Jump Ranges to 7 ly, Boys!

As of a few minutes ago, CCP Larkin announced a pretty badly needed change to jump ranges that will be hitting in the November Ascension expansion. With this change, carriers will have a maximum range of 7 ly (two more than currently) and supers will be able to travel to 6 ly. While that doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to non-capital pilots, try plugging a few routes into jumpplanner and you'll see how important it is. Quite often on long routes, you can end up with the response, "No route is possible" taking only cyno jumps.

Within the post, CCP Larkin stated that the company's goals are to:

• Reintroduce a natural path for capital combat to escalate.
• Differentiate the power projection of Capitals and Sub-Capitals.
• Allow alternative logistics and force projection paths into space that is currently very difficult to access.
• Open up chokepoints and allow jump paths to be a little less predictable.

While this change will be almost universally praised by capital-capable pilots, will it achieve those goals, and are those goals even worthy?

Am I Starting to Like PvE?

In my last post, I talked about taking a few moderate risks to get a ratting carrier into the dronelands. My goal wasn’t just to earn isk, though that is a nice side effect. Rather, I wanted to become more comfortable with flying a carrier and comfortable with the fighter controls. While I’ve been able to fly capitals for a few years now, I really haven’t used them often in combat. Most of my experience with them came in the form of POS repairing.

But now that I’m in system and settling down to actually use the carrier, it’s quite profitable, in more ways than one. In some ways, it’s a bit different than I expected.

Knowledge Gaps

Eve is a game of horizons. You can play for years, skilling towards becoming the perfect pilot for a specific ship. Just when you reach that goal, you find yourself keenly aware of your limitations. So, you need to train for the next one, and the next.

For my part, I wanted to learn to be a good solo and small gang PvPer, so my first priority was to play “catch up” by topping off all the basic fitting and competency skills (shield, armor, etc.), then top off my cruiser/medium-and-below spaceship command and weapon skills. Only after that did I start working on capital skills.

Now, Talvorian is sitting pretty well, able to fly all carriers and dreads, as well as T2 siege. In fact, that’s been the case for about a year now, though I rarely fly capitals.

You see, capital warfare has always been beyond the next horizon for me. I can sit in them, I can follow commands, but I really just don’t “get” them yet. With my schedule of availability, I’m hit or miss for large capital fleets, and there were always other kinds of gameplay I needed to practice more.

Yesterday, I went on a fleet that had several of my corpmates multiboxing capitals, and it made me jealous. I wanted to do that. But, I have enough awareness to know I don’t have the “soft skills” to fly them. I completely missed the boat on the carrier changes; I read the patch notes of course, but I never previously flew carriers in combat situations, so I didn’t really take the time to understand what those changes meant.

Capital Ship Rebalance Notes from Eve Keynote

I'm just about ready to take the weekend off to visit family back in Pittsburgh, but before I went, I wanted to share some news about the capital rebalance from Eve Vegas.  It looks like the Eve keynote contained some interesting tidbits, which will be expanded upon during the capital session tomorrow.  What we know right now, encapsulated in a Reddit post and subsequent YouTube video is:

• New capitals that specialize in logistics, with limited combat capabilities,
• Even titans will be able to dock in XL citadels.
• Refitting mid-combat will not be possible while you have a weapons timer.
• Supercarriers will lose their immunity to electronic warfare.
• Special weapons, Sickle-class doomsdays, which will swath through space attacking all ships in a single vector.
• Another doomsday, tentatively called the Hand of God, which can teleport ships away from the battle field into a random spot in the same solar system; it simultaneously warp disrupts capitals.
• All capitals will receive fleet hangars and fitting services.
• Titans will be getting more variety of abilities.
• All sorts of new capital-sized modules, including shield extenders, armor plates, neuts ranging from T1, to meta, to faction, to T2 varieties.
• Additional weapon modules that specifically target subcaps, called the high angle weapon batteries (better tracking than typical capital modules).
• Existing capital weapons will be rebalanced to be useless against subcaps.
• Capital remote repairs will only be effective when they're in triage.
• Fighters are going to be replaced with squadrons, which will be unable to be repaired (because they're squadrons of ships, hp is measured in remaining members; "you can't rep what's dead").

Here's what we can assume:

• Dreads will experience the least changes; they are characterized as having traditional weapon systems, as they do now.
• Carriers may lose their remote rep bonuses, and could double-down on the fighter bonus.  The new logistics capitals mean they'll likely lose much, if not all, of their logistics capabilities.
• We'll each have a new capital skill to train for each race (taken with the skill sink being introduced, means CCP's following a hybrid "train more" and "sink sp" approach).

So let's get into the analysis of what are, admittedly, sparse details.  But the details CCP has provided are enough to be tantalizing.

While I'm not going to be selling any assets or hedging any bets until the capital speech, some of these changes are well overdue, and great changes.  Carriers being both fighter boats and logistics in one left them heavily overpowered, and the idea that these two strengths will be separated is tremendous.  Now, CCP just needs to add an SMA-heavy capital with no offensive capability at all to be a space taxi (I'm talking 5 million m3 space baby!).

Likewise, refitting mid-fight took a lot of the risk out of flying capitals.  Limiting this ability so that once you commit, you're locked in for the same length of time as aggro on a gate... under those circumstances, a minute is a lifetime.  Firing choices have consequences now.  When you engage an enemy fleet, you've got what you've got, and have to live with your choices, just like every other pilot in space.

And, finally, supercarriers - in fact all ships - losing ewar immunity...  IT'S ABOUT TIME!  Fighting supers required a single ship type in all cases - hictors - and that struck me as very much being against Eve's mantra of offering pilots choices.  Ever since I heard about that ability, I thought to myself, "That's stupid."  They already had the ability to fly a whole mess of fighters, and had all sorts of interesting bonuses and huge swaths of hp.  Ewar immunity was just too much.

I'm eagerly anticipating news of tomorrow's speech, even though I'll be reading for it on my phone. I'm liking the variety of gameplay options these changes suggest.  I can see the evidence of a lot of different thought tracks leading to this.  From what I've seen, CCP is concerned about giving each capital a good role, new abilities, and new vulnerabilities to offset them.

Things are looking very good for capitals, based on these initial plans!

Scaling Fatigue?

Yesterday, I was reading an article by Kyle Aparthos over at TMC talking about local mobility in Eve.  His comments coalesced around some of my own opinions about jump fatigue and mobility.  On the one hand, I absolutely agree that capital fleets should not be able to jump across the galaxy at a moment's notice to participate in fights the way they did before fatigue.

But, on the other hand, it doesn't make much sense for a capital to be stuck in one system for at least 5 minutes or - if you're doing it right - 50 minutes to clear your fatigue.  That seems a bit ridiculous if you just want to jump to a nearby system.  Fatigue was meant to reduce the effective projection of capital forces, not to destroy the tactical advantage of jump drives entirely.

Let's get one thing straight... it is tactically unfeasible for capitals to take gates to defend a whole constellation under fire.  One set of bubbles can clog a capital fleet for 15-20 minutes, and when dealing with defense mechanics in place, that eliminates the value of capitals to attack multiple aggressing fleets.  Small entities are effectively hamstrung to having to deploy their limited capitals in only one system, perhaps two, during a reinforcement cycle.  That utterly defeats the purpose of the system in regards to allowing smaller entities to defend against larger ones.

So, long-range travel and force projection, bad.  Local force projection, good.

It Had to End Sometime...

I have been very luck with my expensive ships.  When I’ve flown carriers or dreads, I’ve done so safely and without incident. 

I use solid practices to move them around.  When I light cynos, I do it off of only stations with plenty of clearance in docking range.  I give plenty of distance between my 5 km sphere and all elements of the station, and have never bumped when I lit a cyno myself.  Before I hit the cyno, I do a quick dscan to make sure no one is inbound, so I know I won’t wind up in some random part of the system.

On very rare occasions, I’ll light a cyno in a system that has no station.  When I do, I watch the traffic for a while before I jump, and if it looks to get a fair bit of through traffic, I’ll use the self destruct cyno (setting your ship to self-destruct and lighting the cyno only during the last 10-15 seconds of the cycle, so the cyno is on grid for the barest amount of time), then immediately warp off to a safe and cloak up.

And, generally, that works really well.  So well, in fact, that I’ve never lost a carrier.  I’ve never lost a dread either, but I don’t fly them frequently enough for that to be a habit, as much as a lucky string of events.

So, I’d say I’m a very safe capital pilot.  Or, at least, I was.  My run ended yesterday.  All tolled, the butcher’s bill was about 4.5 billion isk.

And it all happened because of module positioning.

My Wife's Opinion About Our Move Op...

In the world of jump fatigue, moving RP's assets from Tenal to Deklein isn't just a matter of catching a couple cynos anymore.  No, moving assets even two regions away is now a harrowing, white-knuckled excursion where your ship is slower than the rotation of the planets around the suns of New Eden.

Plus - and here's a tip for you - when your capital fleet lands on a gate, chances are very good that you'll bounce off of at least one of your fleetmates.  I ended up 15 km off a gate after I was a bit late jumping.  So that's an added bit of fun.  Always "jump" instead of "warp" when warping in a capital fleet.  Doing the alternative causes a hilarious* mistake.

* Not really hilarious at all.

But more importantly, moving a single capital on your own is a colossally stupid move.  So stupid, in fact, that all capital pilots are now beholden to move ops, else they take a tremendous set of risks going gate-to-gate.  Such a high risk, in fact, that it simply isn't done anymore.  I sure as heck wasn't going to.

At least, that's my opinion on the new Eve.  You simply have to make the move op, or you're SOL.  My wife, however, has another opinion, which she considerately shares below:

The Fall of Titans - Three Takes

I could go over the details of what happened in B-R5RB, but I'm sure the news sites will do that.  Rather, I wanted to bring something different to the table.  A summary of "what it means", if you will, in three parts.  I suspect there's something here for everyone.

Mobile Depots, Carriers, and You

Just a quick one.  Check this out.  Just read the first paragraph.  An impressive bit of strategy is imbedded in a throw-away line near the end.

“Entertainingly, the Thanny dropped a mobile depot, refit warp core stabs, and warped away from the Nyx's tackle!”

That's brilliant.

 

It’s official.  If you’re not carrying a mobile depot around in your carrier to serve as your own refitting service, independent of a buddy carrier, you’re officially doing it wrong.