Eli Stan
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
382
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Posted - 2016.01.23 16:12:32 -
[1] - Quote
1. A new way of altering ships. When ships are balanced, instead of changing all existing ships to match the new versions, just change the blueprints and leave the ships alone. So potentially somebody could still have a years-old Ishtar with full drone bonus - but it would be rare, of limited supply, valuable, perhaps a collector's item to not be used again. Or somebody could have a pre-buff version of a ship that drops in value. Ship descriptions would have version info, along with their actual model-specific stats.
2. Add terrain. I'm not sure how exactly this would work in a wide open 3D space, but it would be very interesting tactically to have features like cover, high-ground, and narrow passes. Imagine a small group of 30 pilots who live in an area and know the terrain, know where to hide, where to ambush from - imagine a larger gang of 300 pilots looking to create conflict. Currently the group of 30 would have an extremely difficult time going toe-to-toe with the larger group, but with knowledge of the area can use tactics to harass and pick off targets and be highly mobile...
3. Make resource wealth dynamic. Add the equivalent to famines, floods, gold rushes, ecological collapses, overfishing, diseases, droughts, and earthquakes. A lot of real-world conflict is driven by big changes like these - imagine if a disaster in Deklein started a massive refugee migration. Or if an extremely valuable material was discovered in Fountain.
And for the heck of it, some other ideas:
4. Get rid of TCUs. Get rid of iHUBs. Make the wealth of a system available to anybody who happens to be there. Therefore, a system is "owned" by a group simply by that group having a presence there and exploiting the system's resources and driving away other groups. The only difference between SOV null and NPC null is NPC null has NPC stations.
5. Give every ship in highsec that's fitted with modules or drones that can be used offensively a suspect timer. So mining ships and haulers still get CONCORD protection, but Catalysts and Nightmares don't. They have guns - they can protect themselves. CONCORD has other things to worry about, like Drifters. This would bring a lot of (much needed, IMO) combat to highsec, without disrupting industrial activities more than usual. Miners would have to arrange combat protection to deal with belt rats, unless they wanted to be suspects themselves. The main downside is that security missions would take a big hit. Not sure what to do about that one. Highsec Incursions taking a hit is, I think, generally a positive thing.
6. Adjust the relationship between ship speed, ship spacing and engagement range. Currently a thousand ships can occupy a very small volume of space, and in many ways, particularly with anchoring and F1-ing, act as a single much more powerful ship. Imagine if the game mechanics were adjusted such that those thousand ships had to be spread out over hundreds of kilometers? Fleet positioning would become much more important. Tank squads to the front, sniper wings at the rear, logistics spread out to cover as many as possible. Flanking maneuvers would become meaningful. Imagine if tank was split into six individually adjustable segments - fore, aft, starboard, port, upper, lower - such that a ship's heading becomes even more important.
A lot of this this would be a hugely impactful change to how combat is done in EVE - for all I know it could ruin the game, I'm just brainstorming here so no flames, okay?
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