

Remember that Upwell is a consortium of NPC industrial corps, including ORE, so any Upwell ships would probably just be ORE ships since they’re the only Upwell member that makes ship hulls.

EVE Online doesn’t need perfect parity between empires, either - a perfect imbalance is what makes for interesting choices, and thus interesting gameplay.

1 Like
7

Just throwing ideas around, and people do need marines and janitors for citadels. Plus, we now have the Molok, with its gigantic corpse cargo bay - which could very well be moved to an ordinary industrial, since there is a demand for corpses around.

ORE isn’t a Gallentean corporation, not anymore: they used to be one when they were space poor, but once they found the riches in Outer Ring, they left the Gallente and set-up shop in there, with Mordus Legion helping them. Their relations soured and Mordu’s Legion left the area. Serpentis took over, loads of people bought their shares and they then elected to have executive control given to Upwell.

Not only does one of the proposed options involves leaving it with the Minmatar, but moving it to another corporation wouldn’t prevent people from using it anyway. Plus, there’s rockets and hybrid charges as well, not just projectiles.

I’m not demanding more specialized haulers, just suggesting a way to share them a bit. The fuel, drone/fighter and SMB haulers would be useful.

This doesn’t prevent Upwell from grabbing tech from ORE and launching their own ship line, while leaving the ore/mineral part to ORE.

I’m not asking for perfect parity, I’m suggesting a way to spread industry around a bit to stop Gallente from being the end-all choice for all things industry and spice things up a bit.

8

Idea No. 04: Create other types of dedicated transports and assign them to other races.

–Helpful Gadget

And… it helps if I read the whole thread.

–Slow Gadget

9

I support the idea of making ORE license the Gallente ships. We could even make the Epithal able to carry fuel blocks too.
My problem is the Hoarder: ammo doesn’t seem like the usual profile of ORE. We could make it a Concord ship though, upgraded with a small fleet hangar instead of normal cargo hold so people can access it on field too if they need to.

1 Like
10

Here is what I would do

ORE license their ships to Upwell.
Upwell now has their logo/brand in the ORE ships.
Upwell than buys the licenses for the other ships (I think the manufacturer NPCs are part of Upwell)

So, instead of ORE skills we have Upwell skills. You open up more LP stores to sell the goods (BPOs), including current ORE ships, but at a higher LP cost (think SOE HS vs Null Sec LP stores)

It moves the Industrial aspect of the game from current group to Upwell. Which could be played pretty well.

1 Like
11

@Amarisen_Gream You mean like Upwell absorbing ORE’s ship stuff and then expanding the available roster with other types of industrials? Hey, that’s not that bad! Upwell has executive control over ORE anyways.

I can see that happening, would simplify things a bit. Plus, Upwell already deals with heavy construction with the citadels and stuff, so ore and mineral equipment wouldn’t be that alien for the corp.

They could include some black-ish skins in-line with the citadel colors, that would be SO boss.

12

Marines and Janitors aren’t large volume items needed in amounts large enough to justify an entire hull dedicated to moving them around.

Semantics. ORE has their origins in the Gallente Republic, so it makes sense (thematically) for there to be Gallente ships designed to support ORE operations.

My point is that the hauler with a specialized bay for carrying ammo fits best with the Minmatar in a thematic sense, and also a logistical sense, because projectile and missile ammo takes up a lot more room in general.

I agree that a T1 hauler for moving fuel around makes sense. The easiest way to do that is to expand the list of things that the Kryos can carry, since it is used for ice and ice products - which fuel blocks are, in a way.

What business does a player have moving mass amounts of drones or fighters in a T1 hauler? At the point where you’re moving as much volume as that of the Gallente specialized haulers you’re spending far more on cargo than the hull is worth. In that situation, you’d be better off just moving the items by jump freighter.

Yes, but it makes more business sense for ORE to expand their production capabilities than it does for Upwell to impinge on the market of a consortium member. Upwell making ships doesn’t make sense.

The Gallente aren’t the end-all choice for all things industry. They have the most specialized ships, but the other racial industrials beat out the Gallente industrials in other areas - the Bestower tanks harder, the Wreathe aligns faster, etc.

13

Originally Gallente had 5 T1 haulers - Iteron 1,2,3,4 and 5. Iteron 1 became the Nereus, Iteron 5 is still in the game, the other 3 were repurposed as specialized haulers.

Prior to Alpha it didn’t matter which race designed the ship - anyone could train Gallente industrial. For experienced players the specialized haulers are irrelevant - a DST can replace all of them.

Since Alphas are racially locked it does matter that all the specialized haulers are Gallente and the idea of moving them to Ore has been floated a few times on the forums. As we approach the anniversary of Alphas in the game and now that CCP has a dedicated balance team, I think CCP should address the balance issues that make 1 race preferable to another. They shouldn’t all be the same - race should be an important choice, but each should have something they are really good at.

2 Likes
14

Re: Tags

When you create a topic, or modify the initial post, there is a seperate field for tags.

1 Like
15

I wrote a reddit post on this a while back. It would make since to move the Miasmos, Epithal, and Kryos to be ORE industrial ships.

Make the ORE Industrial Ship skill available to all Alphas up to lvl 1. Then increase the skill lvl requirement to fly a Noctis. Anyone who already has Gallente Industrial Ship skill would automatically convert over to the ORE industrial skill at the same level.

The story line would be that ORE is expanding their line of ships and has decided to purchase the BPO rights to the miasmos, kryos, and the epithal.

1 Like
16

Reminder: creating more specialized haulers also broadcasts to local what you’re hauling, or will be soon. :dizzy_face:

17

Loads of responses! Thanks guys!

@Myrddin_Calyx - You’re right, there isn’t that much demand for them as of now. But it would certainly be cool if they added a bit more emphasis to personnel, like the Scientists, Slaves, and all that stuff. I do find myself hauling way too many Exotic Dancers to my corp mates, though! :stuck_out_tongue:

When I mentioned Gallente being the end-all choice, I meant when creating a new industry character, because you already start with Gallente Industrial, and thus, access to the useful haulers - this is especially true if you think of the new Alphas, which are restricted to T1 stuff and factions hips, so they have no choice but to go Gallente or get screwed until Omega.

Upwell making ships would look badass though, think of the skins! But the purpose of this thread isn’t specifically asking for Upwell, or taking them away from the empires, it’s just two of the three ideas proposed to spread industry a bit. It seems the 1st option is the good one, then? Freighters and Deep Space Transports can fill all hauler needs for a character, sure, but they’re really expensive and blocked to Alphas.

@yellow_parasol - Thanks a lot! Didn’t notice that field at first. Hope the tag is appropriate! Accepting suggestions.

@Xenos_Monith_Maulerant and @Do_Little - I completely agree with you two. Good points.

@Este_DeStirr - Heh, true. :skull_and_crossbones:

2 Likes
18

i innocently suggest “indy-porn” as tag, because it sounds appropriate. :grin:

and i’d like to add that this makes perfect sense. the ships are quite long. :innocent:

2 Likes
19

Sigh, for the umpteenth time (I’m bookmarking this for next time).

  • Move dedicated haulers to ORE indy skill
  • Make Noctis require ORE indy II
  • Allow alphas access to ORE indy I
  • Give all omegas ORE indy skill up to their best racial indy if currently lower

Job done, no new programming or artwork. Season with backstory to taste.

3 Likes
20

Personally I would like a new design if ORE takes them over.
Also, is it really necessary to increase the skill requirement of the Noctis? Alphas could make a good income by doing something a lot of omega players usually don’t bother with.

3 Likes