Goodness – three posts today. Lots of things to think about with EVE at the moment.
The first Dev Blog giving a high level overview of the Capital Ship rework has been released. It will be the first of many.
http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/reworking-capital-ships-and-thus-it-begins/
I am not going to summarise the Blog – it is best if you have any interest in EVE Capitals that you go read it yourself, or check out one of the many summaries already available elsewhere (such as those at https://www.themittani.com/ ). I am just going to contemplate how it impacts my solo play.
I have two Carriers and a Rorqual. They exist to allow me to move assets around Low Sec or maybe NPC Null. I haven’t considered using them however since the Jump Range nerf. It was dangerous enough moving capitals solo before that change.
I was hoping that there would be new interesting and unexpected game play options with the capital rebalance. I wanted an excuse to undock in them again – even as a solo player. While the changes are wide ranging, they are mostly around combat, tactics, fleet compositions and such.
My carriers will certainly be less useful. I’ll have to wait for the stats to be released. Now that all the capital hulls will get Fleet and Ship Hangers, I’ll have to check if there is a better one to use as my go to moving van.
I can understand the change to limiting capital remote repairs to only work properly while the Force Auxiliary Capitals are in Triage. It is an interesting tactic to put a limit on the effectiveness of capital remote repairs to how well those new ships can self tank. It should in theory result in more ships dying in big fleet combat. I’m not sure how that will play out. In some cases, those on the losing side of a battle might come away happier if having at least bloodied the opponents nose. If you are almost always guaranteed to loose ships however, some might be less enamored with the idea of large scale fights.
I can understand the idea behind not allowing refits when you have a weapons timer. It does seem to punish smaller groups more than the larger ones, who can simply bring more ships to cover more scenarios. But then I realised with all the weapon changes CCP is bringing, the very best of those small groups will soon find the next killer Meta, which the big groups will then copy, and then CCP will nerf it. So the cycle should continue.
Having Supercarriers and Titans have an innate warp strength of around 2o to 50 is a very interesting idea, although with the ability to hit sub capitals harder, the end result might be less supers destroyed. Then again being able to be jammed on occasion might offset that. Again it will be interesting to see how that pans out.
Overall if you use capitals regularly now, there should be a wide range of new fitting choices, tactics, and unique combat related special abilities to keep you interested. If you don’t currently have a use for them, you probably still won’t.
Evehermit 