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I am a miner / manufacturer and so I guess I see this topic slightly differently from the PvPers or pirate hunters. The whole manufacturing process of Eve needs to be radically and totally overhauled. Tech 2 might make a few steps in this direction but I suspect that those steps will be incremental and designed to fix the symptoms not the cause of these problems.

Ships should not just be constructed as a "one off" manufacture. Instead there should be stages of componant manufacture. Want to build an Apoc? Stage one should be to build a Apoc superstructure using an Apoc specfic BP. From then on in everything should be components made from General BS Armour BPs. ie you could use different types of armour on your ship, some would be cheap, others improve drone / cargo space, others battle resistant. The same system should be applied to sensors, targeting systems, shields, engines, power plant, cpu etc. Why not even have the option to add, or take away slots at a price / performance cost. All of these choices would affect performance, price and even give specific bonus's to certain areas

Why make these changes?
1. You can make BS's designed for specific purposes, you want a miner BS, you go for a BS with poor armour, powerplant, shields, cap etc but boost up CPU, drone and cargo space, maybe even change bonus to weapon tracking and damage to mining efficiency. Want a Combat beheamoth, do the opposite. Of couse all changes will dramatically alter the cost and difficulty of manufacture.

2. This will stop the one ship fits all mentality where everyone gets a BS and just refits it for mining, pirate duty or pvp.

3. This will allow corps to specialise in manufacturing specialist BS's or even be luctrative sup-contrators.

4. This process if done right will increase the time and planning for BS manufacture.

5. A lot of combat balancing issues should resolve themselves. Why, well ships can best play to their strengths, a pvp Megathon could downgrade its shields, massivly pump up its armour and tracking and use a WMD / ion cannons. Essentially, balancing would be done by the players in manufacturing, naturally one ship type would start to become dominante (to which another ship would be developed specifically to counter the uber-ship) but the dominance would be very specific.

Am I totally wrong, is this too fundamental a change? Opinions please!

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