Stitch Kaneland for CSM 14

Council Of Stellar Management CSM Campaigns
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Hello space friends and torpedo aficionado’s,

I’ve decided to make a run at CSM 14 this year. I’d like to focus primarily on ship & module balance concerns with secondary focus on wormholes and low sec (Faction Warfare and Non Faction Warfare) to help provide input on issues that may arise without it being ignored/forgotten.

My main campaign focus would be on these items:

  • Ship/Module Balance
  • Low-Sec (FW and Non-faction)
  • Wormholes
  • PvP Content Generators

For those of you not familiar with me, i’ve been playing since 2011. I’ve been an active participant in the EVE community for 5-6 years by voicing my opinion on ship balance concerns. Specifically focusing on the interaction of the larger subcaps in the game such as battleships and battlecruisers. I also have a Youtube channel that show cases solo PvP videos and has a couple ship fitting videos.

I am part of no major null block or large alliance powerhouse and play EVE with 1 character/account. You could say i’m an EVE casual, but i’ve accomplished much with just my 1 character. I’ve been through faction warfare, non-faction warfare lowsec (being nomadic) doing mainly solo pvp and making isk doing lowsec activities while also roaming nullsec. I also currently live in a wormhole and do small gang pvp. In my past I lived in nullsec for a couple years and also participated in nullsec fleets. I’ve dipped my toe’s in just about every section of space to try it out for awhile and get a feel for it. I’ve flown almost every underutilized ship and weapon system and found their strengths and weaknesses. I even took torpedoes, a weapon system everyone mocked, and have slowly turned around its reputation by showing that it is a viable weapon system when you fit for it.

I am actively pushing the boundaries of ship fitting and would be focused on offering advice and perspective to CCP for ship/module balance issues that arise. With my experience, I can provide insight on not just one particular play style for ships/modules, but all playstyles. Whether its Fleet fights, small gang, solo and even PVE .

I like to review balance through more of a stat change, rather than gimmick changes. Things like ADCU’s i’m not largely a fan of. I do also realize that certain gimmick’s can provide more interesting gameplay mechanics, but need to be used sparingly. I’d advise CCP on solid stat/trait adjustments before implementing gimmicks. This is an example of my mindset when trying to provide balance to underutilized ships.

Suggested and Implemented Ideas:

The ideas below are either what have already been implemented in the past, or idea’s that I represent. They are an example of what experience I have and what my perspective is on ship/balance concerns.

Battlecruiser Rebalance

About 4 years ago, I made the recommendation to give battlecruisers a role bonus to increase their range. With the help of the community and the general foundation of my proposed idea, battlecruisers were given a healthy range bonus to help solidify their role as anti-cruiser ships during the Vanguard expansion. Changes were also made to the Fleet hurricane, Ferox and Navy Drake to bring them in line with the new proposal (to be fair, I did warn that if the Ferox got 2 range bonuses, it would be too strong, which is what happened).You can find my old proposal here.

Making Navy Ships more Competitive with Pirate Ships

You can read through this article to get a lengthy breakdown of my proposal and how it would look in some examples provided.

https://newedenreport.com/2019/04/05/navy-ship-and-pirate-ship-progression/

For a basic summary, its that you can increase the Navy ships stats to be competitive with pirate, but not inherently better. Whereas Navy ships will increase via DPS/EHP to be comparable to pirate, pirate ships will have the unique bonuses not found anywhere else in the game.

Battleship Signature Resolution Buffs

Something i’ve been adamant about for years is buffing battleship lock speed by 25-50mm scan resolution to help the ship class be more lively and distance them from capital ships. Especially in the case of the Rokh and Scorpion Navy Issue.

Remove Pirate Battleships BPC’s from DED’s and Increase LP costs, while adding Pirate Battleship spawns into Lowsec

Straight forward explanation here. Pirate battleships are too cheap, which breaks Navy Battleship progression. Nothing will change even if you buff Navy Battleship stats if Pirate Battleships are always going to be cheaper. Pirate Battleships will almost always be inherently better than Navy due to their unique bonuses.

Remove or severely nerf the BPC drop rate in DED’s. Increase Pirate battleship LP costs so their actual value is forced to increase and then add pirate battleship spawns in lowsec asteroid belts similar to how you can find Mordus spawns in belts. This puts more people in lowsec (in actual space and not something that needs to be probed down) doing things, adds additional ways to make isk in lowsec and can help generate content. As you can hunt for these battleship spawn in a pvp fit ship, which means making isk and finding fights at the same time. To keep up with current demand of pirate battleships, we would expect to see many more people out in low sec hunting these, which will help add life to all of low sec (faction warfare and non-faction warfare).

To go along with these changes, rebalancing Navy Battleships and Navy Cruisers would help provide LP sinks for everyone in FW, by ideally having a few ships that are popular so everyone can make some isk on selling Navy ships consistently, instead of mainly just Gallente sitting on the golden goose which is the VNI.

Buff Torpedoes

With the eventual weapon tiericide (hopefully approaching) i’d propose the following:

Reduce fitting by 8-10%

Increase base range to 30km at max skills (nerf bomber range accordingly)

The link will go into the details of the suggestion.

Data Site Buffs and COSMOS Modules

Going with my Module/Ship balance platform, i’d like to propose making COSMOS/Storyline modules more available and also helping to increase volume to the faction module market due to abyssal bricking (rolling a bad roll on a faction mod and making it nearly useless compared to t2). I’d propose letting data sites have the chance to drop 1 run BPC’s for faction modules (Green loot modules) and also adding COSMOS bpc’s and/or materials to their loot table to make data sites more attractive and help provide more options for fitting with COSMOS items and adding more faction mods to the market to help keep prices stabilized.

Link for more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/a1i2sf/give_data_sites_a_chance_to_drop_1_run_bpc_for/

Better Cyno Counterplay

I’d like to see more counters to cyno gameplay, either by nerfing the cyno itself, or providing more options for countering. This could include, but not be limited to:

-Give cyno’s a spool-up timer

-Either create a new ship line that can provide cyno inhibition or add in to an existing ship line, like Marauders, by giving Bastion a cyno inhibition ability, or create a new module for marauders to inhibit cyno’s with (creates a new role for a ship that lacks a place in the meta)

-Buff cyno inhibitor survivability and give it actual shield/armor resists so it can be repaired and not alpha’d by a super in a couple volleys.

-If the cyno remains an instant “ON” module, the inhibitor should also be an instant or near instant “ON” Module/deployable.

-Look into changing its fitting as way to actually be disadvantaged by fitting one on anything. Give certain ships bonuses to reduce fitting (like probe launcher bonuses).

In Summary

To shorten this all up as to what my platform/campaign would focus on:

  1. Ship & Module Balance
  2. Low-Sec and Faction warfare
  3. Wormholes
  4. More PvP content Generators

I’m politically neutral and have played the game on my own for about 5 years and enjoyed content from all areas of space. I’m active both in space, and on the Forums/Reddit daily. I like to look at everyone’s perspective and try to think of balance improvements that help improve the health of the game, not just one specific area that would only influence one group.

Updates/Additions

Besides rebalancing of Navy Cruisers/Battleships to help LP/FW, other changes to FW id like to see:

  1. Prevent ships with a warp core strength greater than 0 from contributing to the countdown timer of plex. So, venture/ships with WCS would not effect plex timer

  2. Neutrals warping into a plex would become either suspect or have a mutual aggression timer (timer ends much faster than suspect timer but still allows engagement without penalty)

  3. Either remaking the novice to only allow t1 frigates and not pirate/navy, or creating a rookie plex for only t1 frigates.

  4. Force citadels to be assigned to a faction in FW space. If the systems flips, citadel goes into low power. Members of opposing faction cannot be given access, regardless of freeporting/access rights. If you are a neutral entity, you can place citadels, but without being assigned to a faction, neither faction entity can dock.

Wormholes:
Note: I currently live in lowclass and that is where my perspective/experience originates. I roam highclass for fights, but dont actively live in highclass. If you seek a candidiate for high class changes/buffs, i would recommend voting for either Cable Uta or any other high class candidates you prefer as your primary choice. Just remember to vote for multiple candidates for the playstyle you’d like to be represented, dont vote only for 1 person. While im not a highclass, id still voice my opinion on anything that could effect all wormholes negatively.

Lowclass wormhole loot could potentially be looked into. Such as buffing drop rates in sleeper data/relic sites. Or adding COSMOS mats to those sites in conjunction to the typical sleeper salvage/loot.

Alternatively, like highclass holes, introduce drifter ships. Instead of battleships, make them a squad of 2-4 drifter cruisers. They wont have DD’s, but could be setup like a small gang of 1-2 logi and x2 dps. They would drop materials different than the battleships which could be used to create a new module (t2 bastion for cyno inhib on marauder, or a new cyno inhibitor module in general).

Battleship rebalances:

Currently, other than sig resolution buffs, i’d like to see some mild EHP improvements. This can be accomplished in a couple ways:

  1. Create XL shield extenders and 3200 armor plates with fittings appropriate for battleships, but very hard to fit on anything else (or just restrict them).

Rough numbers would essentially double the HP values over LSE and 1600 plates. So an XLSE would give about 6k HP and 3200 would give about 8k HP.

  1. Alternatively, we could give all battleships a role bonus to increase effectiveness of extenders/plate HP values. So a 50-100% bonus to buffer modules would acheive a similar effect. Though could be OP with how easy it is to fit LSE/1600 plates on a battleship.
  2. In addition to these, we could also look into doing some HP value movement. For example, on a Raven, removing some armor and hull, and shifting it into shield to give a stronger shield tank
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Stitch K. is a very competent PvPer, and one I look up to even though I’m way out of his league.

It is my view that his proposals are ones CCP really need to take seriously. I’ll be glad to give him my vote when the day comes.

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Kudos, Stich and very nice to see you here!

Hey if we are lucky and both get elected, we would have two highly qualified members in the CSM whom I trust will not break the ships in EVE Online.

Good luck mate!!

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IF you make the Cyno inhib an Instant online module, it shouldn’t be buffed in resistances. If you lower it’s delay to 10 seconds I think is a good compromise.

Decrease the cyno from 10 minutes to 5 minutes.

Give capitals a 100% increase in cyno duration as a role bonus or just say on the module that caps will have an increase in duration. For a response more quickly. Either give bastion the cyno inhib, or give the Murauders an extra middle slot for the cyno inhib.

WH space if in a pretty good place.

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Those all seem pretty fair to me. I don’t want to neuter cyno’s completely, but i think they need to be looked at more closely with better counters.

Could make the Bastion an immediate effect and keep the deployable inhibitor with a longer timer. As long as there are options available.

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How would you increase torp range flight time or flight speed?

Purchasing Marshal for my collection gave me reason to skill up torp spec to l4 and what I found shooting rats is missile travel speed was beyond horrible,one basically need to start counting salvos for anything over 10km out or else you are wasting a lot of torps.
If you let loose and dont count you will waste as much salvos as you landed that is beyond wasteful on ammo.
Since you are pvp oriented on all of your proposals I am just wandering does missile (torp)speed matter to you since whatever you gonna shoot in face you will also hug close.

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Obviously you have my vote.

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If i had any say in the matter, probably a mixture of both. Torpedo’s are expected to be slow, but an adjustment to both flight speed/time to get the desired effect would be better than a straight buff to flight speed.

Yep, missile speed does matter in pvp situations. Some ships can outrun a missile/torpedo if they’re fast enough even if they’re technically within range. There is also a weird scenario when i brawl with torpedo’s that they launch very slowly, even though their target is next to me, they do this long animation of launching and lazily impacting the target. Feels like it delays damage a solid few seconds. On missile speed bonused ships that i’ve used with torpedoes (Navy Raven/T1 Raven/Barghest), i never had this issue.

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Instead of giving Marauders some sort of anti cyno ability, I would like to give them more abilities along the roles of what their name implies. Going into dangerous space, hit hard and loot a target, escape back to safe sapce; along the lines of commerce raiders of the early part of WW2. Along this line, I would like to see a reduction or removal of the Bastion timer, which just pins the ship for 60 seconds, maybe add some limited movement, and add the equivalent of 2 warp core stabs innately to the hull. This would make running losec dips and dives more logical, as now a player has a chance to escape out after he becomes entangled with NPCs and another player comes hunting him.
Otherwise, except for some rare, big testicled pros, the Marauder is relegated to mainly be your level 4 go to ship…and it deserves to be more.

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Stitch good luck man! You know this game like the back of your hand and will help the game a lot! You can count on my vote.

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Althought I agree pirate battleship may be a bit too cheap at the current time, I feel that removing entirely them from dropping In ded combat site Is nonsense. Actually a nightmare blueprint cost 400 K LP plus 100M Isk, at the current rate of the sansha LP, this Is between 1 and 1.5B solely on LP, not counting the minerals, isk fees of the lp store and the fact you also want to expend the lp cost.

I’ll add that If LP store would become the only stable source of pirate battleship , It would be impossible to supply 10% of the current market, not counting that farmer would still farm others item who require less LP or are more valuable, and I’ll point that some faction don’t have enough agents (I think blood raider got… four ? In delve of course.) to be a viable source for many reasons.

Also I don’t think more npc ship In belt would save this huge issue, orthrus & garmur are cheap because they are heavily krabed, yet the non used barghest Is worth nearly 1.B with only 20 of them being available at jita.

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While the initial title doesn’t show it, the description does also list the alternative as:

So alternatively, they could still drop from DED’s , just be much rarer.

Sure, you could just not buy nightmares with LP, but since there are doctrines built around it, someone is going to be feeding the market. Or this just opens up the more dedicated living in lowsec to start making bank and shifting the wealth away from nullsec/npc nullsec.

Which would cause the price to increase on pirate battleships, which is the intended effect.

Barghest don’t have doctrines built around them. They are also primarily a small gang ship or a wormhole PVE ship. If goons suddenly found a use for a barghest fleet, you can bet they would be much cheaper with higher volume.

Almost every other pirate battleships has a use in multiple areas. Barg just has a small niche, which is fine. Its not a good indicator of how well people farming bpc’s in belts would be since there is a low demand for them. Unused ships with small niche and low movement on the market are generally more expensive. Now, if the same thing were done to machariels or nightmares, that is a much higher demand/movement in the market and we would expect to see people out in lowsec hunting for these bpcs. Which of course, we’d expect to see pirate battleships increase in cost (as intended).

You can’t make Navy Ships cheaper than T1, as currently the bhaal sits at 200-250m, only 20-30m away from T1 in some cases. If Navy can’t get cheaper, then pirate needs to get more expensive, so making them rarer and increasing LP costs is the only obvious way.

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They would go over billionS and be very rare, this would be the total oposite of today situation and It wouldn’t be better as today, to supply today’s market would represent 20 million of LP per day for 50 ship sold only at jita, my point was It won’t work, they are better item to krab with Nul Lp and even If only pirate BS bpc would be farmed because of the scarity only a dozen each day would be seeded. (and glamourex expire In a few month)

Bhaalgorn see not alot of usage aswell yet It Is cheap, for the reason you have highlighted, but the barghest actually don’t drop from ded right now (Correct Me If I’m wrong But I don’t remember CCP seeding them In DED) and have a lot of scarity despite no usage even If It could be a decent fleet core, and one of the reason Is you can’t farm them, and the same situation would apply to others pirate BS with the proposed change, removing +90% of the supply Is just too much.

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Nice! Glad to see your running, good to finally have someone fighting for us low sec folk.

I have a huge love for auto cannons (ac kiting the most) but feel they are massively under powered in comparison to other ship’s an Idea I’v been thinking about a lot recently would be to change actual gun mechanic’s:

If I’m not mistaken fall off range gives a % chance to miss, if this was changed to a % decrease in tracking speed instead of miss chance it would bring auto cannons back into balance in my opinion, what are your thoughts?

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Stitch will have my vote. Another low-sec/pvp focused CSM 14 candidate!
Good luck on the election and hope to continue to see you in space and on youtube .

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Dude definitely knows his stuff, solid vouch from me.

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Pirate battleships used to 1-1.5b a while ago. Back then, Isk was worth even more than it is today. I think plex was around 300m a pop. So it wouid of taken 3-4 Plex to get a pirate battleship if you were going that route.

Do i want pirate battleships to be 1.5-2b now? No, and i will agree that some fine tuning could be done here either by nerfing the outright drop rate from DED’s, maybe going for a 25% or 40% drop nerf, or playing more with the cost through LP. Though, like you said, DED’s supply the bulk of pirate battleships, so messing with LP will only have a marginal effect.

Now with that being said, even if you feel DED nerf is drastic, the end result is that we still want pirate battleships to be more expensive. Ideally in the 600-800m range. Consider the interaction between Navy Cruisers/Frigates and Pirate Frigates/Cruisers compared to Navy Battleships and Pirate Battleships.

Lets take a short look at navy/pirate comparison in other classes:

Slicer/hookbill/firetail/comet - 14m to 25m (depending on location/LP)

Garmur/Dram/Daredevil/Worm/Cruor - 50-65m

So roughly x2 to x3 more expensive.

Same with navy cruiser to pirate cruiser comparison, in general (again location and LP dependent), going from navy to pirate is x2 to x3 cost increase.

So, after LP adjustments and a class rebalance for Navy Battleships, ideally, they’d slot in around 300-350m. Which means with a x2 or x3 cost increase, pirate battleships would vary around 600-900m. Which the Barghest is already achieving. Whether that includes nerfing DED drops, nerfing LP costs and introducing other methods in low sec to get the desired effect is fine with me. I’m flexible on the numbers/% and agree an outright removal may be too heavy handed. There is still plenty of room to fine tune to find a good medium.

Obvious, this is ideal/perfect scenarios with no manipulation. I’m just using it as an example.

Bhaalgorn see’s a fair amount of usage and i believe is 3rd or 4th in movement for Pirate battleship sales in Jita. Bhaalgorn is used in numerous anti-capital doctrines and home defense fleets. With it being so cheap, a lot of people are just throwing them at anything that comes into their space. Just some numbers to consider for volume/cost of Pirate battleships (you can reference this website for the numbers i got)

Units sold is per day in Jita
#1 Rattlesnake - 2435 units sold in Jita, 410m average cost
#2 Machariel - 1610 units sold in Jita, 370m average cost
#3 Nestor - 1565 units sold in Jita, 390m average cost
#4 Bhaalgorn - 1031 units sold in Jita, 240m average cost
#5 Nightmare - 715 units sold in Jita, 490m average cost
#6 Barghest - 273 units sold in Jita, 865m average cost
#7 Vindicator - 145 units sold in Jita, 400m average cost

Per Zkill “recent” ranking:

#1: Machariel, Rank 101
#2: Rattlesnake, Rank 105
#3: Bhaalgorn, Rank 150
#4: Nestor, Rank 194
#5: Nightmare, Rank 206
#6: Vindicator, Rank 245
#7: Barghest, Rank 313

So, both the quantity per day being sold and usage metrics both match each other very similarly. Bhaal is #3 in usage out of the pirate battleships due to it being so cheap and having additional roles as anti-capital neuts.

These numbers may not pertain directly to our conversation, but you may still find them interesting nonetheless to see that a lot of Pirate battleships are used quite a lot and easily surpass Navy Battleship usage/market movement.

Correct, Mordus can only be gotten through LP or low sec belts. Technically, per the data, Barghest has more movement than Vindi’s and Vindi’s remain cheap. Though Vindi’s are involed in more kills/deaths. At the same time though, as we’ve already discussed, there aren’t really any doctrines that a barghest can do, that a T1/Navy raven couldn’t do. The point bonus is not a very useful bonus in fleet comps.

I would be interested in seeing how removing maybe 50% of the supply with an additional 30-40% was put into lowsec would effect prices. Just as a thought experiment. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on the barghest data as there is no doctrine or hard farming occurring in lowsec for those ships.

Thank you for the information, i have some additional things to consider. I am still solid on my opinion that Pirate battleship BPC’s need to be rarer with higher LP costs as well, but I can go about it slightly less heavy handed.

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Medium autocannons especially are notoriously bad for kiting nowadays. Especially when you can consider the other available options. The TE nerf did a huge number on autocannon application (which the nerf primarily came as way to nerf shield blaster talos). Large autocannons are fantastic though.

Decreasing tracking speed at range when comparing to a % chance to miss i feel like would be the same thing, just in a different package. Since, lowering tracking decreases your chance to hit anyway. Although at range, you get an inherent tracking buff. So it may balance out, but the next issue is, is that something CCP would want to spend the time on revamping? As that is more time consuming than say a flat falloff buff or changing TE’s.

Personally, i’d like to see medium autocannons get their range back from the TE nerf. Starting by increasing their base fall-off range by 15-20%.

An alternative is making weapon specific Tracking Enhancers (TE’s). Which means you could fine tune TE’s to fit a weapon system. Where projectile TE’s may get more falloff than optimal bonus, Laser TE’s would get more optimal and very little falloff. While Hybrid TE’s would get slightly less optimal % than lasers but more falloff, but not as much as projectile TE’s.

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I agree would love to see the fall off buffed on the actual gun’s they are way to low atm but a TE terricide with different options does sound pretty amazing. (Would probably be easier for CCP to implement over having 1 module being effected differently across multiple platforms.)

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With the current proposal you aren’t changing directly their price but their suply, wich may indirectly impact their price, you don’t want them to be more expensive you want them to be more rare, and thus maybe expensive. A proprer solution for your intent would be material cost increase as It don’t touch any others aspect (Blueprint supply and price).

Nerfing droprate is only a solution If you find It is too easy for any coalition to refill when ships are lost for huge fleet (+100 people) mainly composed of either Nightmare or Machariel.

The abundant supply of pirate frigate and cruiser Is from Lp store mostly (venal being botted very heavily made the gila price being at his historical bottom price, despite seing ten time more volume trade daily at jita than any other pirate ship, but that is another issue), as they are efficient way to cash your LP into desirable item with high volume.

In case you are not aware this Is totaly different for battleship who are over priced (400K lp and 100M for a blueprint, when a cruiser Is 80K Lp and 20M, a frigate Is 20K lp and 10M, not counting the huge minerals need for a battleship.)

That Is why most (or even nearly all) of the supply of pirate battleship is done through ded site drop, mostly from sov anomalie giving out excalation do to near your krabHub.

those number are totaly off, a simple look at jita market in game look like this


Wich corroborates your source If it was read properly

I redid the math, on 6 month the average sale per day at Jita Is the following
rattlesnake 80
machariel 55
nestor 49
bhaalgorn 36
nightmare 26
vindicator 21
barghest 10.

The decent amount of bhaal sold could found explanation In his popularity In wh aswell as Is addition as 1-2 In 10-50 whaling fleet, but at this point we just lack a lot of data to fully analyze playability/popularity of each ship and I don’t want to spend my afternoon on ZKB since classement isn’t about kills only but take into account others metric such as kill points (lol) and ISK destroyed. I’ll just point that nestor got a lower ranking despite being more used than bhaal (whaling fleet use 4-6 of them as It Is a core ship, while sometime they don’t have bhaalgorn but curse for different reasons)
Also Afaik Nightmare Is still a doctrine ship but have a way lower classement.

I’ll come back to this later but Imagine all of them having the trade volume of the barghest.

As seen barghest got the lowest market movement of all, as an addition following my last post I discuted with some friends were around when this one doctrine of barghest was used a few year ago withing soviet union alliance (for reference : https://zkillboard.com/alliance/99004779/ship/33820/losses/), something that came was It was too difficult to replace them due to the lack of suply after loses, It took too much time and the doctrine was abandoned quickly due to this.

As I said earlier In this post, material cost, and maybe a slight droprate nerf (Minus 7-12%) would be enough In my opinion, while decreasing Lightly cost production of navy ship and reducing their lp cost aswell, and introducing a normalized cost/blueprint for each of them. Unlike nerfing alliance ability to field end game battleship through supply (Wich is way more an issue that said battleship price In my opinion, because It lead to balance them for monkey warfare when they should not be used for this due to their high specialization for niche role)