correspondingly larger opportunity to gain the upper hand through effective communication and leadership. A well-organized fleet with five guardians should be able to defeat a badly organized fleet with twenty.

Blobs firing at one target then switching to the next one is no fun. [...] Blob warfare also leads to boring fleet fits, stifling individual creativity and piloting skill.

Wut? So an organized fleet should prevail, but you don't like flying in well-organized fleets?

(I stopped reading there, sorry. No, actually I am not.)

Wut? So an organized fleet should prevail, but you don't like flying in well-organized fleets?

Just sounds annoying, another gameplay hoop to jump through for large fleets taking sov. Its already annoying enough to FC large fleets in sov fights without having to deal with arbitrary sensor nonsense ******* your target calls.

So here's my idea: sensor glare. When targeting a ship that is being targeted by a large number of other ships, your sensors need to "tighten up their aperture" in order to work effectively--like your pupils when you try to look at something bright. You can target that ship like normal, but beware--like your eyes, your sensors will need time to readjust and focus on a new, dimmer target after the first is destroyed. So blob-targeting someone has an inherent drawback: you are basically committing your fleet's targeting power to that one ship. You gain the temporary advantage of full fleet dps but suffer afterwards as you wait for your secondary target to lock.

I like this, and not only because I thought about a similar concept some time ago.

In my version the number of ships targeting a ship (their added scan resolution) would decrease the signature radius of the target.

(not a fake edit: Obviously locking up your own fleet members would not be affected by enemy ships targeting the said fleet member, as you are in fleet and hence interstellarly connected via the fleet network)

(really a fake edit: Gallente warfare link bonus should be changed to decrease the effect of sensor glare!)

have u read the chronicle about the amarr-jovian war? called the Battle of Vak-atioth or something. What you are suggesting is akin to that. It will be definitely interesting if fleet battles happened like that.

I'm a little confused by the description though. Why is my targeting system like an eye? I'd agree more with the idea that the targeting systems in EVE eventually create interference making it progressively harder to lock on (I base this on the fact that there is a passive targeting module, so evidently something with a funny description like "Gravimetric" is being bounced off the targets normally).

It sounds like your suggesting: If 10 ships target ship X, then the 11th ship has a longer lock time.

And if 50 ships are targeting ship X, its more expedient for the next 50 ships to target & shoot ship Y rather than lock and fire on ship X.

Potential Problems:
1.) Logistics to rep the attacked target become impossible if their lock time is also increased.

2.) Potential abuse by having everyone in your own fleet target important ships (FC, Booster ships, etc), thereby limiting the ability of the enemy fleet to lock said target.

3.) Limit this glare from larger targets and structures. If 200 ships want to shoot a station or IHUB or Titan, giving them a huge lock time is unnecessary!!!

it just looked like an orgy of rusty nails and broken solar panels.

People who can mobilise large numbers of pilots and have them fight in a well co-ordinated way should be punished because I don't like losing to people who can use their superior numbers effectively.

No! This is basically what roime suggested, see my comments above for reasons to not do this. I am proposing that all 11 ships would see an increased lock time when they targeted ship Y.

I suppose you are trying to make space fights a little more like 18th century naval warfare. You might have fleets of a hundred ships of the line, but by and large each ship would target a different enemy ship. You would never have a case where all 100 ships of the line targetted the same enemy ship, vaporized him with a volley, then moved on to the next ship.

If they COULD have focused fire like that they WOULD have. And indeed, every time they had a chance to 'double up' and put 2 of their ships vs one of the enemies ships, they did.

However, to get rid fo blob warfare you'll have to implement a much better physics engine that accurately models two important real life concepts:

Friendly fire is possible: if you fire a laser/missile at an enemy but a friendly gets in the way, the friendly takes the hit.
Intercepting fire for a friendly is possible: if an enemy fires a laser/missile at friendly but you get in the way, you take the hit instead.

As long as the weapons being shot are not physical objects that can interact with all the friendly/enemy actors on the field who are also physical objects, I don't think you'll ever be able to solve the completely unrealistic perfectly efficient blob focus fire technique.

That said, there is no way the current engine can support something like what would be needed, so don't get your hopes up. Additionally I have no idea how to make the friendly fire issue work with CONCORD in high sec space, but without it, people can just blob up and fire the hulls of their own ships. There's no need to spread out and form wings, etc, to maximize firepower. So EVE remains, at it's core, a very tactically uninteresting representation of fleet fights that everyone KNOWS is completely unrealistic.

In real life you simply have to disperse or adopt formations so you don't shoot your own friendlies in front of you. Until EVE addsd something like this, I think the focus fire blob will always remain the dominant method of fleet combat.

Blobs firing at one target then switching to the next one is no fun. Not only is the primary guaranteed to die (unless they have five hundred guardians, also not fun), it's boring for the shooters and it's pretty easy to tell at any point who is going to win the fight. It's like watching a status bar. Blob warfare also leads to boring fleet fits, stifling individual creativity and piloting skill.

I would like to see large battles that are more skirmish-like, more fluid, less predictable, more dependent on individual ingenuity--like small gang fights but with higher stakes, way more chaos and a correspondingly larger opportunity to gain the upper hand through effective communication and leadership. A well-organized fleet with five guardians should be able to defeat a badly organized fleet with twenty.

So, do bomber squadrons do nothing to mitigate massed fleets?

I'm not sure if I agree with this proposal, but do all you leet PVPers calling him out as a whiner REALLY enjoy blob warfare that much? I mean, the results are effective, but is it really fun to go around with 50 of the exact same ship fighting 50 other of the exact same ship?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lanchester%27s_laws

This is an important read. Currently we have in blob warfare, you call primary and everyone shoots at it. This counts as aimed fire, and is covered under Lanchester's square law.

Where the square of the ration of the forces determines the inverse casualty ratio.
example (A)100 vs (B) 50. Ratio is 2:1, So casualty is 1:4. A looses 12 ships, B looses 50

Whats important here is that the skill ratio is linear based while #s is square based. Note that Lanchester's Square Law does not apply to technological force, only numerical force; so it takes an N-squared-fold increase in quality to make up for an N-fold increase in quantity.

So if you are out number 2:1 you need to be 4 times as skilled to take down your opponent.

By limiting the Number of Combatants, were you can only engage and be engaged by X, similar to your 18th century warfare. This follows the linear laws.
In this case the same battle of 100(A) vs 50(B), you'd have a 1:1 ration. Where A looses 50 ships and B looses 50 ships.

It's really unfortunate that your post hasn't gotten all that much attention. Things might work better overall if things were a lot closer to this.