DigitalCommunist
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Posted - 2006.05.01 16:18:00 -
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My take on tech 2 battleships..
You have a few problems which have prevented, and will continue to prevent their release.
1. Main one in my opinion is the way research and BPO distrobution works. No matter what the ship does, even if its marginally better than a tech 1 battleship the BPOs will create an extremely bad situation.
The bad situation is that someone will have obtained a huge boost to pvp effectiveness out of sheer luck. You don't see the same things happening with HAC and Command Ship BPO owners because they are not the mainstay of battle. Battleships are still the primary tool of war, and no matter how close other smaller tech 2 ships come.. they still can't match a battleship one for one in all stats.
Or in other words, there needs to be a fairer way of distributing something so powerful, or else you create something along the lines of Techell's miner II monopoly.
2. Role is the second biggest problem. You can't introduce a HAC version of the battleship because the damage output would be so obscene that fights literally come down to who can field more of them. Currently the case with tech 1 battleships, just less obvious as the performance gap is smaller. Nobody wants to see an oversized logistics ship because they'd be slow to move, slow to run, and slow to lock. It would also create unstoppable amounts of remote rep circlejerking, which stops being a tactical option when everyone is doing it. Mini capital ships is an incredibly stupid idea, because they won't be doing something unique - or even better. What else is there?
My serious hope is that tech 2 battleships are all Flagships (gang bonuses) with half tech 2 resists (similar to Field Command Ships). There was an image which somebody photoshopped (completely fake) of a tech 2 Raven called the Albatross.. lost the link but it was a good example of where CCP should go. A very good example at that.
In essence you'd have a built in gang bonus, 3% per level lets say (from Flagships skill) which would boost different things, unique to that ship and race automatically.
For example:
Amarr
Arma - laser bonus (cap use, tracking)
Apoc - cap bonus (recharge, size)
tier 3 - armor bonus (hp, repair)
Caldari
Scorpion - ew bonus (range, strength)
Raven - missile bonus (velocity, hp)
tier 3 - shield bonus (hp, boost)
Gallente
Dominix - drone bonus (hp, velocity)
Megathron - blaster bonus (tracking, cap use)
tier 3 - erm..
Minmatar
Typhoon - stealth bonus (sig size, ab speed)
Tempest - ac bonus (falloff, tracking)
tier 3 - arty bonus (falloff, tracking)
3. But then you get to the third problem..gang revisions. You don't want a situation where these bonuses work for the entire gang, no matter how big it is. You want it to work for small squads or wings or something so in larger gangs there is an incentive to use more than one, which means more risky fights. But it would take a major expansion like Kali to provide this.. and by then people have already trained up a good deal of skills.
4. Which brings me to the last problem, skills. People are going to get these ships even if they don't have second damage bonuses, just for the resists. Considering all the delays, a lot of people are already reaching the limit of what they can train for a specific ship, and you want these things to be limited for some time at least. A few unreleased skills will help, like Wing Command V (prereq - Squadron Command V) to delay it, and maybe make charisma somewhat useful for combat. Another thing to consider with skills is specialization. You want people to go for one type or at most one race. That can be done with specialization skills at 5. Like for the tech 2 scorp you would have maxed EW and electronics skills. For tech 2 dom, you'd have gallente drone spec V or something.
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