Surfinal
United Society Starfleet
Axiom Empire
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Posted - 2007.10.23 00:05:00 -
[1]
What we want is pretty basic: We want to make fighter wielding capital ships more reliant on their support fleet and less of a direct nber deathbringer.
Your proposal: Reduce a carrier's ability to deliver damage by 50%.
So a ship that has an excellent tank and at-best BS-gank is going to be an awesome tank with....the firepower of a battlecruiser. So what's the incentive to put your billion-isk ship on the frontlines? None. We're back to POS-hugging. Sure, the carrier could stay frontline and be a harder-to-kill 5-fighter controller, and soak up some EW. Sorry, that doesn't do it for me. Many carrier pilots will simply dock up and pull out their BS, its more useful.
If making the capitals more reliant on the support fleet is your goal, here's a couple of possibilities:
- Go ahead and nerf the carrier's control abilities, but also:
- Give us a capital-sized anti-frigate weapon that SHREDS frigates that get within 20km.
- Allow DCUs to add to the number of direct controlled drones/fighters, so a pilot could control 6 drones with one DCU, for example.
- Make carriers immune to EW, so there is actually an incentive to deploy them outside a POS and still do something.
- Make MoMs immune to interdiction spheres, but not the new cruiser dictor's sphere.
- Keep the carrier and MoM's control abilities as they are.
- Reduce deployed fighter damage by 50%
- Increase deployed fighter damage by 25% for each gang member directly under the carrier pilot's leadership. Have squad commanders count double, so each wing commander and squad commander could receive a full 0.5*2.5=1.25x bonus. Possibly, make it so that only MoMs in WC slots would have SCs count double.
- Give carriers and MoMs flagship bonuses like the field and fleet command ships respectively. Add these in as class bonuses, as I don't think we can afford to take away any of the existing bonuses.
Option 1 attempts to give us some incentive to deploy carriers, while living with your restriction. I don't like it, but I think its at least a decent attempt at balance.
Option 2 is far more interesting to me. We get a carrier that can, in a gang, deal more damage than before. We get a carrier that MUST have gangmates to be effective. Even better, we get an effective limit on carriers in gang, 5 WC+5*5 SC = 30 carriers per gang. To be effective, those 30 carriers need full gangs, so lots and lots of support will have to be employed. Simply adding more carriers to the mix won't help all that much. Also, carriers would be incentivized to fit gang mods.
There, my attempt to both be constructive and civil. Now watch it get lost in this 70 page mess.
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