Fishyman8u
Gallente Fishyman Mining and Production
|
Posted - 2008.05.16 19:29:00 -
[1]
Right now sub-capitals can play a role in capital combat in a few creative ways such as bumping (to prevent warp), lag bombing (so many cheap ships that the opposing side can't even load), scouting, meat grinding (think goonswarm), and in the sole case of HICs can scram supercaps. However, most of these roles aren't all that fun for the sub-capital pilots (well... maybe meatgrinding might be fun). Subcapitals have a myraid of roles such as ECM, scouting, and so on, but most of the time sub-capitals' abilities and weapons are absolutely ineffective on caps and supercaps. ECM doesn't work, it would take huge numbers of cruisers and frigs to have any impact with any weapons and that is how it should be considering the difference in skills and cost of cap ships. When titan DDDs get in the mix suddenly anything smaller than a BS is in trouble (with two titans up that to dreadnought).
So how can we let sub capitals play a useful role without making capitals worthless? My idea is to create a new class of frigate called the "bomber" (I suppose stealth bombers could be used... but I like new ships.) These ships would fit special weapons that cause no damage to the actual ship, but instead gradually damage modules fitted on BC class ships and up. These highslot weapons should be specced in a way so that when they are fitted, they are the ONLY thing in the highslots (maybe just one highslot...?). They should also be immune to AOE weapons like doomsday and smartbombs.
So what will this do? Well, the ships won't be too overpowered because they can't actually kill anything, but they become strategically VERY important. A swarm of them could cripple a titan's doomsday in a matter of minutes or break spider tanking capitals. At the same time they are helpless when enemy frigates and cruisers attack them. So capital fleets will start bringing along subcapital support to protect from the enemy bombers.
This would make the doomsday a lot more strategic as well because if you use it you will kill both your support and the bomber's support while the bombers will be unaffected and be free to cripple your modules. It would suddenly be more risky to guard a cyno jammer with multiple titans. You could make it even more interesting if bombers could temporarily cripple (chance based + a timer perhaps?) POS weapons, jump bridges, and cyno-jammers.
If this were properly balanced you could start to see more strategy in fleet fights with capitals slugging it out while bombers streak past each other towards the enemy capitals. The bombers would be chased by frigates and cruisers which would be targeted by BCs which would be targeted by BS and... you get the idea.
Obviously if you go too far with this than the module killing bombers would be overpowered, but if you balance things so that the bombers are effective (but not too effective). This would also balance out the doomsday without nerfing it because the bombers would effectively be doomsday killers. They are immune to it and they can destroy the DDD without having to kill the titan. This also shouldn't be a 'hardpoint' type weapon. It should gradually deal damage (perhaps starting with the high slots) kind of like overheating does now.
Anyway, this kind of thing probably has been suggested before, but I haven't seen anything like it recently... This won't help blobs any, but thats whole different problem and it probably won't make blobs any worse than they are now. This is a specific idea for a specific problem.
|