DIsclaimer: This is an opinion piece written by Seraph IX Basarab. This Article reflects his opinion, not those of EN24.
Over at TheMittani.com, Kael Attrell, a director within the Goonswarm Federation submitted an opinion peace regarding his thoughts on how overpowered logistics are. His claim is that they turn battles into an all or nothing situation. The argument is that if an FC doesn’t get a set number of logi, they simply do not undock.
To quote:
“The result of all of this is a disincentive to fight unless you know you can win, because if you can’t win outright then you probably can’t even get a kill. At this point, experienced FCs can make this calculation and won’t engage unless they can win, while inexperienced FCs often find that anyone willing to fight them has already made this calculation; either way, the result is either no fight or a one-sided slaughter.”
I realize I may be coming off a bit crude with this statement, but no shit Clausewitz. Military forces tend to not want to engage unless they know beforehand they will win. Not to quote Sun Tzu all armchair general style but obviously the basic principle needs to be expressed here. A good general ensures he will win and then heads into battle, a poor one heads into battle and then tries to win the battle. And guess what, that’s how real war works as well.
“Hey we don’t have enough cavalry to beat those guys in battle. Guess we’re holding up in the castle until friends show up or the enemy army wastes their supplies.”
Even catastrophic and horribly bloody battles like D-Day were more or less a certain victory. That’s because good commanders gather intelligence before heading into battle. This isn’t some new revelation as the article seems to think.
One of the articles linked in this piece even states that the issue is that due to increased number of logistical capable pilots, fleets have been getting bigger and bigger. Of course the other piece was written in the depths of Dominion sov which we now know contributed to the polarization of 0.0 and the real reasons fleet got so much bigger.
But actually this large number of pilots tended to bypass Logi and show its limitations. This is why the various Alpha doctrines were made popular especially by the CFC. Logi had been a tool of the smaller entities to stand up to the larger ones. Unlike “orbit and F1” that most DPS ships handle in the Dominion sov battles, a logi pilot actually has to play the game at a higher level. Lesser skilled entities would be inclined to use their mass numbers for mass alpha strike doctrines that bypass the logi. So the whole article kind of contradicts itself.
The counter to logi is simple: ewar. People should know this already and if not, one need only look at some of the fights that occur in w-space. People here fly high EHP fleets at point blank range with Triage and Guardian reps in some of the most expensive brick tanked fits out there. The numbers in fleets are smaller but due to the ship types used, the two sides can shoot at one another forever and the reps will negate any incoming damage. So what do they do in w-space? They use ewar, specifically neuting ships and damps with res scripts making the lock time of the logi ships slower.
If you think about battles as a purely DPS vs Reps game, you may reach the conclusion of the aforementioned article. If you also throw ewar into the mix you’re going to get much more interesting results.
So what is the actual issue, if there is one in all of this? People avoid battles they are certain to lose. So then how do battles ever occur? The fog of war. The real issue is that Eve is a game where you are provided near perfect intel due to local. Increase the amount of fog of war, and you’ll be more likely to see more fights.
There is one thing I did like in the article, and that was the possibility of “burning out someone’s modules.” Back in the day I had an adorable shobon newbie moment I will share with you. When I first started I actually thought that thermal damage weapons caused enemy ship modules to overheat. This is one of the reasons I actually picked a Gallente character so I could fly blasters and do that.
The idea of having a module (not a repper) actually do that is very interesting and adds another layer to the gameplay. One suggestion I would make is to make this a secondary affect of energy neuts and there are several mechanics this could be employed.
1. Neuts overheat enemy modules only when overheated themselves over a period of time.
2. Neuts have a chance based possibility to overheat modules but likewise have a chance to overheat the modules of the ship doing the neuting.
However I would venture to say that CCP would need quite a bit of testing and balancing before something like that would work. Different ships would react differently to such a new mechanic.
~Seraph IX Basarab
