Evira Alivar
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Posted - 2011.08.20 20:37:00 -
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I would like to see environmental effects that limit the ship size you can operate effetively. You all remember Star Wars, the empire strikes back? The Falcon dodging into a asteroid field where the star destroyer could not follow it fast enough? Where sensors only worked to a limited distance? Thats the kind of fight i want to see.
Have parts of the system where captial ships suffer heavy penaltys. They can be used as a base, but not as a fighting ship. (No warping deeper into the anomaly, damage from asteroid impacts on movement...) This means you have to use smaller ships inside that environment. There is no point in bringing a captial fleet there.
Have parts of the system with limited view range. (You can only see things inside sensor range, the range is reduced.) This means what you see is actually in fighting range. If you hunt someone, you need to spread out and find him. Fighting under fog of war. This gives an advantage to small mobile ships for searching and avoiding fleets. Fast ships can flee into the fog of war and trick their hunters.
Have vital structures in those environments to make it worthwile fighting in that space. Small fleets attacking small structures there in a cloack and dagger manner sounds exciting.
The other part: Make Capitals and especially supercaptials vounerable to a well organized fleet of small ships. Here again Star Wars as an example: Remember the trench run? I am not saying that you should be able to one shot a capital with a frig sized ship, but you should be able to hurt it. An idea for that: Have hacking modules (either the ones we have or special ones tied to a small vessel) turn off enemy modules. It can be chance based (5% chance per cycle to disable) and random (disable a random module). That form of ewar should work against supercapitals also (they have a lot of computer equipment, there should be something to hack). There is already a counter to that in the game: Cap transfer and turn the mod on again. The main point is: In small engagements there is no point is using this, fights are over too fast and ecm hurts more and is more reliable. But against a supercaptial, one big target, the combined effort of a small ship fleet can totally incapacitate the ship. This means no capital neuts, not remote ewar, no tanking mods, no remote repairs. And you would need small ships to fight of the nasty little things turning off your supercaps.
There should be a chance to compensate small ship size with amount of people and tactics.
Another idea to take on supercaps and caps with small agile ships: Have a weapon that stacks when used constantly. No limit to the dps, but very slow building of the dps. Like shooting agressive nanobots on the surface of the enemy ship and then just projecting power to make the effect last. Each layer (even when used from diffrent ships) adds to the dps. The enemy ship can only get rid of the effect when it stops the energy transfers to the nanobots long enough to make them wear off. The time needed to wear of should also be tied to the ship size: the larger the ship, the longer the effect lasts. So an inty could just burn out of range for some time to make the effect wear off, bs need to warp off and caps /supercaps need to jump out and be repped for quite some time before they can enter battle again. Building enough dps to severely hurt a supercap should take some time, but if you manage to dodge his attacks that long, there should be nothing preventing you from destroying him.
I am not against supercaps, but its annoying that one person can field enough power to deal with a whole fleet of smaller ships. Thats not a question of isk value of the ship and production effort, its an expesive ship and should be powerfull. but having more than ten times the people in smaller ships and not standing a chance is not very balanced. I would roughly guess that a fleet of 50 bs would need about 20min to burn down a supercap, even if its not repped. Thats broken.
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