Supercapitals, Ponies and Rainbows.

[Sir T]

Just thought a thread about Supercaps, their neded nerfs and other things that need to be fixed in Eve might be fun, especially since it wont polute the war thread. Especially since we have about as much chance of getting them as a pony.

I'll start with some idea on the supercap situation

Starting with supers, the problem is that they are far too difficult to kill and their toughness grows exponantially to their numbers. With Supercarriers each one is a logistigs ship, and with titans they have the abily to instantly remove thei number of their opposition instantly every 10 minutes.

Even more seriously they have reduced "roaming games" to a few guys flying around in cloakers and is one of them spots something the whole gang can be on top of it instantly with their full power in a perfect position. with an ordinary roaming game they have to travel normally through gates, they can be spotted, and they can only be in one place at a time. With supers you can literally have the rest of the gang sitting at a pos playing world of tanks and only 5 guys need to be actually playing eve to cover an entire region with threat.

I read somewhere that CCPs design document said that 5 frigs should be able to kill a carrier to make it fair. We all know how much a laugh that is. But to fix them you would need to have something like that, to have small ships remove a supercap gangs capability to fight. Granted this is the company that designed titans with the idea that they could be taken out by 7 nanofit minmatar dreadnaughts equipped with capital Nosferatus.

Other ranting and bitching and wishing for the sky is welcome.

[Amaron]

Personally I'd prefer to see some smaller ship types dedicated to shooting at bigger ships.   Like a battlecruiser able to fit a titan laser or whatever.   That's my pie in the sky idea anyways.

[eldaec]

Nerf jump bridges, that will somehow reduce force projection.

Anyway who cares about supercaps when we can walk around a sofa.

[slog]

Just do the World of Warcraft solution.  Release an expansion that makes everything released prior completely obsolete. 

[Amaron]

Just do the World of Warcraft solution.  Release an expansion that makes everything released prior completely obsolete. 

I can't even figure how you'd translate that concept to EvE.   It would have to be something like releasing T3 battleships and putting in L6 missions in empire.   Of course watching the user base implode would be amusing.

[eldaec]

What? CCP do this all the time.

See also : Battlecruisers, HACs, Command Ships, Dreadnoughts, T3s, Post Seleene Supercarriers and Titans.

[tmp]

Not seeing any ponies. This thread underdelivers worse than Incarna.

[Amaron]

What?  How do those things represent a money/skill point wipe?

[tmp]

I believe it represents "release that makes everything released prior completely obsolete". Even WoW expansions don't wipe out characters' levels and money so not sure where that expectation comes from.

[tgr]

Supercarriers isn't the major problem. Lag kills off their efficiency heavily, and smartbombing strips them of their dps, leaving them ... stranded. Titans are a much bigger problem as they can doomsday ships every 10 minutes and they can one/two volley battleships etc if they're setup for this.

The main problem with supers is that they're basically essential in SOV warfare today because of the massive EHP of structures, but if you haven't got more of them than the other guy, you will most likely lose the fight. And once you lose the fight, and you've lost enough of your supers, you stop fighting back, which again means you get steamrolled.

I've seen this happen in nearly every war the past 18 months, a few major battles with supers, replaced with months of structure grinding. There hasn't even been a hint of the old type of warfare where you have to grind down an enemy, and that saddens me. The problem with this is, trying to reason with PL is mostly met with "well, get/build more supers then" and "the current SOV system is better than the old", except it isn't in virtually every way.

[eldaec]

Also, you remember the horrible POS grind that supposedly got removed with Dominion?

WELL IT DIDN'T FUCKING GO AWAY.

You still have to kill the fucking POS littering any space you take, because all those fucking POS are still orbiting all your new moons even if you took sov. All dominion did was add additional space junk you have to shoot at for 20 minutes at a time before you move onto POS shots.

Not to mention shit like tech moons fights and CSAAs, I can't count the number of times post-Dominion I've heard an FC (ok, I mean DBRB) tell us 'we're doing something fun in a minute!' and it turns out, every single fucking time, we're shooting some of these POS that apparently no longer feature in sov warfare. EVE Online more like shoot some POS Online amirite.

[Simond]

Not seeing any ponies. This thread underdelivers worse than Incarna.

[Amaron]

I believe it represents "release that makes everything released prior completely obsolete". Even WoW expansions don't wipe out characters' levels and money so not sure where that expectation comes from.

It's just the context of the conversation so far.

Sir T: Talk about how to fix OP supercaps
Slog:  Wipe everyone's  existing advantages and release new bigger ships like a WoW expansion.
Me: I'm not even sure how you'd do that in EvE blah blah.
eldaec: What? CCP already does that all the time!
Me: 

[tmp]

(snip the awesome)

Thank you, kind sir. fucking saved.

[sinij]

Well in real-world equivalent are aircraft carriers. How do you fight them? You have carrier-busting rockets that are lousy at anything but hitting Very Large Targets. In turn if you have carriers and want to use them, you have to go in with something else first and neutralize carrier-busters.

As to solutions:

-Decay on larger ships, you have about a month 'service life' then it starts accumulating "cascading failures" debuffs that are progressively more expensive to 'maintenance' remove. This way not only producing, but actually "having" these kind of ships is Fucking Expensive. This way fielding more supercaps is not always better, especially if you can't afford them in a long run.

- Create anti-cap weapons.  Call it binary blackhole generator, where you can temporarily create an immobile blackhole that sucks nearby ships in. Larger the ship, further away it has to be to not get pulled in.. but it works on all ships in the area. These black holes should take time to create and could be only deployed in advance to create "don't supercap on me" defensive zones.

[tgr]

As to solutions:

-Decay on larger ships, you have about a month 'service life' then it starts accumulating "cascading failures" debuffs that are progressively more expensive to 'maintenance' remove. This way not only producing, but actually "having" these kind of ships is Fucking Expensive. This way fielding more supercaps is not always better, especially if you can't afford them in a long run.

Would be awesome to be a supercap pilot who went on a few months' vacation from EVE, only to come back to either an empty (or negative) wallet or a dead ship.

No, if they're going to do anything to the cost of supercaps, it would have to be moving them about.

- Create anti-cap weapons.  Call it binary blackhole generator, where you can temporarily create an immobile blackhole that sucks nearby ships in. Larger the ship, further away it has to be to not get pulled in.. but it works on all ships in the area. These black holes should take time to create and could be only deployed in advance to create "don't supercap on me" defensive zones.

Currently that's called a "cynojammer". If it'd be a new module, it would have to be destroyable or all of 0.0 would turn into "don't supercap on me" systems.

[Stabs]

So there are two issues with these ships?

1) They have been allowed to blob and were never designed to be fought against when blobbed. Ships that were designed to be very hard for subcaps to kill if they were a single supercap supported by a subcap fleet become unkillable when remote repping in SC blobs.

2) They are very rarely lost.

Perhaps the solution is to make it strategically worth spending supercaps to gain space. At the moment you can gain space without spending them if you have enough of them.

Now it's worth spending supercaps if otherwise you would lose that space anyway and with it the ability to field supercaps. If you can't get them out you might as well have them die fighting.

However when NC lost to NC. it wasn't worth spending supercaps as they wouldn't have done noticeable damage.

So we need supercaps to become vulnerable to other supercap and subcap fleets. Inferior fleets. Perhaps remove or nerf the ability of supercaps to rep each other. So if 50 supercaps attack 20 you will lose a few rather than losing zero.

A more general issue is blobbing. Blobbing is encouraged by space being very hard to conquer and jump bridge networks. You don't lose space if you keep towers stronted and defend anything going into reinforced, right? This means that if you have a powerful ship blob you're not worth attack as the blob could turn up to defend any structure put into reinforced. It should be slower and more dangerous to move blobs.

Another issue is the ability of alliances like PL to dominate the sov space game without holding sov space. That seems broken, you should be open to attack if you're such a major force. Possibly the remote rep nerf I suggested might fix this - if more SCs blew up then PL would need a greater supply but everyone else would have less spare.

[tgr]

A more general issue is blobbing. Blobbing is encouraged by space being very hard to conquer and jump bridge networks.

What? Jump bridges? Really? Are you really going to say that jumpbridges encourage blobbing?

You don't lose space if you keep towers stronted and defend anything going into reinforced, right? This means that if you have a powerful ship blob you're not worth attack as the blob could turn up to defend any structure put into reinforced. It should be slower and more dangerous to move blobs.

Ask the NC how "a powerful ship blob" worked out in their last stand under an unimportant jammer system. Numbers don't matter if you suck complete donkey cock at tactics, and park your titans on the gate. For example.

[Numtini]

He's got a point, everyone knows that jump bridges make the NC impossible to destroy. Well, everyone on the message boards who's never set foot in nulsec.

[Stabs]

What? Jump bridges? Really? Are you really going to say that jumpbridges encourage blobbing?

Any defender can reach anywhere in even a large empire in less than an hour. If it took, say, five hours to get from one end of the old NC space to another end someone owning the space might be more inclined to spread their military assets. As it stands everywhere, through a combination of jump bridges and cynos, is a chokepoint where a side can concentrate its entire force at short notice. This discourages combat because people won't want to risk losing a fleet to an entire enemy supercap blob.

Ask the NC how "a powerful ship blob" worked out in their last stand under an unimportant jammer system. Numbers don't matter if you suck complete donkey cock at tactics, and park your titans on the gate. For example.

As I said you don't lose space if you keep your towers stronted and defend. If you defend. If you DEFEND. Getting your titans blown up stupidly is not defending.

Anyway the short version is this: the fix for Supercaps is higher attrition. Industrialists and miners want more of them blown up because of profits. People who pvp in subcaps want the prospect of blowing some of them up even in a pyrrhic victory rather than simply being irrelevant. And possibly even people who own Supercaps want good fights rather than the chess like manoeuvring game they are mostly being used for.

who's never set foot in nulsec.

People who are getting their arses kicked in nullsec should go easy on the random put-downs. If you were as pro as you think you are you wouldn't be losing. You would also be able to spell the word.

[Amaron]

I don't really see a point to bringing up blobbing.  Blobbing is just too big a topic and CCP has worked on that for years.   Speaking as someone who admits he has no clue about facing a supercap fleet though I'm curious about some things.   What are the sailent points about why a super huge (like 500+ or whatever) normal fleet can't take them out?   Is it lack of damage vs repping or just that the super carriers do to much damage to normal ships so the normal fleet gets blown to pieces too fast?

[Sir T]

who's never set foot in nulsec.

People who are getting their arses kicked in nullsec should go easy on the random put-downs. If you were as pro as you think you are you wouldn't be losing. You would also be able to spell the word.

Uh you better check who's winning practically all the subcap engagements before you throw out silly comments like that

Blobbing

CCPs solution to bblobbing were Titans and remote doomsdays. How did that work out?

[IainC]

What? Jump bridges? Really? Are you really going to say that jumpbridges encourage blobbing?

Any defender can reach anywhere in even a large empire in less than an hour. If it took, say, five hours to get from one end of the old NC space to another end someone owning the space might be more inclined to spread their military assets. As it stands everywhere, through a combination of jump bridges and cynos, is a chokepoint where a side can concentrate its entire force at short notice. This discourages combat because people won't want to risk losing a fleet to an entire enemy supercap blob.

This makes zero sense. As of a couple of months ago, nothing with a jump drive except for Blackops ships can use jump gates. How therefore do they contribute to discouraging combat through the threat of a supercap hotdrop?

Alliances already 'spread out military assets' through encouraging their members to have multiple caches of ships in geographically remote areas. The main military asset of an alliance - active PvP players - however aren't typically spread out and wouldn't be even if jump bridges never existed. Even if they were, jumpclones make it possible to base a long way from the front lines as long as you have ships available closer to the action - which alliances typically do regardless of jump bridge availability. Trying to get a large fleet down a long JB pipe is a logistical nightmare, most forward bases are close enough to the action to avoid needing to make multiple jumps before a fight. The main advantage of jump bridges isn't in force projection but in bulk logistics.

[tgr]

Any defender can reach anywhere in even a large empire in less than an hour. If it took, say, five hours to get from one end of the old NC space to another end someone owning the space might be more inclined to spread their military assets. As it stands everywhere, through a combination of jump bridges and cynos, is a chokepoint where a side can concentrate its entire force at short notice. This discourages combat because people won't want to risk losing a fleet to an entire enemy supercap blob.

Um. I'm going to go right out and say this, but you're wrong.

Most objectives we've been deployed to the past few weeks have been within 30 jumps. If we're told to burn, we'll spend maybe half an hour going there. If we take JBs we'll spend maybe 10-15 minutes, and GSOL are slitting their wrists. If we're fighting a bit away from the main capital, guess what, we stage out of a system closer to the fighting. Jumpbridges aren't the bee's knees of nullsec, they're merely a convenience enabler, and if people were actually LIVING in nullsec, then they'd be used more by carebears than for military purposes.

Ask the NC how "a powerful ship blob" worked out in their last stand under an unimportant jammer system. Numbers don't matter if you suck complete donkey cock at tactics, and park your titans on the gate. For example.

As I said you don't lose space if you keep your towers stronted and defend. If you defend. If you DEFEND. Getting your titans blown up stupidly is not defending.

They didn't get their titans blown up stupidly. What happened in that system was they kept their supercarriers and carriers on the jammer and the titans on the gates, the titans were bubbled, PL/NCdot/ev0ke/etc got in and took down the jammer. The NC logged off their supers when the jammer reached 50% armor or thereabouts.

They did defend. They just did a piss-poor job of it by putting their main DPS at the gates instead of the vastly more interesting jammer.

Anyway the short version is this: the fix for Supercaps is higher attrition. Industrialists and miners want more of them blown up because of profits. People who pvp in subcaps want the prospect of blowing some of them up even in a pyrrhic victory rather than simply being irrelevant. And possibly even people who own Supercaps want good fights rather than the chess like manoeuvring game they are mostly being used for.

Yes, and no. Death to all supercaps and all that, but the combination of supercaps and the SOV system of today means that wars end much, much quicker than they used to. The fountain campaign I think took less than 4 weeks before IT's will to fight just broke up after 1 supercap welp, the NC lost the will to engage after they had their major supercap welp, etc.

BCs, BSs, dreads and carriers are sufficiently expensive that continued losses will hurt, yet cheap enough that continued losses can be sustained for a while. This means that you can run a war of attrition (instead of a single fight of attrition vOv), and it means that a single fight won't completely fuck you over just because you make a major mistake. This would be much better, because it would mean that campaigns like the one we had in fountain could end up as an actual meal, not just an appetizer. It was a seriously disappointing end.

who's never set foot in nulsec.

People who are getting their arses kicked in nullsec should go easy on the random put-downs. If you were as pro as you think you are you wouldn't be losing. You would also be able to spell the word.

Now you're just being a faggot.

I don't really see a point to bringing up blobbing.  Blobbing is just too big a topic and CCP has worked on that for years.   Speaking as someone who admits he has no clue about facing a supercap fleet though I'm curious about some things.   What are the sailent points about why a super huge (like 500+ or whatever) normal fleet can't take them out?   Is it lack of damage vs repping or just that the super carriers do to much damage to normal ships so the normal fleet gets blown to pieces too fast?

Supercarriers aren't actually the main threat to subcaps right now, titans are much much worse. Supercarriers can easily lose their drones/fighters (I'm not even going to talk about fighterbombers, as they don't really work that well on subcaps iirc), whereas the titan has 2/3rds of its dps in a doomsday (if they're firing at f.ex a supercarrier or a titan, where they can do sustained dps ... alternatively they're used to take out strategically important ships like scimitars etc) and the rest is from their guns. And they can (if fit for it, instead of max tank) hit BSes etc. Basically they can one/two-shot a BS every 12 seconds I think it is.

However, one guy in PL has been screaming for literally weeks at me on kugu on how we should throw tons of dreads or neuting AC-fit tempests at them to kill their supers. The neuting tempests have been shown to work well against singular supers at least, I'm honestly not sure how f.ex 300 AC+neut fit tempests would tear through a supercap fleet when there are more than 1 of them, simply because they could then support eachother through cap transfers, making them a much harder nut to crack.

The problem I have with supercaps is how much they cost, how much work it is to take down one, and how much it affects morale when one (or more) of them dies. They take 3-8 weeks and 12-60b (I think) to build. I can afford one, but there's no fucking way I'm getting one unless we're absolutely fucking desperate, because fuck staying in a space coffin.

[Goumindong]

If i might jump in here and focus the discussion.

One of the problems in balance discussions is that role and feel are often left unspoken. Role and feel are inherent in any question of what is "balanced". They practically define it. If role and feel are not explicit it becomes hard to say why any particular solution is "balanced". But if role and feel are explicit then arguments to balance can directly be supported and argued as to how the changes effect the intended role and feel of the ships.

Since I know you guys don't like it when I go off on ships, i will spoil the rest so you can conveniently ignore it if you wish. Unfortunately you will have to look at the titles because for some reason nesting my spoilers isn't working.


What should the role and feel of Super-Caps be?

General Principles to consider when dealing with the role and feel of super-caps

A possible solution for motherships: Mobile Bases, POS replacement, on grid modification

Why this works

What to do for titans

Re: stabs

[Amaron]

How often can Titans fire their doomsday these days?  I guess I'm not surprised they can blow away BS's with their normal guns either.   EvE's gun tracking system has always been broken at fleet engagement ranges.

Doesn't this sort of make the game not even worth playing for a year+ though?   Didn't they essentially admit they aren't going to fix them prior to WIS being finished?

[tgr]

A titan DD can be fired once every 10 minutes. As for tracking BSes, they are sacrificing their tank to get that capability, kind of like hurricanes do to get quick locktimes and high damage.

As for goumindong's suggestions, I'm going to simply say that I'm highly sceptical of many of the suggestions. Especially the titan one-shot titans one (as if supercap fights aren't rare enough?), and the "mothership mines all moons in a system"/"make them immune to capital ship fire" etc. I'm fairly certain these changes would make things worse.

[Lantyssa]

(Questions are to help me understand the larger fleet game.  I'll openly admit I'm ignorant and still learning the lingo, so they may overlook something that is common knowledge.)

Am I understanding that part of the problem with supercap blobs that they can reinforce one another with shield and armor repair?

Why not make it so they either cannot reinforce other ships, or make it cost them significant portions of their own structure to do so?  Let them receive it, but only from smaller support ships.  Thus meaning if you want to protect the asset, you need a bunch of support craft in the area for each one.  If there needs to be a lore reason, then just say too much of their energy generation is going to maintaining the structural integrity of these massive ships.  Diverting it to aid other ships is crippling.  So it's not done, or only done at the expense of massive structural damage.

[Sir T]

However, one guy in PL has been screaming for literally weeks at me on kugu on how we should throw tons of dreads or neuting AC-fit tempests at them to kill their supers. The neuting tempests have been shown to work well against singular supers at least, I'm honestly not sure how f.ex 300 AC+neut fit tempests would tear through a supercap fleet when there are more than 1 of them, simply because they could then support eachother through cap transfers, making them a much harder nut to crack.

Well thats retarded. First Bombers are designed to take out dreads, and how the fuck are you supposed to maintain contact when you siege against a supercap fleet that can freely move, ESPECIALLY when they can use logistics on their units and you cant because of (you guessed it) sieging. And as for the Neuting AC idea, there's no fucking way you could cram 300 tempests on one target in an enemy fleet and keep them inside the 10km ( I think) effective range of an AC, especially when using the Neuts means your firepower and tank is crippled. And you are gonna run out of ammo in minutes, especially if you were using cap booster charges to keep your Neuts running. And the supers will deploy fighters instead of bombers so that they will be tearing you up so your projected forepower will be constantly going down...

And I think its stunning that PL never do this themselves.. The only counter they have used against supers recently is a bigger blob of supers.

It reminds me of CCPs suggested easy titan killing fleet, baslicly a mob of nano fitted Naglfars (for bumping) with Nosferatus, and some DPS. Suggested right before they nerfed Nos and nanos. Heh.

[Sir T]

(Questions are to help me understand the larger fleet game.  I'll openly admit I'm ignorant and still learning the lingo, so they may overlook something that is common knowledge.)

Am I understanding that part of the problem with supercap blobs that they can reinforce one another with shield and armor repair?

Thats part of it, yes. A carrier and mothership are like big "priests" with no weapons of their own but have slots for healing gear but can deploy smaller 'pets' called fighters and Serpercarriers can deploy bigger pets called bombers which are built to destroy other capital ships.

Deadnaughts have the ability to go into siege mode where they deal massive amounts of Damage and can repair very fast and are immune to ECM, But cant move and cant be healed from outside. Carriers can enter "triage" mode which is similar, but it boosts their repping ability and they cant deploy fighters.

Supercaps are immune to ECM, can't be scrambled, can only be bubbled or pinned with a special ship class, Titans can be freely healed with supercaps (which cant be ECMed to try and stop them) and can kill anything smaller than a supercap every 10 minutes with a doomsday. Remember those specialized Ships for pinning supercaps? Yeah they are gone instantly, followed by your logistics, carriers dreads, whatever you are having yourself. And if they took away their ECM immunity they would suddenly be vunerable to being pointed by any pleb in a newbieship, as a point is ECM, and we cant have that.

[tgr]

The thing about the dreads is they're going on and on about "isk efficiency" etc. They do have a certain amount of logic to it when it comes to the dreads vs supercaps, dreads are much more easily replaceable than supercaps, so each supercap is a harder blow than ... uh, I dunno how many dreads would die in a 200 vs PL's fleet brawl, but you could possibly come out on top.

As for the AC neut tempests, the only scenario I've seen that mentioned in was them against a single NC titan, because the rest of the fleet was bubbled away from the titan pilot. I'm not convinced it would work in a proper fleet scenario, but I haven't got the means to test. Basically it would be a suicide mission, though.

[Amaron]

What's the insurance payout on a Dread these days?  I thought siege mode made it so Dreads couldn't hit even super caps very well due to tracking/etc.

[tmp]

Obviously, a counter to proliferation of titans would be introduction of supertitans deathstars.

[Goumindong]

A titan DD can be fired once every 10 minutes. As for tracking BSes, they are sacrificing their tank to get that capability, kind of like hurricanes do to get quick locktimes and high damage.

As for goumindong's suggestions, I'm going to simply say that I'm highly sceptical of many of the suggestions. Especially the titan one-shot titans one (as if supercap fights aren't rare enough?), and the "mothership mines all moons in a system"/"make them immune to capital ship fire" etc. I'm fairly certain these changes would make things worse.

Note that the "make immune to cap ship fire" would have been only for titans [so you can reduce their hit points and make them vulnerable to sub-cap fleets]

But if you don't mind me asking how would those changes make things worse? Would you really expect more motherships and titans to be fighting if titans were not effective against sub-caps and motherships had no weapons?

I was under the impression that the problem with super-caps was not that they didn't fight enough but that when they fought there were too many of them. As far as i can tell, the only way to reduce their numbers in fights is to make them more specialized and more vulnerable. So that people move to other ships [like carriers and dreads]

[Amaron]

Obviously, a counter to proliferation of titans would be introduction of supertitans deathstars.

See that's whats wrong with EvE.   What we need here are Cruisers with spinal mount lasers of death.    The tracking speed would be based on ship agility so they could only hit cap ships.