Originally by: Lygos

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I like the idea of a t1 BS/BC sized & cost ship that can assign normal drones to another ship on the same grid and confer typical BC gang bonuses on the same grid.

Basically, an intelligent upgrade to the logistics ships. Perhaps they could even have bonuses which are specifically intended to boost other logistics ships exclusively.

It would need to be a front-line ship. Too many drones would mean lag, so bonuses to existing objects are more desirable. Damage is too simplistic, and aircraft carriers are more about interception and response timing improvements. So I would think significant drone speed enhancements are more called for. Enhancement of specialized non-damage drones are even more worthwhile.

Other enhancements might be AWACs support. Locktime improvements if that doesn't create too much of a gate-camping atmosphere might be feasible with some counterbalancing. The more the enhancements are geared towards ganking, the more fragile this platform needs to become.

Alternately, the ship could have an effect on whole grid mechanics, for example allowing ganged ships to warp to one another in as little as 100 or even 50km. Or perhaps allowing non-ganged ships the ability to warp in on one another outside 150km to bring short and mid ranged ships prominently into fleet warfare.

If these minicarriers are stargate-capable, and designed for front-line duty, I could see a use for an exclusive technology that can disrupt existing bubbles and their formation while in play. The minicarrier would then be ideal for crashing a gatecamp with support. They certainly don't need independent jump-drives given that Titan jumpbridges are going to become more common.

I really like the idea of a pure support craft. Perhaps one that has 0km lock range, but can still target any gang member instantaneously all the way across a grid. Thus it can't sick its drones on a target, or even be used for independent combat, but is a tremendous asset against all fleets configured for static engagement tactics.

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Originally by: Lygos

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I realize this is a very necroed thread, but it's fueled some interesting concepts for me.

For example, what if we had Jump Bridges with mass restrictions. Titan JBs would remain as is, but perhaps JBs on smaller craft would be restricted to ships smaller than themselves. A JB on a minicarrier might only be able to jump in frigates and perhaps cruisers. A specialized POS or some other heavy platform intermediate to Titans might be able to jump in BattleCruisers and perhaps Battleships.

As for general carebearing, it would hopefully create a platform for advanced gang modules that can only be deployed in 0.0 or perhaps lowsec. I find this an impure application, but if we absolutely must have a "quest-based economy" it should at least involve more than ever higher resist armor and higher dps.

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Originally by: Cygnet Lythanea

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True. I know that if my armour resists get much better, I'll be gaining HP when I'm shot. Personally I think that EVE has a great deal of potential, but we need to move away from a instant cash reward system. Maybe we should have to bring back pirate tags before we can claim bounties on them, or a known pirate player's frozen corpse. Another idea should be that losing a ship should have real reprocussions beyond just a financial loss. There should be some way to actually invest time in our ships beyond 'get this much isk and buy officer mod xxx" As fas as POS jump gates,I think I talked about that. There's a thread linked in the Recurring ideas sticky that I wrote on the idea of new POS moduals that would be useful.

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Originally by: Lygos

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I believe I've scribbled something to the effect of having to drag npc tags across the universe to a faction's homesystem in order to make NPCing integrate into the player-driven economy. Namely, in the form of trade and piracy.

I'm not big on NPCing, but if something can be made better, it should be given serious thought. NPCs deserve a lot of leeway to be more devious. Rather than just a match of two variables, tanking and damage dealing, some support functions of manipulating the local environment in your favor might be useful. The most complex way is manipulating the environment by speed and ship navigation. This is already implemented, but there is the unrealistic tendency of NPCs to fail to agro. A tremendous diversity of NPCs and objectives is actually needed to accord with a more realistic empires-in-space theme.

Since a minicarrier is probably expected to participate in a lot of day to day quest-economy tasks, I would see it's primary roll as environment manipulation by making it more consistent for ships to achieve certain effects in otherwise unpredictable situations if NPCs gained some behavioral randomness. NPCs probably need some devastating tendencies and possibilities. For example, an elite tackler NPC that can't be webbed and habitually targetted drones. For that you'd need a buddy with correct placement and adequate tracking for support fire. In the context of a support minicarrier, maybe you could have NPCs that use webbers to devastating effect in a mission that is less about killing things, and more to getting to a certain objective within a crucial time frame. A minicarrier with gang mods might provide that navigational advantage to a crew of AB cepters operating in a deadspace trying to rescue a damsel or yacht that is being actively targetted or scrambled.

Still, those are only quantitative advantages, and only by degrees. I would think that quest-based gameplay would involve distinctly qualitative environment alterations which can only come from support vessels. Like completing a mission by using a science vessel for example. A powerful support vessel might be needed to ward off some attackers, or open access to a non-intelligible obstacle. We're still talking about stuff that is comprised of very simple 1/0 operations that involve activating or not activating a module against some known quantity. It's not like we're dealing with making decisions in the context of semi-randomly generated tables or graphs of data.

Anyway, recasting and vitalizing support craft = win.

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