Suggestion Submission: Revamp Industry and Ships in EVE Online

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
1

First and foremost, I would like to sincerely thank @Power_Armor for being the spark of inspiration for this suggestion.

This essentially sums up the suggestion.

I would like to suggest that all ships be stripped of their role and ship bonuses. Do not remove them from already produced ships, even if packaged still but instead allow us to start using data cores through manifacture to add bonuses how we see fit.

This would completely upend the current meta dynamics and allow for emergent, never before seen content. One would not be able to set up doctrines to counter known via zkillboard enemy fleets. This extends to all types of gameplay.

Highsec miner ships could have different bonuses that would make it much harder to guage how easy the kill would be. Explorers could use ships that arent completely ugly! Haulers could be much faster, for example. So many options.

Another thing that could be changed is the high, mid, low and rig slots! Using more data cores, and effecting the material cost we could change the slots based on some point system.

For example, take an orca. 6 high slots, 5 mid slots, 2 low slots, and 3 rig slots.

Say a high slot is 10 points each. mid 8 points, low6 points. Rigs 15 points.

So an orca would have in that hypothetical example a total of 157 points.

From that i could choose to reduce the number of rigs to 2, giving me 15 points. That would allow me to have 2 additional low slots, or 1 additional mid slot and 1 low slot! the leftover points could then be a flat reduction in material and component costs for manufacturing these ships.

That would change the entire fit!

Say i want an orca using strip miners! Data cores! Say I want an Avalanche boosting my mining fleet! Data cores!

This sytem would also make industrialists far more important. It wouldnt just be research and then use endlessly and mindlessly outside of normal material costs x number to produce. Giving player agency to fly the ships they love to look at but have the role for their playstyle that might not normally fit would make the gaming experience more enjoyable.

This could change the entire game, making wars far less predictable, far less of crunching some numbers and +1ing it.

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2

To expand the suggestion, We could use existing data cores for this as well as existing skills.

Say you have a caldari battleship, a raven. But you want it to be able to hit frigate pirates. So you might use 2 caldari starship engineering, and say 1 Minmatar encryption method datacore.

This means some new data cores would need to come out, and some old would have more use. So then agent research would become far more important, thus lucrative. This means players would be spending more time investing into parts of this game they might not even really be aware of even after 20+ years.

Metallurgy could get datacores, for example that would maybe reduce the mineral cost of producing a ship.

Molecular engineering could increase hull strength! Alongside Hull upgrades and then Mechanics, you could change a whole lot about these ships. Say you don’t like shield tanking and instead like armor. Change the ship up as you see fit!

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3

A system like this could also give corporations and alliances a way to have their own flavor for ships. That would allow them to be a real brand inside of new eden. Something more significant than some ads that so few people really bother watching.

More significant than emblems, but would also allow for them to place their corp or alliance emblem on the ships where we might normally see things like ORE posted.

For over 20 years, players have been building empires in new eden that far surpass the 4 npc empires, yet have no real effect on the npc story. We can impact preset stories in meaningful ways, but we can’t really RP a brand. Everything made is exactly the same as everyone else is making.

4

There could be associated changes as well. For example, people that have 5 in a skill could set up a production that would take slots similar to production, science and reactions, that would allow them to build x numer of data cores for that skill.

Only the skills at 5 could be produced. This would add another isk sink to produce them, as well as some minerals to produce the “physical” copy as well as create a brand new market!

A reward, if you will, for long time players but also for anybody in the game that have a rank 5 skill! Of course, everyone would have to skill into new skills to produce skill related data cores!

5

Im goin to add my 2 isk here cause yes I am a grumpy bitter vet.

I like the idea of where this is going but… we can’t change the mechanics of ships too much, especially fitting slots.

That being said how about something more hybrid like we have done with multiplasmids but for ships to reroll some bonuses.
I’m going to use a Rattlesnake for an example.
In its role bonus it has a 50% bonus to armor plates and 5% bonus to reinforced bulkheads. No one is fitting an armor plated rattlesnake or using reinforced bulkheads, cause yeah that’s dumb.

But what if we used a multiplasmid to have a ONE TIME re-roll one of those bonuses?
Lets reroll the bulkhead hit points.

I could use an offensive, defensive or support multiplasmid.
Now we could debate the classification later, but im going to say i use a defensive multiplasmid.
I could get anything from 5% bonus to shield boosts to +2 warp core strength.

Or the offensive multiplasmit which replaces reinforced bulkheads with…
5% to small hybrid weapon damage. WOMP WOMP.

This would need extensive balancing because you could get some really good rolls and your ship becomes op or…
your ship goes to the scrap yard cause you ruined it.

2 Likes
6

I like your idea!

I also think breaking up the meta isnt a bad thing, so I’d like to fold in some of that idea.

What if we added mutaplasmid as an option that could roll one time for one of the bonuses to change the % that it helps or hurts?

If going all out on this idea, maybe one time roll for every bonus? So say like an algos. It has 2 bonuses for gallente destroyer, and 1 role bonus. so then that would allow for 3 mutaplasmid rolls, one for each slot that data core(s) would be used to apply.

You might end up making a ship worthy of legend, or you might end up making something you wouldnt show to your college professor out of shame. Perhaps there would be more noteworthy ships and not just the veldnaught and steve.

This could work with the market pretty easy I’d think.

Say you roll 150 ships and want to list them all at once. No biggie. Add filters to the market for ships and maybe even stations, where you could put the filters at the range for ships you are comfortable with. Then out of your 150 ship batch, only the ships that meet the filters would show up for sale.

You’d have to set 4 different prices. No mutaplasmid, low grade, mid grade and high grade which would be dictated by the amount of improvement or reduction from the mutaplasmid roll.

This would also give players the ability to choose which price grade they want to play in. Say alphas are limited to no muta and low grade, but then the high grades might end up costing a billion for a frigate (if omega).

7

This change kills the ability to sell ships via the market since repackaged items must be identical.

I doubt that this will result in some massive meta shakeup because eventually everyone will figure out that a Zealot with 7 high slots or whatever is still the best option for what they want to do.

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So perhaps it could become a system where the original ships remain as they are but then a new system could appear for manufacturing these more specialized ships and would only be able to sell through contract only. Even if repackaged.

9

This sort of thing will add too much data complexity on server side of things. Rather than just having 1 “SKU” per ship you will have an exponential amount of SKUs - one for every possible outcome.

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So basically, instead of ship 1 having these amount of slots/attributes/bonuses, and ship 2 having different, we use datacores to customize the ship to our liking during production?

If we want, we can add the required datacores and make a frigate for example with any amount of slots or properties.

Maybe we want a frigate with 4 high slots, and then later we use datacores to make another frigate with 4 low slots and a big cargo hold?

Basically customize and choose what type of ship we want to make using datacores, instead of having no choice and no customization.

11

Such a “system” already exists - Strategic Cruisers - I don’t feel like it should be added to another class of ship.

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There would need to be a point limit for every ship size. You could change anything within that limit.

Exactly! player agency in this game is pretty shallow. npc’s for everything and players have only choices with modules and rigs. No customization even though capsuleers are far more intelligent than basically everyone else in the galaxy and yet we are stuck using ships designed by non-capsuleers.

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I’m not logged in right now but i dont think strategic cruisers are able to change the slot allocations and the bonuses are still hard stuck. What you can change is pretty minimal even if it is more than every other ship except strategic cruisers.

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I think it’s a bad idea.

Ships in EVE have character, have strengths, weaknesses, roles.

Players have a lot of flexibility to use modules to fit the ships, within some constraints, to change the function of existing ships.

Your suggestion to strip all ships of all identity and let players decide all the bonuses and roles makes them not only bland, it removes the need for most ships to exist in the game.

What’s the point of having a mining barge if any ship could fit it’s role? What’s the point of having distinct exploration frigates if they’re all the exact same in the end?

You can already do that by fitting modules. Many miners choose to fit all low slots with mining upgrades for additional yield, and mid slot modules like mining chipsets, but you could choose to fit more hardeners and a damage control instead to make the ship much harder to kill!

In other words, there’s no need for a huge overhaul that strips all ships of their roles, strengths and weaknesses to mod ships.

If you don’t like the blockiness of the Buzzard you could try the more elegant and rounded lambda shape of the Helios. As ships with the same role the two hulls are nearly identical in roles and fit already so you don’t need a huge overhaul stripping all ships of their roles in order to fly the hull you want!

EVE’s ship fits and ship modification are like a puzzle. And like any good puzzle the thing that makes it good is it’s constraints.

You wish to remove these constraints and make all of the puzzle pieces simple squares so you can use them however you want.

I do no think that this makes for a more interesting game. I fear it does the opposite.

1 Like
15

I already have the Windicator why would I want to muck around with custom ship bonuses?

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Slot layout changes depending on what subsystems you use.

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Stimps (an idea I suggested waaaaaay back). High, medium and low. Installing one (max) essentially changes your H/M/L slot configuration, ie: High = +Mid, Mid = +Low, Low = +High. You basically lose one slot to gain a different slot.