Supercapitals revised

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Raised by: Vuk Lau
Submission Date: 23-04-09
Issue ID: 0203-10-0125

Summary

Supercapitals are broken. Motherships sucks, while titans needs to be reworked.

General issues

Main problem:
- They die so easily its not even funny.
Solutions: Massive boost of HP and Supercap reps
1st solution and IMHO the „MUST“ one is a massive boost of base HP of both moms and titans. If we take a quick glance at the current numbers (unfitted just as a rough comparison) Thanatos (carrier) has 591k EHP, Moros (dreadnought) has 890k EHP, Nyx (mothership) 1250k EHP and Erebus (titan) 1575k EHP. If we take quick relation between carrier and mom we have price ratio of 1:20 and EHP ratio of 1:2.1, and dreadnaught and titan ratio is 1:32 price wise compared to 1:1.76 EHP ratio. Even with EHP boost of 10 times price ratio and EHP ratio wouldnt be the same.
2nd solution is the introduction of supercapital armor reps/shield boosters. I wouldnt boost them too much compared to regular capital ones, mainly because the intention of supercaps is not to be solomobiles. With all changes I will propose here, one thing must be untouched and that is – if you deploy your supercap solo, you need to die :D
3rd solution I was proposed which I dont like is the role bonus of increased armor/shield resistances. It would be too much IMHO, because it simply becomes a multiplier to spider tanking which is already powerful.
4th solution is decreasing of sig radius to prevent dreadnaught weapons inflicting full damage except when a supercapital ship is not moving. Before late 2007 this is how it was until supercapital sigradiuses were increased by approximately ten times (to make them more probeable). Because supercaps can’t be webbed ganking them with seiged dreadnaughts was challenging, and involved tactical skill both on the part of the dread FC in positioning his dreads, and the supercapital pilot in trying to maneuver to reduce the damage. The titan which died before this change was Shrike in 46DP in a long battle involving sieged dreadnaughts missing a lot and hundreds of other ships. Soon after the change Thulsa Doom was ganked quickly in a safespot by sieged dreads before any exciting battle could get underway. The real advantage however is for motherships because they'd become viable again in capital battles.
Other boosts of supercap ships related to both motherships and titans. 1st – Increased size of Ship Maintenance bay 2nd – Increased size of Corporate hangars 3rd – Buffing/reworking clone vat bays
Now I will spend just a few moments on one thing many people proposed but in different variants. Its about turning supercaps into mobile/deployable/permanent structures. Honestly I am totally against this, and I am not even sure how it would be implemented code wise. However I am open for any discussion about that idea as well.

Motherships

There were many proposals about giving motherships higher damage but somehow I dont feel that dealing damage should be the role of motherships. With increased static and active tank, increased corp hangars and ship bays, they are a step above carriers but still not that much to justify price difference. One thing motherships have and I personally adore is the remote ECM burst. I would slightly boost it and allow it to break the lock of sieged dreads as well.
There are some nice proposals for boosting moms as drone boats by EdFromHumanResources: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1023003
As I said I am not really fond of adding DPS to the ship, but boosting their drones in other ways should be an option f.e. as mentioned here: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1023003&page=2#40
or in worst case, t2 fighters should be introduced through invention, or in combination with wormhole goodies for the roleplaying sake.
Another of the really cool ideas I heard is to have an area of effect healing module. With that module fitted an activate mom should have certain penalties like inability to deploy drones or fighters and f.e. decreased cap recharge so it needs remote cap transfer to stay operational, then it would heal armor and/or shield of all ships in 10km area around (could be decreased initially with option of introducing the skill for range) by launching a „nanobot swarm“/„shield plasma cloud“ from the module.

Titans

Even with the initial nerfing of doomsday devices, they are still way too powerful, and with increasing numbers of titans around, they are seriously threatening to destroy the phenomena of fleet fights. Anyway as mentioned, I had 2 directions, nerfing Doomsday or removing it. When I say removing doomsday, it would kill the role of the titan as it is now (if we exclude jumpportaling) so they would need another role, and the only viable one would be to introduce them as capital killer ships as they already have bonuses on their weapons. When it comes to nerfing doomsdays I will be honest and say I didnt have any idea what to do beside decreasing the damage inflicted, until Yaay posted a great proposal, especially the aspect of Doomsdays doing heat damage to modules:
20% chance to cause 40 heat damage (lvl 5) 10k Maxed (lvl 5) racial damage 15,000 Energy Neutralized (lvl 5 skill) Warp Stasis, 20 second delay to affected ships warp abilities (including titan)
I would keep the current ROF, and would decrease the amount of energy neutralized, but anyway the idea is excellent. Hats off. This would basically solve the problems with doomsdays atm. They can’t singlehandedly win a battle with proposed changes and even with multiple doomsdays fired a hostile fleet will be crippled, but alive and you WILL need your support fleet to finish it (or not)
2nd thing which is bothering me from day one is damn range of Jump Portal Generator. For the love of God increase it to 5000m at least.

Olympians

While considering the option of removing doomsday devices, as mentioned above the only viable solution for me was giving them the role of capital killer ships. Finally I asked myself if maybe its time for another class of supercap ships. My fellow alliance mate Danny Centurai christened them as „Olympians“. (If we continue using Greek mythology, The Olympians are a group of 12 gods who ruled after the overthow of the Titans, so its a really nifty name for the new class.)
Anyway, as we witnessed massive 100+ vs 100+ capital fights maybe New Eden is ready for a supercap whose sole purpose is blowing up capital ships. They should be able to inflict massive amounts of damage to the capital size ships. To counter them being too powerful they need to be „massively“ nerfed from the other side. To effectively siege one Olympian you will need to support it with constant remote cap transferring (someone invited motherships to the party) because an Olympian itself cant sustain the massive cap consumption of its „siege module“. Their active tank due to low cap will be also nonexistent so you would need carriers, and motherships if you want to make sure 5 rooks/falcons/scorps doesnt shutdown your Olympian’s spider tank. Basically if you want to deploy Oly you need to deploy your moms, or its just one giant sitting duck.
When it comes to production costs of Olympian initially I wanted to put it between moms and titans (around 20-25 bil figure) but with huge amounts of isk floating around I am thinking maybe to make them more expensive than titans. From the other side it would totally waste any chance for some „smaller entities“ to get ahold of them. Maybe something like an increased price but decreased production time, compared to titans.

Conclusion

My initial motive for proposing these changes is to give more intense and more fun gameplay for both supercapital and all other pilots. With changes like this we will see many more supercaps deployed on the frontlines and many more of them killed (killed, not ass****d without the chance to live long enough for a 2nd rep cycle :D ). To be honest, I wouldnt be emo at all if I lost my mothership or titan after hours of fighting with my hull going down to 5% just to be boosted again and so on. Atm a titan pilots combat experience is all but non-intense (besides praying that you will not die cause you were in lag for 1 minute :D ) and a mothership pilots combat experience is...lets say non-existent

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