Okay, so bear with me. This is going to be a lot to follow.
The Problems: Corvettes are really useless. New players are out-of-place and confused and don’t know which training path to commit to and are limited to committing more than a month of training to fill a single role in a specific niche of T2 frigates. Veteran players are looking for ways to break out of those niches and try new and unique playstyles. Frigate-class ships are overspecialized, requiring large sums of isk to break out of the confines of T2 frigates using ships like the Astero or the Worm or the Pacifier. New players that lose everything accidentally while learning the game are completely lost and at the mercy of benevolent good samaritans in Rookie Help to bail them out. Solo and small gang activity has been washed to the wayside, especially in dessie-down metas.
The solution: T3 Corvettes. Happy in-betweens for new and old players alike. Less than 20 days of training and priced around the realm of T2 frigates, but filling the niche the user wants, without being OP or breaking the game. Giving T1 Corvettes market value high enough to bail out a first-dayer but low enough to be unexploitable. Here’s how it works:
Corvettes are my favorite ships in the game. Specifically, the Impairor. I’m mostly a dessie-down pilot and I love the gameplay environment created by S-sized ships. The PvP roams, dessie-down fleets, Lowsec PvP, expendable ships, for-profit exploration, hunting for-profit explorers; I have always found it to be the most thrilling gameplay that EVE has to offer.
Renaming the Rookie Ships to Corvettes was a step in the right direction. These are ships that you’re supposed to be granted for free, to fall back on after a death. To validate them with their own class and give them a slight rebalance was good, but they still fall short of being anything other than entirely useless after your first week of gameplay.
I propose a change to this by adding a new tier of Corvettes. This is because changing Corvettes themselves to be more useful would affect the balance of the game for newer players, giving them a free ride to essentially ignore training T1 frigates altogether and imbalancing the game experience and economy by giving out viable ships for free.
But what if, instead of giving out a viable ship for free, it were merely a component of a viable ship?
If there were an upgraded Corvette - a T3 Corvette - using the same hull models (like T2 assault frigates and their T1 counterparts) and requiring a standard T1 Corvette for production, the economics of producing the ship could be reliant on tangibly expensive skills or materials. This would have the effect of elevating its relevance above that of total rookies and into the realm of competent participants of New Eden’s activities.
But Why T3?
Corvettes, under the current role bonuses and with their current intended uses, are a sort of jack-of-all-trades ship. The only other ships in the game which compare in versatility are T3 ships. Tactical Destroyers are capable of switching modes to employ a more diverse variety of tactics than any single ship could achieve, and have bonuses to the use of scanning probes. Strategic Cruisers are customizable in almost every respect to produce, within the limitations of lore, the most desirable combination of bonuses and even module slots for the user’s preferences. Corvettes, with their 2 weapon bonuses + 1 defensive bonus + 1 EWAR bonus + mining bonus, are a natural candidate for transition into a T3 format.
How would it work?
Each T1 Corvette would be a required component for production of a T3 Corvette. The recipe could be fairly simple and the finished hull could have an average market value of around 15-25mil. This would put it in the realm of most T2 frigates price-wise, but below them in performance. The balance would be that these are far more versatile and customizable and fulfill a unique role.
The empy hull would have stat scaling similar to T2 ships, with all HPs increased by roughly 30%, but would only have 1 High, 1 Medium, and 1 Low slot, and no rig slots. Instead, they would have 2 customization slots, similar to T3 Cruiser Subsystems. Each of these “Small Subsystems” would require only a single 3x skill across all races and all subsystems and cost about 3-5mil each. There could be three options for each Small Subsystem. It would all look something like this:
Amarr
- Corvette Role Bonus:
8% bonus to all Armor resistances
T3 Corvette bonuses (per skill level)
3% reduction in Afterburner and Microwarpdrive activation cost
3% bonus to damage of all weapons
2% bonus to all Shield and Armor resistances
.
- Structural Small Subsystems
-
Assault Configuration
+2 high slots, +2 turret hardpoints
+1 med slot
+1 low slot
+1 Rig slot, +200 calibration
30m3 Drone bay
15Mbit/s Drone bandwidth
Small Subsystems bonuses (per skill level)
+7.5% bonus to Small Energy Turret damage
+5% bonus to Drone damage and hitpoints -
Defense Configuration
+1 high slot, +2 turret hardpoints
+3 low slots
+1 Rig slot, +200 calibration
Small Subsystems bonuses (per skill level)
5% bonus to Small Energy Turret rate of fire
+4% bonus to all Armor resistances
16% reduction in Armor Plate mass penalty -
Stealth Configuration
+1 high slot, +2 turret hardpoints
+1 med slot
+1 Rig slot, +200 calibration
Small Subsystems bonuses (per skill level)
+5% bonus to Small Energy Turret damage
10% reduction in Small Energy Turret activation cost
10% reduction in Microwarpdrive signature radius penalty
+7.5% bonus to Afterburner velocity bonus
- Technological Small Subsystems
-
Infiltration Configuration
+2 high slots
+1 med slot
+1 rig slot, +200 calibration
Small Subsystems bonuses (per skill level)
+7.5% bonus to Core and Combat scanner probe strength
+2 bonus to Relic and Data analyzer virus strength
16% reduction in targeting delay after uncloaking -
Coordination Configuration
+2 low slots
+2 rig slots, +200 calibration
Small Subsystems bonuses (per skill level)
+7.5% bonus to Remote Armor Repairer amount
7.5% reduction in Remote Armor Repairer activation cost
+7.5% bonus to Remote Armor Repairer optimal range
+100% bonus to Remote Armor Repairer falloff range -
Weaponization Configuration
+1 med slot
+2 low slots
+1 rig slot, +150 calibration
+30 CPU
+5% bonus to Drone control range and tracking speed
+5% bonus to Small Energy Turret tracking speed
5% reduction in Small Energy Turret activation cost
+10% bonus to Small Energy Neutralizer and Small Energy Nosferatu drain amount
+2.5% bonus to Small Energy Neutralizer and Small Energy Nosferatu optimal range
10% reduction in Small Energy Neutralizer activation cost
The concept is pretty simple and fairly straightforward. None of the combinations produce more than 10 module slots. The average number of module slots in Assault Frigates is 11, and the average for the above options is 9. All of the bonuses are lesser than T2 frigates. Yet the ship offers versatility, customizability, and an inexpensive and flexible alternative for many playstyles which are stuck in a rigid and inflexible meta right now (See: T2 exploration frigates) without imbalancing the game or negating their specific, niche usefulness.
This would have the added effect of making Corvettes worth something as a fallback ship. By making it a required component in the recipe of such a valuable and popular ship, players would be able to sell them on the market for a meager income (maybe 25-75 thousand each). An insignificant limitation could be placed on the number of Corvettes that could be claimed for free, such as a 5 minute timer. As this would produce a similar isk/hour as Project Discovery, it wouldn’t break the game, and it would allow newer (first week) players the ability to recover from losing everything and help them to raise funds for their first useful frigate or destroyer.
The point of this is that the T3 Corvette would fill niches that aren’t filled by existing ships without overshadowing them. For example, as an early EWAR ship, it would not perform as well as existing T2 EWAR frigates, but it would take a fraction of the time to train for and would present the pilot with the ability to utilize other aspects of the ship for combat or defense. This would be conducive to a more lively dessie-down PvP environment. Likewise, there are no exploration frigates which can compete with the Astero that do not cost nearly twice as much as the Astero. T2 exploration frigates are entirely defenseless. The T3 Corvette, configured for Exploration, could be capable of self-defense or counter-aggression without overshadowing the Astero or the Pacifier and without eliminating the niche of T2 covert-ops exploration vessels. T3 Corvettes would allow newer pilots to be more useful earlier in the game, and jump into and contribute to more thrilling gameplay earlier. They would also allow veteran pilots with a lack of stimulation to fit and experiment with the extreme variety they would bring to one of the most populated areas of gameplay (S-sized PvP), allowing them to carve out their own niche and revel in the refreshed PvP content they would ignite.