Originally by: Matthew

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Originally by: Necrologic

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You could also have stuff like different damage distribution across the formation, which would spark some life back into tanking setups. Using a certain formation could direct a % of damage taken to a ship set up for tanking, etc.

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Something like this would be key to really providing any sort of viable defensive play options.

The nature of eve as a space game starts it off at a significant disadvantage with defensive aspects compared to a "people on foot" game in terms of the "meatshield" factor that lets you physically keep attackers away from your vulnerable targets. It's even worse with no real LOS being implemented, so you can't even have your tanks physically dive in front of projectile attacks to protect the weaker elements. The thing is that adding either of these elements wouldn't really fit with eve (space is just too big to form a meatshield wall and LOS in general would be a real pain with the limited navigational controls we have).

At the moment there's no real way of forcing attackers to engage your combat ships instead of the weaker industrial targets they are escorting. These weaker targets also generally do not have enough HP or resistances to be remote repped effectively when under any sort of group fire. Thus, the only defensive option becomes running away, with any military resistance being in the form of a counter-attack rather than a real defensive operation. This consequently means that simply having a presence in an enemy system is enough to disrupt their industrial operations, wheras it should really depend on their ability to actually overcome the defensive escort.

The only way round this is to either prevent the attackers from choosing the guarded ships as targets, or forcing the damage to be applied to the guarding ships regardless of who in the formation was actually shot. Clearly there would need to be limits to prevent abuse (50 barges being "defended" by one drake just to give the barges time to warp out, for example), so there would probably have to be some sort of points system to balance how big an escort could be considered an effective defence for a given ship(s). This would also prevent it being used as another form of spider tanking, as you could only focus the protection on a small part of the total group. You'd also need things like the requirement of everyone in the formation to be in the same grid etc so no safespotted tanking gang.

Clearly there would be a lot of undesirable cases to identify and deal with, but that's true of any new concept. I certainly think it's worth looking at though.

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