What if there was anti capital ship weaponry, large turret flavours, and possibly medium?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Large anti capital ship weaponry. Designed for use by battleships, allows you to do significantly increased damage vs capitals, so that players actually have a way to fight massive capital fleets even if they do not have Titans of their own. Possibly have a medium turret option too for cruiser hulls? Not sure.

It makes sense though that a battleship should be able to inflict worthwhile damage to a capital ship. It’s supposed to be a battleship.

The damage vs capital ships would be significant enough that a sub capital fleet using this weaponry is actually able to be a threat and score kills against a capital fleet.

The weapons would not be able to fire in hi-sec, to avoid ridiculous ganking scenarios. The weaponry would suffer large damage penalties vs non capitals, which could be done either through sig and tracking, or a flat out negative damage penalty vs non capital ships.

It’s sort of like how attack battlecruisers can use large weaponry, except this is for use against capitals. The reason to design new weaponry for this is so that any large weapon using ship can equip it, and not just specific hulls like we see with attack battlecruisers.

What do people think? It gives battleships a needed buff and a new use. And helps give alliances without capital fleets a way to fight back. Should attack battlecruisers be able to use it? Possibly not, but not sure.

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I think your head is in the right place? Maybe? But in my opinion, an anti-capital sub cap ship would have to be a new ship, with the sole role of being anti-capital.

Then on the other hand, I’m not sure this would help the problem at all. I think we’re in a corner where there is no good solution to capital proliferation.

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I prefer to give this to battleships, because that class needs a buff. And while not an overall buff, it gives battleships a new use. From a lore perspective if any subcap was going to have anti capital weaponry, it should be batleships. So I think for those reasons it just works.

It may not solve the capital proliferation problem, but that problem was unlikely to be solved with a single change, not without making capital ships useless anyway.

It gives some teeth to players who are attempting to take on capital fleets who may not have capital fleets of their own.

I’ve no idea how much damage the new anti capital subcap weapons would do. That would be figured out by those balancing it.

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I actually thought of something like this, only instead of anti-capital modules for all battleships it was a T2 battleship called the “Arsenal Ship”. It would be designed to counter capitals through significant bonuses to weapons, durability, EWAR, and signature radius, with a special module like the marauder bastion that allows it to instalock capital and supercapital ships at the expense of becoming unable to target anything smaller.

This proposed vessel would be concurrent with HAWs getting restricted to dreadnoughts and targeting restrictions for capital and supercapital ships; Titans and Supercarriers become unable to target anything smaller than a battleship, Dreadnoughts get the same unless they’re mounting HAWs.

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If the anti capital was a T2 battleship hull, the price cost would probably stop people bothering with it. With insurance factored in, probably costs more than carriers and dreads. If this idea was used, better that “Arensal ship” is a T1 variant of the battleship, so it’s cost effective to bring to a capital fight. Like how attack battlecruisers are T1.

But again I prefer to allow all battleships to have this, because it gives battleships a boost. It’s just more fun if all battleships can fit anti capital weaponry. More options. It also means the enemy can’t quickly identify which ships are anti capital.

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I think there could be a certain number of modules spread across multiple ships that would make Capital ships incapable of receiving remote reps. That is what I’m thinking, but it would take multiple pilots in a coordinated effort.

Anyway, this is all wishful thinking. This problem isn’t even acknowledged by CCP; they certainly won’t address it.

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Hilmar did say something about fleets made up entirely of Titans. I believe they do see capital proliferation as problem.

It was never intended to have a fleet composed solely of supercaps. What the game needs is to offer players a counter that is effective against such a fleet, then things should begin to balance out.

Enemy brings a fleet of pure capital ships? Then bring a fleet of pure anticapital subcaps. If the enemy can’t apply damage to you as well as you can apply it to them, then they should have brought a mixed fleet including subcaps, not just all capital ships.

I’m not saying 100 anti capital subcaps should beat 100 titans. The 100 titans probably cost 100’s of times more isk. But those 100 anti capital subcaps should be able to kill a number of those Titans. How many? 2? 5? 10? No idea. From an isk efficiency perspective the subcaps won the fight by a mile even if they didn’t win over all. Should have only brought 10 titans and 90 sub caps, would have had a much easier job killing those 100 anti capital battleships.

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I mentioned a similar idea of ‘capital hunters’ in this thread:
https://forums.eveonline.com/t/slowing-down-the-decline-of-eve/189205/260?u=kezrai_charzai

Battleships might be okay for the role, but there is a very large stat-gap between the battleships and the capitals. I think a new class of ships in between BS and capitals, with 3 types: one to provide fleet anti-sub-capital support, one to attack capitals, and one to provide utility/support roles or perhaps something like a mini-carrier.

Although in that case it wouldn’t hurt to also have a form of Battleship that is like the Assault BCs - bonused up to be able to mount some sort of anti-capital or at least ‘anti-Hunter’ (or anti-Arsenal) weaponry.

A new class of ships would allow them to be limited to Omega, would sell subs/injectors as people trained into them, would shake up a lot of stale doctrines, and could tie into some of the ideas coming out of EVE Vegas where CCP wants areas like wormholes to produce ‘new resources’ that would be required to built the new ship lines.

T2 battleships or whatever could also serve the purpose although the EHP gap and other issues would be a problem.

However these ideas would in effect be bandaids used to maintain interest a little longer. CCP’s real issue is that they simply don’t understand how to balance combat roles or even the nature of PvP in their game. Instead they’ve spent 10 years staggering from one notion of “What can we put in the game to make people buy more subs?” to another, without ever addressing the core design issues of the game.

Heck, they keep complaining about how hard it is to update their almost-20-year-old game engine. News flash for ya CCP: if you hadn’t thrown away literally millions of dollars and tens of thousands of dev-hours on useless side-projects that failed or went nowhere, you could have re-written your engine twice over by now.

It’s time to bite the bullet and do some real re-design, not just slap duct-tape on your Minmatar game engine and hope the rust holds it together a little while longer…

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Would be a good role for the old Tier 3 BS (Hyperion/Rokh/Maelstrom/Abaddon)

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Is the Leshak of any use against capitals? A T2 version of the Leshak could be an option as an anti-capital ship.

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Yes. Capital ships needs to have some subcap hard counter other that another capital ship.

Smaller ships could be able to target modules of capital ships ? For example turrets, and destroy them. Targeting modules of capital ship would require very high scan resolution so that could be a trade off for module targeting ability.

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Capital ships in EVE are very ill-conceived. There is a huge gap between Battleships and Dreadnaughts in terms of EHP, size, and damage that simply doesn’t exist between Battlecruisers and Battleships. While CCP is unlikely to change the ship models, there are things that can be done to balance caps.

The biggest problems I see with capitals (and here I am strictly talking about Dreadnaughts, Force Auxiliary, Carriers, and Supercarriers) are:

  • Overall EHP.
  • Strength of Local Reps.
  • Application of Remote Reps.
  • Application of capital DPS to subcaps.
  • Lack of clearly defined role.

EHP and Local Reps

For reference: A Megathron has about 36.9k EHP unfit, and a Brutix has 23.7k EHP unfit. This is about a 1.5x difference. A Moros has 569k EHP unfit. This is over 10x the EHP of the Megathron. The disparity widens with fittings and ofc that doesn’t take local repping into account.

An overall nerf to EHP and local reps is in order. This makes sense. Ships in EVE have a steady progression from Frigate to Battleship. That progression breaks when you hit caps. It also makes sense for another reason; Dreadnaughts (specifically) use “oversized” weapons. Compare a Dreadnaught with guns fit to a Battleship with guns fit. Now look at an Attack Battlecruiser with guns fit. On both the Dreadnaught and the Attack Battlecruiser, the guns look absolutely huge on the hulls. This is not the case with a Battleship. Attack Battlecruisers have very low EHP compared to Combat Battlecruisers. It makes sense that a Dreadnaught would have more EHP than a Battleship, but it also makes sense that they would have a lot less EHP than they do - they fit these huge guns, they have this “siege” infrastructure (which involves their weapon and repping systems), and they have a jump drive. Not to mention considerably sized storage; on the Revelation that’s 2k cargo, 10k fleet hangar, 1000k ship maintenance, and 8k fuel bay. That’s a huge amount of space that doesn’t add to EHP; it’s just empty storage space.

Proposal: Reduction in Dreadnaught EHP to 2x that of Battleship, and some sort of reduction in Local repping. Perhaps a limit to how many “capital” sized reppers can be fit. Carrier EHP cut in half, speed increased (see below on application). Supercarrier EHP reduced to 1.5x that of Carriers.

Application of Remote Reps

I’ve always thought that Remote Reps should apply their beneficial effects based on signature radius, wherein subcaps could rep subcaps the same as they do now, but caps would have very poor application of their reps on subcaps.

Proposal: FAX’s have trouble applying their remote reps to subcaps, making them less effective than logistics cruisers on some metric (could be ISK per reps or something).

Damage and Application

There used to be this paradigm in EVE - and that paradigm was “bigger isn’t better”. People would often lose their Battleships to a single Frigate or the like because the Battleship couldn’t apply DPS to the Frigate. A lot of that has changed with the rebalances to drone hulls and the introduction of equipment such as “Heavy Grapplers” and the “Rapid” variety of missile launchers, making solo PvP in larger, unsupported ships more viable - for better or for worse. It has certainly hurt the people who enjoy flying smaller ships. Anyway. This change has also made it’s way, unfortunately, to Capital ships with the introduction of HAW and, again, Heavy Grapplers. And with the huge amount of DPS caps do, it creates an untenable situation for subcap pilots.

There is also the issue of Carriers. A Supercarrier, one of the largest ships in the game, can simply delete a frigate from existence. With the Arrayed Sensor Network, targetting the frigate is no problem, either.

This is broken and makes Capitals oppressive. It also reduces the amount of support Capital ships need.

Proposal: HAW weapons can track Battleships - but only with very heavy support (remote tracking links, webs, target paints). HAW weapons specifically for shooting Carriers and Supercarriers. Make Dreadnaughts a hard counter to carriers. Normal Dreadnaught weapons relegated to structure bashing and shooting Titans.

Lack of Clearly Defined Roles

Caps and supers can do pretty much everything these days. They can delete subcaps with ease, either via fighters, HAW, or AOE effects. They can do ECM. They can teleport. They can store other ships inside them. If cost is no factor (and it isn’t anymore), why even bring subcaps? Caps need clearly defined roles and they need to have their effectiveness outside of these roles drastically penalized - the same as every other ship in EVE.

  • Carriers - Anti-battleship and anti-battlecruiser platforms. Their fighters move fast, their weapons are fixed in place, and as such they should have a hard time applying DPS to smaller targets.
  • Supercarriers - Anticap.
  • Dreadnaughts - Anticarrier, antistructure.

Subcap Anticap Stuff

Tech 2 Attack Battlecruisers maybe. Oversized prop, oversized guns. Low tank, but high speed and high DPS/range. Worse tracking than tech 1 variant.

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I’d like to see changes that don’t directly nerf capital ships, because reducing a dread’s ehp by the amount you suggest would simply enrage people. Also, nerfing and rebalancing dreads, weapons, and/or other capital ships is a lot of work. It would take a lot of balancing, and even then I’m not sure it would solve the problem.

But, I think there is a different way to nerf capitals, or at least dissuade people from flying them. So, what if there were problems, or nerfs, imposed on capitals when there were multiple capitals on grid? What if these nerfs were strong enough that bringing more than 20 capitals would provide diminishing returns? That’s an arbitrary number, btw. That’s the direction I think CCP could go to, and provide more diverse fleet fights without nerfing a particular ship or type of ship. This isn’t a complete idea, it’s just a theory. I just want to demonstrate that there are methods to change fleet fights, or capital blobs, without changing a smaller fleet dynamic.

Not that anyone wants to fight, mind you. Got farming to do.

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Agreed that more, and bigger, nerfs is not the way to go. The last people you want ragequitting are the ones who’ve already shown they are willing to pay to reach endgame.

Fixing EVE is and always has been a matter of hard work. In the first 5 years of EVE’s development (pre-release through first years of release) everybody worked their asses off. Then for a couple more years everybody worked pretty hard. Then somehow CCP got ‘Himar’d’ and the development process became more about “saying the right things” and channeling the game into whatever direction CCP thought would make the most money.

It cannot and will not be fixed without hard work. Tweaks won’t cut it. Flipping values up and down to make ‘chaos’ won’t cut it. Powerpoint presentations showing things are less disastrous than everyone thinks won’t save EVE.

There is room for ‘imposing limitations to improve the overall balance’, but EVE really really needs new and better solutions and content, not more limitations.

Xuixien makes some excellent points about the current usage of capitals, and even more comprehensive blogs along similar lines have been posted by Suitonia and others.

However the notion of ‘nerfing capitals down to 2 or 3x battleships’ in effect takes what people already have and worked and paid to obtain, and nerfs them down into the ‘between-class’ of Capital Hunters / Arsenal ships / Gunships that were already suggested.

The balance problems and role-definition would be similar, but one solution adds new content and new ways to engage with the game, and the other solution involves massive nerfs that take away existing content and enrages the people who use them. (And doesn’t really address the impact of Titans.)

The key issue is that CCP needs to stop making these one-off and blanket and class changes that basically deal with one issue at a time. Assault frigates being underplayed? Buff’em all! Jag getting out of hand? Nerf’em all! People pay lots to get into caps? Make capitals one-stop solutions for everything! Null sec has the highest percentage of high-paying players? Make null-sec into wonderland!

It’s short-sighted game design where every few months they toss out another one-off idea to fix a specific issue or pump a little more sub/Plex money into the bank. And most of their ‘fixes’ don’t even accomplish the intended result.

CCP needs to envision a broad picture over how and why players engage in combat - in solo combat, in fleet combat, in sov battles - and then make sure that every class of ship has a valid role and every player has at least some reason to engage in combat and expect that they won’t simply lose their shirt over it.

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CCP talked about new heavy, anti-cap bombs at Vegas.

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Talked. That’s it.

Actually they don’t need to add anything new to game. Lets take that anti-cap bombs idea. All that needs to be done (maybe) is to change how signature affects damage of bombs.
Capital ships have huge sig right ?
So, after certain sig threshold (test it) bombs signature starts to apply reversed dmg penalty → it starts to give damage bonus that rises with signature of particular ship.

I know that this could be counter intuitive cause it is written that bomb does 8k dmg and suddenly it does 20k (for example) but this could be very sfimple to implement idea to add more risk to cap deployment on battlefield.

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No, go away.

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Actualy fk that. All that needs to be done in terms of implementation is to change the formula for bomb damage from whatever is now to a logarythmic scale where x axis is signeture radius and y axis is damage bonus caped at certain value.

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