In the high class corps I believe most members wil have multiple clones over a billion ISK in value..
Entirely depends on the fact if they can establish a connection or if the invader is hardcore and holds hole control 24h over multiple days.
Usual policy is that you try to have or bring as many pilots IN as you can and try to avoid being closed out at all costs, to be available for the next defense timer. So it CAN be hard if under high pressure, especially for people not having that much time to use each an every chance when the attackers might show a weak moment…
And as said, my main concern is that transporting clones not only for yourself but also for others make the extraction or transfer of large clone armies from being a logistical challenge that would give highly active and disciplined groups an edge to something trivial that can once again be ‘outsourced’ to some logistic nerds and requiring the main force to just ‘contract them over’.
I understand that you see this possibility, but for me this possibility was intentionally part of the suggestion: to allow players to ‘taxi’ jump clones for others, to expand the opportunities for haulers and as an extra way to cooperate when preparing for content.
People can already use a jump freighter to prepare a bunch of ships at a staging station for a weekend fleet with their group, wouldn’t it be great if they could do a similar thing with jump clones?
More cooperation, more possibilities, more content… why exactly is it bad if a ‘logistics nerd’ can haul a bunch of jump clones for their allies in preparation of a content fleet?
Yes, it rewards cooperation and rewards disciplined groups, but how is it bad for the game if such tools exist?
As explained: In my eyes it would be bad for the game. Geography should matter. It should be incredibly hard for a group to bring an Army from A to B over half the map and JumpClones totally skip that effort. If I can put the burden of “travel” from 100 people to 1 guy who needs just 1 trip to bring over the clones so 100 others don’t need to travel into the target area, that would be in my eyes absolutely contraproductive to the way EVE should develpop into. And I see very little chances you can convince me otherwise.
Imho all geography skipping mechanics (that includes jump clones) should be nerfed instead of further buffed.
Would probably too high, given the Space a single Jumpfreighter already has.
The only viable solution would be to limit Clone-Transporting to specialized hulls, similar to DSTs that can hold them in a specialized bay. Then you wouldn’t even need to make them exceptionally large, since other ships simply couldn’t store them. Hard Limit should be 10 Clones at most for one of these ships imho.
Ehh.. every cryopod should not free a normal clone slot… of course. The clone slot should still be blocked, the clone is just not usable while being in cryo-transfer to the target location. And yes, the remote-installation would have at least another 24h delay before it becomes usable.
But thats rather obvious… you can’t allow people having basically unlimited amounts of clones and just “freeze” or “install” them at multiple locations as they like. Thats bonkers…
Cryopods being on a separate limit than the regular 15 jump clones was a big part of this suggestion.
I wanted more clones for the sake of allowing players to have more clones for extra implant sets, yet without also increasing mobility that you would get by simply adding ‘more jump clones’.
Hence ‘offline’ jump clones: cryopods.
Additionally I thought it would be nice to be able to transport clones, so the suggestion consists of two parts for two purposes:
More spare clones for extra implant sets, without increasing jump clone mobility with more jump clones
Transportable clones to enable clone hauling as an action, for haulers, taxi services, deployments and easier relocating of homes
The suggestion should not increase how mobile the fastest and most competitive players are.
Indeed, that’s something I realized later. This is why I thought there should be some extra restrictions on cryopods, like it’s own limit and a delay on remotely installing them.
Local installation should still be instant to allow easy swapping between implant sets, this doesn’t impact mobility.
Well, thats a strict “no” from my side. And basically no wiggle room. If it was up to me, the clone amount should be reduced back to 10 instead of 15 already, but the toothpaste is out of the tube now. Unfortunately.
Is that because you think people should have fewer clones for implants, or fewer jump clones?
If you think players should have fewer jump clones to jump around, but have no problems with clones for implants, we agree on that point.
I’ve had this idea for a long time, even before CCP added the last 5 clones to go from 10 to 15 jump clones.
If it were up to me we’d go back to 10 jump clones too. But also have access to 10 ‘cryopods’ for implant storage on top of that. Less mobility, more spare clones for implant sets.
My concern is mainly jump-clones. But also the insta-switch ability to always adapt perfectly to any given situation. In the old days, jumping into a clone was a strategical decision. It would grant you a huge benefit in a certain sitation, but then you would be stuck with that decision for this day. And that was good, because people thought twice to use their HG clone for every little encounter, if they had another OP that day or early the next day. Simply because they couldn’t get out of that clone then and during the OP it would be at high risk. So you found a lot more fight when people didn’t use their ultra-pimped clones.
Again: that leveled the playing field between the rich vets and newer notsorich casual players.
Today people (mainly lowsec, but also in some WHs I know that for sure) chose a perfectly pimped clone for literally any occasion. Which I think is bad. Because it puts the casuals at another huge disadvantage.
But this is not a thread about insta-switching clone complaints.
We’ve got a game where players can instantly switch clones right now.
All I’m asking for is that people get access to more spare clones for the sake of being able to use more of the implant sets.
There are many implant sets, some very niche and rarely used. It would be nice to be able to use those implant sets, like ‘extra sensor strength for gallente ships’, but also being able to store them again because the times I would want to use such a set in a year can be counted on one hand.
Last time I used such a clone I deleted it again later to make space free for jump clones, which I think is a wasteful thing to do. So nowadays I ignore most implant sets if I can help it.
You are arguing against a wall with me then. I explicitly don’t want more minmax perfectionism in the game where rich vets can throw just ever more money on any given situation and have perfect solutions for every problem. It ruins the gameplay. I prefer a game in which actual problems on grid need to be solved with good decisions and quick reactions, something every player can learn independently from his financial background or skillpoints. A game where you don’t push for ever more alts, ever more numbers, more stockpiled assets, ever more bling and ever more specialized clones to have the maximum advantage in any given second. Brain and experience should give you an advantage, not a deep wallet.
Your idea aims in the direction I don’t want the game to go. It’s that simple.
So, the only things I can barely agree to is a dedicated non-cloaky, slow and bulky, Clone Transporter Hull in which you can shift over a selection of your own clones from one location to another. Mainly only useful for relocating your main living area over to another alliance or group or region. No additional counts, no clones of others, no remote-activation, nothing that gives a single bit of more advantage in the everyday business. Not a single bit.
Seems like a skill that gets trained to I at best. 5m is chump change.
I think that maybe cryopods should consume something to keep the clone frozen to combat having hundreds of them and this skill could lower the cost.
Nice idea, I agree the current idea of that skill isn’t great. I might revisit that later.
I’m not a fan of some kind of fuel to keep cryopods frozen (we don’t need fuel to maintain any other objects within structures either after all) but maybe I can swap it for a ‘more cryopods per level’ skill now that I’ve come to the conclusion that these should be limited somehow.
I still think this would be a nice addition to EVE.
Expanding hauling to also allow for clone transportation/taxis and allowing players to use and store more implants (without at the same time boosting their clone jump limit again) seems like a good idea to me.
Update:
I added a re-installation delay before cryopods can be used as jump clones. 4 days for remote re-installing, an hour for re-installing within the same station.
Explanation:
A while ago I realized there was a flaw with my idea: people could instantly jump anywhere in space where clone bays exist, as long as they prepare enough cryopods to have one in each of those stations. It would effectively act as if players have a jump clone in every station in the game!
(And that’s obviously silly).
This would be a huge buff to mobility, which was definitely not my intention of this suggestion.
This suggestion is meant to:
increase the number of implant sets players can use
– (without increasing our mobility with extra jump clones!)
to allow players to transport multiple clone sets at once of any character
But increasing fast mobility is not the intention.
To disable the strategy mentioned above I’ve added a 4-day re-installation delay before a jump clone created from a cryopod can be used. This delay can be reduced by a new skill down to 48 hours, which I think is a long enough delay that it doesn’t boost fast mobility of players to anywhere in space, unlike before.
With enough determination someone could still place a cryopod in every station in the game, but with this new delay it would take people two days before they can jump anywhere, and then are still subject to the usual ‘one jump per day’ limit. I think that’s reasonable. People could fly anywhere faster just flying a shuttle on auto-pilot, unlike before where such travel using cryopods was instantaneous and easily exploited.
Within the same station the re-install delay is much smaller, within an hour or 30 minutes with max skills. This smaller but nonzero delay means you can have reasonably quick access to a cryopod set without the mobility of jumping to a remote station, but it’s also long enough that you cannot instantly switch to any of your cryopod implant sets in response to hostiles arriving in your system unless you can keep them busy for 30 minutes. You still would need to plan in advance which set you wish to thaw.