Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece written by Seraph IX Basarab. This Article reflects his opinion, not those of EN24.
Just to be clear, the Phoebe jump range nerf was needed. Having a situation where everyone can chain cyno dreads and supers across the map in a blink of an eye ensuring any cap battle is a TiDi fest blob affair was not good for the game. Before the jump ranges all the effective nullsec groups were polarized into two main groups, CFC and N3PL. Even so, there has been some complaints about this and while I find most of them to be unfounded entitlement around a game play mechanic that made certain classes of ships simply over powered, there are some legitimate frustrations in regards to simply moving your capital ships. So the question becomes, how do we increase the ability for capital ships to move for the sake of moving, but not automatically rebuff their ganking blob ability which turned Eve into a N+1 scenario every battle? I’ve come up with a unique method players can move their caps that’s interactive, skill intensive and adds a new dynamic to the game. I call it needle threading and you’ll soon see why.
In pre-phoebe times you would light a chain of cynos at various station undocks and/or poses and jump your caps/supers across the universe. Today a similar method is used albeit at a slower pace with breaks between each jump lest ye anger the jump fatigue gods. This makes deploying/moving much more time consuming and difficult. Over all the idea is not bad. As stated above this limited alliances from dog piling onto every single capital fight all over Eve which staled the air quite a bit. It also kept sov holding alliances from leaving their space and messing around elsewhere without any risk to their home. Currently, now if you do leave your space undefended you can no longer hide behind millions of structure HP and you can very easily lose systems within days even to a meager force if no one defends the space. What about nomadic pvp alliances that have little interest in holding sov and simply want to deploy to the combat areas of space for the sake of pvp? Let’s take some of the tools CCP has given us and come up with a creative way to make it possible.
So how exactly would moving caps work under this new scenario? Say you wanted to move your capital ships from Khanid to Black Rise. You would take a probing ship starting from Khanid and find a wormhole. The scout would find a chain from Khanid and exit out into Black Rise. The scout would then orbit the wormhole and activate the entosis link on it. After a cycle, it would light a cyno. As this is happening your caps would be activating their own entosis link on the wormhole entrance in Khanid and after a cycle, they could jump to the scout in Black Rise. So you “needle a thread” through the wormhole chain linking one end of space to the other and use it to move your capitals through space. You never actually enter the grid in any of the wormholes. It’s simply a connecting bridge.
Did you just move your super cap fleet across all of Empire space in one jump? Yes, yes you did. This may seem somewhat OP at first but you have to take certain factors into consideration.
1. That scout had to find the wormhole chain. This requires time, patience and a lot of luck.
2. The scout has to entosis the wormhole and light a cyno requiring that there is an actual Vanguard subcap fleet defending the “needle.”
3. Capitals would land on grid with the exit wormhole so you have no way to actually hot drop a target. It’s strictly for moving, not long range ganks.
4. There would be some fatigue involved perhaps ranging from 24 to 72 hours of no jumping. Again the goal is to move, not gank.
So in effect you could move your capital fleet from Stain to Venal in one jump. However it would be extremely risky without already having a sub cap presence in your destination system already. This would also make it easier for people that weren’t on the move op to catch up. A lot of people have voiced frustration that they couldn’t be online during the move op do to RL and were basically stuck.
Now there could be a coding issue that stops this from ever happening. In that case I have a second more simpler mechanic which should not have that limitation. Instead of doing the above we would simply have a deploy-able structure in the form of a gate. The gate would be large requiring multiple Blockade Runners to move the pieces which would be assembled at the site. The gate would have to be deployed on grid with the sun. The gate would require an hour of “power up” (something something solar powered) before being usable. After the gate has enough power, capitals could pass through for an hour after that before collapsing and being destroyed (something something unstable technology absorbing too much solar power). As in the previous example the gate would allow caps to move from one system to another anywhere in Eve (minus HS of course) but would more than likely require a vanguard subcap fleet to keep the gate safe and the caps would endure some sort of fatigue penalty.
One, both or a single mixture of the two of these methods could be implemented, the 2nd more than likely being easier.
