Andre Coeurl
Embers Children
TOHA Conglomerate
30
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Posted - 2015.11.06 02:35:43 -
[1] - Quote
Sayod Physulem wrote:The mass limitation of wormholes made me think - you can only bring a limited amount of capitals at a time, if you want more you have to seed them in a big effort. This counters n+1 very well. So I tried to think of other examples in the game that do things like that, and realized something. You can counter larger numbers with two things:
area of effect weapons (yay RnK pipebombs)
seperation
and Seperation is what I want to talk right now - we all know those pvp viedos where a single player kills ships right under the nose of their fleets, done by seperating the target from their fleet, using fast, long range ships to stay out of the reach of most ships - make them come closer and kill them one by one.
But this obviously doesn't work with capitals as they don't move much.
In other scenarios than eve funnelling the enemy through a chokepoint can also archive such things. But space has no terrain, so you can't really do such things - or can you? As I said, wormholes got me thinking.
So here is my idea:
What if you can only jump a limited number of capitals into a system within a certain amount of time?
Lets talk pseudo science: The jump drives of capitals create space warps - you bent space to create a connection from one point to the other, but bending it, stretches it to its breaking point. If you create too many of those tunnels, they get unstable, in other words: not safe to travel anymore.
Lets say you can only jump 10 capitals every 10 minutes into the system - now you got a chokepoint. You could even seperate them more by limiting the amount of capital jump ins/outs in a certain area of the solar system, if the area of the system is already too stretched you can jump in, in a different area of that system - like at a different planet, safespot, ... This gives the possibility to seperate capitals and creates bigger logistical headaches for bigger groups. Enabling capable small groups to seperate larger groups.
Lets work through an example:
You manage to bait an entity with capitals - they jump 10 caps in - spread across the system, the maximum "space bending" is reached - no reinforcements will arrive for some time. You can now try to nail down 9 of those caps, stop them from warping while you take on the last one with your fleet, then the next one, then the next one - if you are fast enough, you can kill them within the ten minutes before reinforcements arrive. Maybe you can delay the other capitals by bending the space with your own capitals on purpose?
It doesn't stop large fights from happening - you just need more time to deploy all of your chessman, and you will have to gather everytime you jump into a system as you will be spread out (if you don't want that you would have to wait even longer - wait for the area in the system you want to jump to to regenerate). Your subcaptials can try to nail the enemy down at their entry points and stop them from joining the fight.
It enables smaller fights - as batphones won't result in you getting blobbed right away. Reinforcements will arrive in waves - so you might have time to extract. While the jump fatigue still doesn't protect you from getting stomped - they just can't do it as often.
So it would be a better limitation to force projection while it wouldn't punish activity. Because it is tied to the system rather to your ship or your character. And it wears of rather fast. It also punishes the logistic guys less - as it doesn't really affect the lone jump freighter.
So that is the basic concept - maybe some variations/details:
you should probably count jump tunnels or ship mass when calculating the impact on the system, that you don't make bomber operations or bridging in general useless
maybe make gates chokepoints aswell? like make them have a capacitor? that would mean that it can only jump x amount of people through - after that it needs to regain cap. Maybe link you to the gate, like you can link to a citadel while waiting for the jump, making you invulnerable so that people don't use that for *different* purposes ;-)
maybe let people still jump when the space is already bent a lot - just with the risk of exploding?
Great proposal, at least this would also make sense physics-wise... it's not just a nerf to caps because somebody doesn't understand how to couter them.
There are some interesting ideas in CCP's proposed changes to cap warfare but some are frankly terrible gamewise, plus they are showing how little some devs care about the YEARS of training cap pilots have been investing... incremental changes are much more likely to avoid breaking the game, and as others pointed already, losing players.
Creating a while new cline of caps ships to serve NO new role whatsoever? So we need to train, buy, fit and deploy a series of new capships to do what we previously did already? That's a huge nonsense!
The new logi caps will be doing just one thing, and not better than what is done now, so they'll be just boring, while carriers will do half their previous role, so they'll prolly be unused because dreads do more DPS and subcaps are more tactical (and cheap).
So many of us have been training level Vs in racial dreadnoughts or carriers because those ships had a very useful role, now by simply turning the tables under them, I think many of us will be severely pissed off.
Judging by the current players' numbers CCP has pissed of a lot of people already, in part by introducing highly controversial new game mechanics which often meant sending down the drain huge players' investments in skilltime, assets and organization, partly by being inconsistent with new promising game contents...
Please learn from mistakes, start listening to players' feedback, and stop thinking that a bold swerve of your nerfbat will fix complex problems, as time and again we have all seen, that isn't the case.
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