welsh wizard
Celestial Apocalypse
Insurgency
   |
Posted - 2007.09.23 11:21:00 -
[1]
Edited by: welsh wizard on 23/09/2007 11:26:11
The ships themselves are generally well balanced. It's the mechanics of the fight itself that are not well balanced. Some would argue that this is a good thing.
In order to destroy a target successfully (whether its 1 ship or a fleet) Eve favours close range combat creating the illusion of Gallente and to some extents minmatar superiority. Caldari & Amarr get shafted a bit here because their ships are designed to fight outside of disruptor range and they're beset by a number of additional problems that make doing this pretty much impossible or not worth doing.
For a start you're never going to see Caldari properly utilise their range advantage because they need to fight with their comrades who will inevitably bring shorter range ships of other races to the fight. If you sit alone at range you generally get picked off or run down by tacklers. Now you can come up with all sorts of situations to argue this theory but in general practice, as a whole, thats how the game is played properly. The evidence is in front of your faces.
Secondly, easily attainable speeds in the modern Eve universe have become ludicriously high. This exponentially dilutes the range advantage as there is very little time to "do what you do" before you're tackled and therefore dead. Couple this with the hitpoint buff and sniping just isn't what it used to be without a fleet. Again this means the time taken to shift between a long range combat situation to a close range combat situation is dramatically shorter than it used to be. Again this favours Gallente & Minmatar combat philosophy and ship setups.
This generates alot of frenzied debate on these forums as assorted pod pilots (mostly those that aren't affected) reel off all sorts of fantastical ideas about how to fly soft hitting long range ships successfully. It's often all well and good on paper but when applied to the game mechanics these postulations generally fall flat on their faces.
In short its going to take a number of sweeping changes to game mechanics to bring about overall combat mechanics balance... Hitpoint reduction, speed reduction, missile speed increases, revised tackling ranges and effectiveness and perhaps most importantly, acceptance from CCP that currently things are not particuarly even.
By the time they've finished doing this we'll be playing a different game.
edit: Oh I really don't care about npc'ing, give the other 3 races an 8 hardpoint siege launcher ship for all I care. :P
NPC'ing should not be considered in matters of combat balance because it involves very little inter player competition meaning the end result is of little consequence. You may aswell moan at your command & conquer playing computer because your CPU controlled skirmish opponent is too hard.
[Balance] The Caldari problem. |