TLDR - The revised faction, cap, and super production chains make a lot of sense, if the long term goal is that these hulls will begin to drop some of the new rare and valuable components they’re built from. This would be a massive PVP buff – the incentives for hunting down caps, supers, and even faction ships would increase dramatically, and PVP would become a more reliable income source for small groups.
The long version.
I was going over the faction BS and cap production chains and comparing component ingredients, seeing where they’ve gone after the past few months. Maybe I’m overanalyzing things and giving CCP too much credit, but I think the next set of changes are going to be really good and make a lot of people very happy. The last set of industrial changes make a lot of sense, if in the next iteration, wrecked faction ships, wrecked capital ships, and wrecked supers start dropping some of the (for now) absurdly expensive components. Probably the wrecks will drop components somewhere intermediate along the production chain, so industrialists still have to build the ships up the chain. I could even speculate which pieces will start dropping. Not sure if they’ll have to be salvaged off wrecks using the current system, or whether there will be some new “reclamation” item / skill. It also makes some sense of their adage “scarcity breeds conflict.” This could dramatically incentivize pvp, because a lot of the new hull cost for these now very expensive ships would be dropped when they explode. To me, this squares with the fact that it is still ridiculously expensive to build faction hulls, even after the markets have had a chance to stabilize. There are certain components that are just rare, and certain other components that are labor intensive. I suspect the long term goal is that these components are partly obtained as they are now, and partly obtained by destroying the apex ships in the game.
I think they’re trying to implement a system where one of the paths to making the new apex ships (titans, supers, caps, faction bs), is by destroying the old ones. Want some Machs for your lowsec pirate crew? One way to help build out the components is by destroying a Niddy or Hel. This wouldn’t be possible under the old system, where all the apex ships in the game were built up from T1 minerals. Now there are enough intermediate components, some of which are so labor intensive and rare, that now CCP has a lot of latitude to make (for example) a Revelation drop a few billion in intermediate build components when it explodes.
I think this also would mean a critical buff to the fun available for small corp players after their first 3-6 months – with a small battlecruiser fleet, you can take on the oldvets in their Vindicators. If you destroy a few while driving them off the field, you get a nice payout. When they explode you, well, you’re just in a ship made of T1 minerals with some T2 modules. This actually has similarities to the T3 production model, except instead of destroying sleepers, you destroy sleepy EVE vets. : )
