Makes sense, I guess.

It'd be nice to have something like a ore hold, or a fitting service on the others, but it would be limiting for anyone but the gallente.


I mentioned this in a previous post (somewhere) but I can see the following Industrial roles:

1: tanky
2: fast - This is a lot less useful. As fast can be covered by a different class. A frigate sized courier
3: big
4: Specialist cargo (ore/gas/ice)
5: Fitting service
6: Fleet hangar


And we already have:
7: Salvager
8: PI specialist cargo.

What's the reason for giving them such substantial baseline cargo capacities when compared to the present? Restricting the capacity of an industrial has obvious purpose in restricting player mobility, but I suppose that genie has been out of the bottle for some time now with Warp to Zero and Titan Bridges.

Isn't 4,5,6 covered by the Orca?

First, something kind of simple: why the Hoarder instead of the Mammoth? This basically comes down to art direction. At earlier stages in this rebalance we considered both removing some ships from the game, and also adding more. Part of that discussion led to art asking that we use the Hoarder rather than the Mammoth as one of the primary Minmatar industrials.

Oh h*ll no, itty 4 is one of the best indus there is. Also you are removing over 1k hp from the itty 5, how is that going to give it 50% more base hp compared to the old?

Not sure the agility bonused ones are agile enough to make the bonus worth while - even a battleship without a sensor booster should be able to lock them before they warp.

For such cheap hulls they all appear to haul a lot now.

+1 to the idea of specialty holds for hauling different materials

Having holds for PI goop vs. packaged ships vs. minerals vs. shrink wraps would be a fun way to have reasons to fly a variety of industrials.

.....
As you say, its resist vs repair. In the case of Indies, it would have had to be: resist vs nothing because Caldari/Amarr have no ship. This would have been the only case in the whole game of one race having access to a role that wasn't balanced in some way for the other races with another ship.

.....

I don't know exactly which numbers you are focusing on, but there should be no increase in t1 indie cargo capability as a class.

The old (current) Iteron 5 had 6000m3 base cargo, which translated to about 38500m3 cargo with expanders, level 5 indie skill, and expander rigs. The only new industrial to exceed that is the Bestower, which only does so by about 700m3 with the fully expanded version.

It may feel like a lot of increase capacity since before it was only available to Iteron 5 (which was over 10k expanded hold ahead of all the rest), and now its available to 4 ships. Or it may be that you're reading the numbers wrong =p

I admit that I do not understand why specialization for races is bad.

With the entry requirements dropped as they have been, anyone can turn around and step into any of these ships. When the only way to access the Iteron Mark V was to train Gallente Industry to V I understood why you wanted to make sure that there was a viable, somewhat closely resembled choice for players. People tended not to learn about the different options until they were somewhat vested in what they were flying.

However, the different races being good at particular things even to the point of a highly specialized Gallente industrial ship is a good thing. It adds an interesting aspect and facet to the races. The "we don't care you can fly this and make it work" from the Caldari state makes sense. Their focuses are elsewhere and their ship yards reflect their focuses. That gives uniqueness and appeal to the various classes to people that care about that. And that, in my opinion, is what is missing in the reflections of 'some racial flavor'.

Be bold and say, "This is what they do and they are cool with it."

The player base is going to go for the best (biggest option) for the most part. Look at the flood of Iteron V's. If people are going to care about numbers they are going to care about numbers. One singular ship will rise to the top time and time again. It seems like this fight for flavor should be more focused in the lore and aspects of the classes instead of trying to fight against players who are going to min/max the moment they run the numbers and present you with the best option. That best option will then be splashed across the internet and it will become the staple for people who are only flying this for the best option. Creating four clones of each other with differences of a few hundred k m3 isn't going to make anything more interesting.

I don't really understand this homogenization where every race can pretty much do what the others do maybe a bit better on this side. It seemed interesting when particular races were announced as being good at X and other races were their hard counter of Y but enough flexibility in the middle to give birth to creativity instead of squabbling over choices based off of which hull is the most attractive. With the low cost of entry for industrial ships making them unique and interesting against their fellows could be a lot of fun without harming people through training.

If I can haul 40000 in a t1, I should be able to haul 100,000 in a DST.