I was wondering, if there are any plans to revamp Caldari NPC and when? I have heard of the rumor but not read anything concrete.
Right now, these NPCs can hardly do anything against Triglavians unless they greatly outnumber them (IGS has plenty of RP-post in the matter).
Few things come to mind immediately.
EM hole. Trigs do Omni damage and basicly EM damage sinks in like hot knife through butter. Perhaps someone ought to tell Caldari Navy that EM Shield reinforcer rigs are on market and quite cheaply actually.
ECM changes/unoptimal use. Right now the whole fleet jams the primary target which achieves exactly nothing in terms of fighting. If the AI could actually jam multiple ships at the same time, this would reduce incoming damage from Triglavians and actually help.
Heavy missiles. Simply put, the application of heavy missiles is not good against trigs with their remote repping and only one Caldari NPC at the moment webs their target to help this application.
Damage. Inferno is best all around damage against Omni tanked Trigs but only an interceptor actually does it.
All this results in that unlike other empires, which can fight Trigs and contribute to defense, Caldari fleet is something that needs to be actively protected by player actions to keep the influence % from plummeting when fleet derps itself to a fight it cannot win.
So in summary could we perhaps get something like this. I base the ideas on what I have observed personally and what is written Kybernaut guide.
Give some of the ships rapid light missiles (Rook?)
Split ECM across entire enemy fleet.
Put drakes to do thermal or increased kinetic damage.
Give raptor a web
Increase EM resistance of the shields
Add Moas to fleet with webs and rail guns (or if you have the old code, bring them back with split weapon system so we get more light missiles).
This would at least help a bit. Of course optimal case would be just have State purchase rapiers and hyenas from minmatar and paint/web trigs and then blow them to bits with missiles but that does not work at the moment.
Well, the way things are going it seems that Trigs can drop their other holdings and just grab remaining systems in Lonetrek.
But back to topic. We have fairly active alliance and we mustered for Passari. Essentially we had full control of system for 2/3 of the day but that 1/3 was enough for NPCs and few Trig people basicly undo the whole progress during that time.
Based on information I got, main reason however was simply NPC navy dying to Trig NPCs and we occasionally had influence bar dip regularly even with no pro-trigs in system, conduits bring run and roaming fleets getting killed because somewhere in system NPCs derped in such large numbers.
Well, system timed itself out and of course RNG/CCP immediately throw another Trig invasion at us couple of jumps over which aims to split FW space into even more annoying pockets with Black Rise already being cut in half with Hikkoken being lost.
Not everyone wants to be neutral. We would just appreciate not being saddled with faction navy which is essentially as useful as pair of skis on a gravel road.
Finally someone found the courage to write directly about a problem that has so far significantly influenced the outcome of the Triglavian Invasion in Caldari Space.
Your proposals should be immediately implemented in the game by the CCP, so there might be a faint hope for Caldari - that their space will not be completely torn to pieces. And that Minmatar will have the chance to avoid the same failure, due to a design mistake in terms of EDENCOM ships, as Minmatar balance shield and armor, while we already knows that shield tank on NPC is absolutely useless during invasion fights.
But will the CCP be willing to hear your important comments and proposals?
I’m afraid that, unfortunately, the answer is “no”. The CCP is convinced that they knows everything best and that the whole invasion event is working properly, so nothing has to be changed. While anyone who has participated at least several times in the fight during the invasion knows perfectly well that it is completely different.
I’m pretty sure that CCP wants the Triglavians to cause a bunch of destruction and chaos. They are doing that. So, as far as CCP is concerned, what is the problem? Working as intended.
Because it is retarded. Chaos and destruction can happen organically like in Floseswin with players at the front of the creation of destruction and not with this hot steaming pile of rubbish, bugs, inexplicable behavior, disenfranchising progression and developments and a CCP telling people everything is working as intended but they cannot explain why it does.
You don’t say? Did you hear this from @Dinsdale_Pirannha or @DrysonBennington? Probably not, as it lacks sufficient twists for a proper CCP conspiracy theory.
It certainly takes away from respect towards players who in theory are here to decide the fate of high sec. It promotes certain scenario with certain NPCs in mind, undermining player role.
CCP design, so they are responsible for that situation.
So. Any information when you might fix the Caldari NPCs and perhaps not make every Caldari system that spawns be a liminal system as seems to be the case.
The idea that you are stacking the deck for the benefit of Triglavian players is quite strong when A) NPC weakness has been known for a long time B) Most Caldari systems that come up just happen to be Liminality systems (as has been there case of four previous ones).
The way of fixing the NPCs has been given and not following it through is just showing a big middle-finger to people living in Caldari space. As we demonstrated in chart regarding Passari, it would be more beneficial to not have the navy at all than suffer from it in current stage.
With CCP’s arbitrary and dumb handling of this farce it could be any minute or never.