This article has been reproduced here with the permission of its original author – RoCkEt X a member of Sniggerdly Corporation within Pandemic Legion. All views and options should be considered that of RoCkEt X and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of Eve News 24 or its Staff. The text has not been altered from its source which you can read here.
Introduction:
Hello! For those of you who don’t fly Supers or capitals, allow me to introduce myself. In-game I’m known as ‘Rocket X’; I started playing EVE at the very beginning of 2005. So yes, I’ve been around a long time. I found my ‘calling’ in-game when I started flying capital ships. I started doing so as the head FC of a small alliance in lowsec sometime in 2007, by mid 2008, I had my first supercapital – a Wyvern, and lost it to an awox within a year of owning it.
I’ve come a long way since those days. I started to hunt down and kill capital ships, then later started hunting super-capitals. Initially, I started out with two close friends, running around and killing solo Supers here and there between the three of us. Eventually, people noticed and started to hunt for us. We realised it pretty quickly, and spent a lot of time working on measures to keep us safe whilst flying our Supers. We were hunted by many of the big names of the day: -A-, Atlas, Goonswarm, Cry Havoc, and PL to name but a few.
Eventually, we became so used to behaving unpredictably, that people stopped looking for us, and thus the hunted became the hunters. Time passed and friends came and went. More time passed and we decided to merge our small alliance into Pandemic Legion. With the help of our new alliance and some like-minded people, our hunting exploded into success. We formed #REKKINGCREW, and the internal PL hunting team known as #TEARS and went to work.
In the last two years, we’ve discovered new mechanics and pushed them to the breaking point. Sometimes these mechanics have been broken. And by broken I mean – it’s not declared an exploit, but we knew it was wrong. Some of those mechanics we’ve publicized and pushed for balance and progress to get them removed. [Sunbounce cyno, garage door cyno, Titan log-in bumping, POS field server-tick manipulated bumping etc].
For me, the opportunity to be part of the focus group is a chance to help fix some of these mechanics and loopholes before they become broken or overpowered. Capital combat affects almost everyone. Whether you fly them, get shot by them, live near them, or not – the changes being made to capitals will likely affect your gameplay.
History: From introduction, through to pre-Dominion era.
Most of you won’t remember this. Capitals were very different to where they are now. When Carriers were first released, they had similar EHP to a modern buffer tanked fleet battleship. (42.5k armor on a Thanatos… imagine it repping 90% of it’s armor in a single dual rep triage cycle).
So let’s look back, and I’m going to do this by ship class – it seems the easiest way. Remember, whilst looking at these, the biggest capital fleet in EVE at the time was Ascendant Frontiers – with 10-man capital fleets, and later Mercenary Coalition with approximately a 40-man capital fleet.
On the plus side, the old jump effect lightning tunnels were amazing and new players should definitely get to experience the horror of those lightning funnels spawning capitals right on top of their fleet!
Dreads: Back when Dreads first came out, blap Dreads weren’t a thing – the siege module had a massive penalty to turret tracking, and nerfs to explosion velocity and radius for missiles. Dreads were literally designed for shooting POSes, and other [stationary] capitals (by this I mean, other sieged Dreads). Flying a Dread literally sucked. 10 minute siege timers, unable to shoot any ship (capital or otherwise) moving more than 5m/s. Even so, you had so few hitpoints that being shot by another Dread generally didn’t end very well, or last very long… see for yourselves!
Carriers: Even after the hitpoint buff, RR Carriers weren’t really a thing yet – most had local reps fit – and drone control units, and using triage wasn’t really a thing either. If a Carrier jumped in, the general consensus was that you should probably run for it. Ultimately, Carriers were used for what blops are in modern EVE – as DPS platforms with jump drives. Here’s a youtube link from a pilot known as ‘DaMiGe’ (original file: http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/damige/damigecontrol.wmv)
SuperCarriers (Then called Motherships): In lowsec, flying a SuperCarrier was amazing. HICs did not yet exist, so with minor exception (NPCs could still tackle you at one point), it was impossible to be tackled (though X13 did famously kill one using bumps to stop him warping, and neuts to stop him jumping out).
Titans: Well, they were quite something. Titans could fit the same guns as Dreadnaughts, but nobody ever did. Titans could not fit siege modules and had no significant damage bonus. A max damage Titan back in those days would do less DPS than an average fit modern battleship. Titans, as with nearly all capitals, were active tanked with dual capital local repairers and an X-type tank. The doomsday was an AoE grid-wide super weapon that hit every ship on grid for 70,000 damage regardless of its size. For a short period of time, you could also fire your doomsday through a cyno – the Titan never had to enter the grid.
Oh and by the way, the Ragnarok’s Doomsday was glorious!
As you can imagine, the remote doomsday was nerfed pretty quickly. Titans normally fitted Nosferatu and Smart bombs in their high slots, essentially ways to clear tackle – similarly to the way you’d fit a drive-by Titan today. But back then there really was no reason to fit anything else!
Heavy Interdictors: HICs initially did not exist, they were introduced a year or so after the introduction of supercapitals (well before Dominion) as a way of tackling them in low security space, previously there was no way to tackle them properly, other than bumping them to prevent warp, and neuting them to prevent jump-out (x13 were the first group to pull off a supercapital kill in lowsec without the use of a HIC).
Whilst their introduction wasn’t particularly relevant to capitals as a whole, it did stop people gate camping with their SuperCarriers. It wasn’t unusual to camp a gate with an over tanked command ship with a ‘Mothership’ sitting cloaked 20km away.
Meta & Mechanics: From inception to the pre-Dominion era.
So, Carriers were essentially drone based blackops, remote reps were used sparsely, but similar in the way a remote rep BS gang would have worked back in the day, incorporating both local and remote reps. Capacitor chains weren’t really a thing either. Dropping Carriers as a small gang would be pretty cool, I did it myself several times and had a lot of fun – but capitals were still relatively rare and somewhat feared by pilots not familiar with them. For nullsec combat (remember at this point SOV warfare was based on how many moons your alliance had POSes on) Carriers were ultimately dropped to counter larger sub-capital fleets alongside Dreadnaughts to engage hostile POSes. Though it would be unheard of to see more than 10-15 capitals in a fleet.
Dreads were pretty much useless unless you were fighting other Dreads or shooting POSes. Yes, they did get used to shoot well tackled Carriers occasionally, but it wasn’t really the ‘done thing’. If you were going to drop capitals to kill Carriers, you’d probably just drop more Carriers…
SuperCarriers were kind of useless, as their only advantage was they had slightly more EHP, and they were immune to electronic warfare… but EWAR wasn’t particularly ‘a thing’ back then either, despite the fact that a pre-nerf Arazu could damp a Carrier down to 8km, whilst tackling it from 40km. They were great in lowsec in the days before HICs existed, but had no real place on the capital battlefield.
Titans were simply used for their doomsdays and bridges. Did you know that a long time ago, CCP hoped that battleships wouldn’t be commonplace, and there would only be a few of them providing the ‘backbone’ of a fleet? Well – they got it wrong, and made the same mistake with Titans. Too many of them quickly became a problem. Some fleets even went Doomsday-proof (max tank and plates etc), and then quickly had a second Titan jump in and doomsday them and got obliterated. Obviously, this leads me into balancing.
Part 2 to be published tomorrow.
