I just want to point out that it would be really silly to have ships moving towards the enemy fleet, going to a certain threshold, and then turning back, to minimize profile. It would just make it more tedious. If you want realism, then make it so that a full complement of weaponry can't fire in every direction; in that case you would have some naval tactics to read up on.

if the profile of a ship gets factored into its chance to hit then many ship designs will become obsolete just for their model. look at the Domi compared to the apoc, or a cane compared to a harby.

ur diagram also assumes all ships are oblong shaped with a bow roughly half the area of its port or starboard. u've somehow failed to notice that this is very untrue for many ships. just a handful ontop of the ones mentioned above are the scorpion, moa, raven, incursus, tristan, prophecy, catalyst etc etc and all their faction and T2 variants

it opens a whole world of balancing issues beyond the cons u've already stated and CCP will be tweaking ship models for years trying to balance them against all the other stats.

terrible idea is terrible

As I said before, I will not say "every ship should has its own hit area". Of course ccp can do it if they want some wot challenges, but it is not what I would issue here.

Scorpion, Raven, Tristan and Catalyst are the case that have larger side area than front I agree. But Moa, Incursus, Prophency and most of the ships in EVE are possible to use the rule, even though the ratio of side/front area are not all the same, they still have larger side area than front.

any ship that doesnt use the rule would be obsolete, as those that do use the rule will be exploited. this creates an imbalance.

If you have a higher chance of getting hurt while running away, kiting becomes very much less viable, .

This idea would require hell of a lot more power since you'd actually need rather detailed ship models for the combat calculations.
I dont think its even possible to do this with the current types of hard- and software.

I don't understand your logic, if you are running away you are not kiting, you are just running away. And running away actually made you less likely to get hit but more damage if you do get hit, due to the engine hits.

Sometimes, when you are kiting, you are actually turned directly away from your opponent.

I don't see the point of reducing the chance to hit while increasing the damage if hit. If you balance it evenly, nothing will change, and if you don't, it will reduce the viability of one tactic over another.

To explain my logic, I'll put it in logical form:

Premises:
A. Kiting requires range control.
B. Range control often requires turning your back to your opponent.
C. If the changes are made as you suggest, turning your back to your opponent can increase the damage you are taking due to critical engine shots (more than it already does, since moving directly away from someone seriously reduces your transversal)

Conclusion:
Therefore, D. Kiting becomes less viable.

It depends on the ship. A Catalyst has a much smaller side profile, so not only does it get transversal working against it when it's controlling range, it's also easier to hit, given the suggested changes.

Make Every Ship a "T3" in that every ship is comprised of five overlapping spheres representing ship modules: weapons, propulsion, electronics, etc.. The closest "module sphere" gets hit and the hit module suffers damage (standard shield/hull/armor damage) and some reduced effectiveness for that module (weapons suffer RoF reduction, electronics hits reduce targeting ability, etc..)

It's a bit simplistic, but should encourage some maneuvering without overloading the server too much. In fact, if time dilation kicks in, the five spheres could be dynamically replaced with a single sphere and modules are damaged via RNG.

One huge flaw with 'critical engine hits'.
It overly benefits shield ships vs armour ships. Because shield won't be taking extra damage.
Also you assume the typical starship trope of 'One shot in the right place kills any ship'. Which just isn't true. Even now days ships have extra armour surrounding drive mechanisms as well as procedures in place to mitigate any hits there.
You 'might' temporarily disable a mechanism, but again, this would heavily load in favour of shields if this were implimented since nothing gets actually hit on a shield hit.
So for game balance you have to leave critical hits out of it.

One huge flaw with 'critical engine hits'.
It overly benefits shield ships vs armour ships. Because shield won't be taking extra damage.

If ship profiles, angles, armor thickness at different places on hulls and ship surface area come into play with damage calculations...... then why is this not extended into the context of capital ammo size meets small sub-cap hull = splat on windshield even if its a near miss?

Assuming there is air in the space?

The Dual Giga series of turrets may be able to do this, dependent on what crystals you use as any energy weapon of that size should have a heat profile. So the future will contain the smallest profile capital ships, firing beam lasers so as to cause a string of sub cap destructions on their way to killing off their target. This would also extend to Judgement obviously.

But this is a buff minmatar thread so I don't think you thought of that.

Edit: how do glancing/grazing shots factor into this? Since Capital munitions should potentially splat something that gets grazed by this. Also if something grazes, does the ammo need to have a new trajectory calculated due the possibility of the package bouncing or being deflected? Heck, shouldn't this also affect every type of munition, even LASER as depending on where you hit on a shielded hull there would be "bounced" energy?

Then the Ahacs will be overpowered and battleships die horribly, as ahacs survive by speed and signature radius, and they don't miss battleships from any position. As well as tier 3 battlecruisers

Anything that introduces positional tactics, instead of Ball of Death is a step in the right direction.

i would rather like to have a redesigned tracking formula which takes your own ship rotation into account (orbiting ships should not need to track as much as the ship being orbited.. kinda common sense). But it is probably a requirement for your feature request anyway so i am fine with it ;)

Ideas are good when they are theoretically possible.

the original idea is just as demanding as the others. like u said, a local of 1200 would crap all over the servers with these ideas

More server loads
This feature would add more loads to the server and may make the large fleet fights lager. However personally (as one who is not a technician) I believe it would not be more complicated than the transversal and capacitor calculations that currently working on the server.

I just think that all of this, fun as it all sounds, is too enormous of a change to game mechanics to make it viable, for way too little of a positive effect. The game already rewards and punishes position, speed, understanding of the battlefield, direction of your ship, bait and switch tactics, psychological warfare with your enemy, etc. I just don't see how adding an entire hitbox-ish mechanic to it is going to add much at all. Even if the mechanic were added, having your fleet of ships anchor up on you so that it is easier to control range is still going to be a useful tactic, especially in sizeable fleets where micro-managing the movement of all of your members should be secondary, tertiary, or lower on your list of priorities.

So should the tracking speed increase or decrease, when the ship is rotating statically? I don't quite get the idea.

imagine your ship is a tank. A quick tank "orbits" a not moving tank. The not moving tank has to turn the gun to hit the quick tank. The quick tank however does not have to rotate the gun at all, since the tank itself rotates. In eve, both have to rotate the gun the same amount to hit something... which does not make sense at all. (the root for this issue is the fact that the server dos not know the ship orientation, you are a point.)

how exactly does the orbiting tank not have to turn its turret.

once he turned it 90 degrees he doesn't have to do anything anymore. It will always point to the enemy as long he drives in perfect cirlces. The tank itself rotates already.

once he turned it 90 degrees he doesn't have to do anything anymore. It will always point to the enemy as long he drives in perfect cirlces. The tank itself rotates already.

Or just screw capital tracking and make capital fights between grids. They hit any ship on the same grid but instead of 150km they get 150k km range. Other ships must go to the opposing capital fleet's grid and target the capitals for their fleet, one ship linked with a capital. The opposing capitals will notice the targeting ship and can try to have it destroyed by the defending sub-capital fleet before the shots are fired.

So you have a sub capital fights going on around two capital fleets in different grids while the capital ships dish it out on more stellar ranges. Fighter bombers and fighters need to be assigned to sub-capital pilots to coordinate the attacks on the enemy grid.

Also deploying cynos would be more strategic.


Alright, alright, I shut up.

this would require the creation of a new collision engine witch is non existent at the moment. Those collisions engines are VERY heavy and require a lot of resources. Also the current tracking and shooting formulas would need to be completely revamped to allow this kind of behavior even if the ships are physical cubes with 6 areas of collision, the most important problem here is how resource intensive are most collision system but it would be a cool feature.

note: in most fleet fights i have been we dont orbit anyone unless its a remote repair fleet, sniper fleets in 0.0 HAVE TO MOVE or they will get trapped in a bubble and die horribly.

especially in sizeable fleets where micro-managing the movement of all of your members should be secondary, tertiary, or lower on your list of priorities..

Watch the fanfest videos about tessellation?

If you want realism, go play Microsoft Flight Simulator.
EVE is a global space MMO, and as such, it has to make some steps to reduce server and network load to make the game available to players.
What you suggest would make the game unavailable to many, if not most, people out there.

Hum, I understand the tracking in EVE are somewhat different from what in a really close range tank fights.

As in EVE, spaceships are ranged by kms, for most of the time, the time took that rotate turret to the right direction should just take a minor proportion over the tracking process. The majority of tracking power would be spent on fine turnings that make sure the bullets/laser beam really reach the target many kms away, rather than just point the turret to a roughly correct direction.

In this situation, the movement of the shooter itself should increase the difficulty of aiming.