It's quite surprising for me that you are trying to came up with some kind of special case for the supercapital guns here while exactly same problem exists in subcapital world as well manifesting itself with frigates being extinct from all 0.0 warfare formats.

You told me at the weekend you didn't want to put any damage cap on turrets because it would 'make them too much like missiles', and now you're talking about turning all XL turrets into projectiles - relying on falloff for damage.

Can we go back and revisit dropping ewar immunity? While not perfect, EW is the logical solution to this issue provided supercaps don't recieve too high a bonus to warp core strength. The issue was not so much that coordinating EW is too hard, but that coordinating EW alongside coordinating 50+ points of tackle was impossible.
With a warp core strength in the region of 5-10 it becomes viable to need fewer ships holding down titans while more ships focus on EW. It also means that temporary loss of EW does not immediately compromise the tackle.

Remove EW immunity,
Set max targets to 3,
Keep the -50% tracking change.

Unfortunately not having the time to run the numbers myself, but are you satisfied with how the tracking formula disregards signature resolution as transversal approaches 0?

It appears to me on initial inspection that as transversal approaches 0, the turret to target signature ratio has less and less influence on the to hit chance. Would it make more sense to add it as a range modifier so that the turret -> target sig resolution ratio would be modifier on range as opposed to transversal speed?

But doesn't that take you back to having to change an entire mechanic, which will then significantly affect the balance of all other ships as well? And if you're gonna start messing with that, then changing the falloff formula to fix a tracking problem rather then changing the tracking formula doesn't make sense.

In addition to that, if it's just the falloff formula being changed, then it's going to reduce damage at range by roughly the same amount against ALL types of ships, including capitals, not only sub-caps

If you do have time to re-work the formulas, what I'd like to see is separating tracking from the guns signature.
Run a script to divide the tracking of every gun by its current sig res, and then set the variable for the guns signature in the tracking formula to a constant 1. Since signature is simply a modifier, this will have absolutely no effect what so ever
For example, a BS sized gun with 400 sig shooting at a frigate with a sig of 40
Today, the BS has a tracking of 400x, but since the guns signature is 10 times higher then the friagtes, its tracking get reduced to 10% of its base value. 400x * 10% = 40x
With this change, its tracking would only be x base, but since the guns signature is considered to be 1, it gets multiplied by the target ships signature, in this case 40. x * 40 = 40x

So why make a change that has absolutely no effect?
Well, 2 reasons really
1. It makes it easier to understand and more intuitive. Currently, a newbie will assume that the gun with the highest tracking track the best, without realizing that the signature radius can change that completely
2. It frees up the signature stat to be used for something else.

So, what could it be used for?
To give guns that need it a maximum damage potential against smaller ships. A new step would be added in the damage taken formula, comparing the sig res of the gun with the sig of the target. If the target is larger, do nothing, but if the target is smaller, reduce the damage taken by the ratio of the 2 signatures. For example
An Avatar is firing at a Tempest. The XL lasers that the Avatar is using has a sig res of 1000, and the Tempest has a signature of 340, so the sig ratio is 340/1000 = 0.34. Modify the damage the Tempest would normally have taken by that value
However, the Tempest firing at the Avatar would have a 400 sig gun firing at a almost 16 000 sig target, so since the target is larger then the gun, it does normal damage
Result: Even if the Avatar hits, it's doing 66% less damage to the Tempest then it would normally do, but firing at the appropriate sized target still does the same damage as it does now

But this would change the sub capital balance as well...
Not necessarily. Have the script that adjust the tracking to the new values also reduce the sig res of all non-XL turrets to 1
Since it is no longer considered in the tracking formula and there are no ships with a signature of less then 1, they will track exactly like they do now and there are no targets that they'd get a damage penalty against

Why is this good?
1. It's a balancing tool. Currently, it's very hard to balance tracking since it's almost impossible to get a tracking value that allows the big ship to hit the small ship sometimes, without also having that hit result in the smaller ship dying almost instantly. This mechanic makes it possible to have the tracking formula decide what types of ships you can hit at all, and you can be pretty generous with that since you also have a second formula to decide how much damage is taken when a hit actually occur.
2. It opens up for new ship roles. For example, you can have 1 BS with low tracking and low sig res. It will be able to hit BS and maybe BCs for full damage, but can't do anything to cruisers, and then you can have an another BS with high tracking and high sig res that can hit anything but will do very little damage to anything smaller then a BS. You'd then have to choose between a BS that can fight only BC and BS and a BS that can fight anything, but is less effective against any given target.

Note to self: re-read this on Monday.

I see what you're getting at, I think. Can this not be mitigated by just adjusting the falloff formula*, alongside potentially adjusting the general balance between optimal and falloff?

*As in, the attribute "falloff" that currently exists on turrets etc, not sig-based damage reductions

Would require us to do an upgrade script to remove all the suddenly-illegal weapons on patch day, which introduces too much overhead for it to be a viable option for this release.

Why would you want to emphasize doomsdays, oh god. DDs are such a god-awful mechanic in the first place.

I find that the DDs are becoming balanced.

And a Titan without a DD is like a Bike without a front wheel. One might was well remove all the titans and boost the dreadnaughts.

[ a very long but excellent post as already quoted by CCP Greyscale on this page ]

The difference between capitals and subcapitals capwise is that subcaps have adequate capboosters to counter neuts.

they can be neuted in siege/triage, but can't be filled up with cap by transfers while they're in the middle of the cycle.

And consider carriers neuting the battleships to zero in one cycle with one neut.

Regarding all this formula-manipulation: I'm bad at mathematics, but please don't do anything that would affect subcap turrets and their uses. I see that you say in your post that your changes wouldn't really change anything for subcaps, which is good. What I wouldn't want is a scenario where, for example, I can no longer blap an interceptor that is MWDing at my battleship with zero transversal.

Basically, stay away from any changes to gun hit mechanics that straight up reduce damage applied by larger guns to smaller targets. Doing this would make it too easy to fly tacklers (by, for example, turning flying interceptors into "turn on MWD, approach target" rather than the current mechanics where you need to manually pilot to keep transversal up, etc).

This basically reads just like someone whining about a titan nerf. just replace BS with titans and interceptors with BCs.

I agree that at 0 transversal everything should die, but it's much too easy for BS to hit frigates right now. Same problem as how easily titans hit BS and BCs (but smaller scale).

If you want to fight off frigate tacklers, bring some antisupport like artycanes or HACs. BS being the be-all end-all of fleets isn't the way it needs to be.

E: I also had the experience a few weeks ago of trying to peel fast tackle off a friendly ship while flying a beam Oracle. At 100km with faction standard and tracking scripts loaded I was unable to land a single hit on an Ares over a period of ~2 minutes. Literally zero damage applied. And that was watching and trying to time gun volleys with moments where the target had relatively low transversal. Incidentally, the guy who got tackled was flying an automach and was also totally unable to hit the inty pilot at any point (because the pilot was competent and didn't fly straight at him).

you're not flying your mach well

and you're not flying your frig against a group.. solo comparisons are not equivalent to eve combat.

Raivi and many others see that the tracking formula is broken... I can only hope that CCP also realizes this after 5 years of me campaigning hard core against it.

I've come at it from the other side as well (I've flown a lot of Sabres and Dramiels in particular), and while there are some small ship classes that are really awful to fly against BS (hello, dictors!), for the most part its extremely easy to avoid damage if you fly properly. Flying a Dramiel is dead easy, and that doesn't even have a sig-reducing MWD bonus like inties do.

When talking about tracking there is one thing you can't ignore: any competent group of ships have webbers at their disposal. And -60% speed penalty from the single web is equivalent of 150% boost to tracking for entire gang.

With all the cheap faction webs, overheating, gang bonuses, ships with web range bonuses 60-80km web is a de facto standard for most roaming gangs or fleets and you just can't say "tracking is fine" because you run into enemy who fail to web you.

dude, the problem is not sig radius the way you've suggested.

The problem is that tracking gets better over range because of your formula. There is no penalty for a ship being further away and thus appearing smaller in reality.

So while I can always choose a smaller ship to counter sig, I cannot choose a smaller ship to counter tracking. There's only 2 ways to counter tracking, get closer, or get faster.

The issue is this. If I pull out my gun and try to hit a pumpkin from 2 feet away, I'm probably going to hit it because it's very large in my view. But if that same pumpkin is 100 yards away, it should appear a hell of a lot smaller. This does not happen in eve. The sig size always stays consistent. So there is no penalty for sig according to range, and tracking gets progressively better at range.

Creat: wouldn't your change (I guess you were just describing the problem, not advocating a change, but whatever) only add to guns' ability to do damage? IE wouldn't they perform the same at range (limited by optimal/falloff), but do more DPS to small targets up close (where currently they usually miss entirely)?

What does "I got webbed by six dudes in huggins and hellraped" have to do with "battleship tracking is broken?

It's an interesting idea, the only thing I worry about is making guns into "missiles, but worse."

That illustrates one of so many things broken about caps and complicating the effort to balance them. I would change that so that siege/triage still allowed RR and ET.