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[Lyn Farel]

The other way to do it is diminishing returns, just like module stacking.

Anything past X number of titans or supers in system reduces effectiveness by an increasing penalty.

So fielding anything more than that number becomes pointless.

That is what I proposed somewhere in the past...

I would like to see to being with, supercarriers and titans being equated to commandships. You do not need more than one or two commandships at the same time. Maybe a little more for huge fleets, but not much. As long as the ship provides bonuses or advantages for all the fleet at once (like a CS) instead of specific personnal effects (like every other ship), bringing more of them is counterproductive and highly redundant.

Then you can find innovative things they can offer. A supercarrier would become again a mothership and could serve as an accelerated factory on field, instant producing frigates and tacklers for example for people to reship, at the cost of ore stored inside. It could host shield drones, offer boosts to other carriers... A titan could be used as an emergency shelter forcefield carrier that use strontium to deploy a forcefield that can hardly be pierced through, but immobilize the titan until the stront is consummed. It could also project graviton effects that have various suppressing effects on a huge area (not stackable). Like area webs, area disruptors, etc. The same way, at the cost of stront and mobility.

Of course, that would mean the removal of doomsdays and weapons that deal apocalyptic damages to make sure that their primary role is a unique role inside the fleet.

[Mathra Hiede]

I like the idea of either sucking the Titan through the jump-bridge it creates at the end of the cycle.
That would mean from my perspective that if you want to Titan bridge you had better have a damned good support fleet and a valuable enough target to warrant fielding it.

Either that, or we need a new Super-capital to replace the mothership (now Supercarrier-of-doom) that acts as the mobile command centre. Clone bays, bridges, the factory idea has merit as well. generall make it so supercapital specific abilities ONLY are use able on this ship, reducing the titans overall important to that of a gigantic gun reducing its value and perhaps seeing them actually used and destroyed more often with an emphasis on destroyed... get a decent SC fleet + support together and I am sure killing a titan isn't that hard.

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However if I was designing a new supercapital system I would start with 3 SuperCaps make them all equivalently priced to manufacture with three seperate and distinct roles.

Support/Command Platform
DPS/One-Hit-KO Platform
Mobile-Station/HQ Platform

Balanced out: Making these cost several times the current prices and only manufacturable in Special Super-Sized Industrial POS' that can only mount limited defenses and are entirely dedicated to the giganticly huge production lines and times required.

I think its best that only the largest alliances have access to these, but in doing so make them continuously hard to achieve - requiring parts from WH-space, Planetary interaction and heck why not (for when DUST goes live) give a bonus' to the production if they own the planet.

Also, making these Super-POS' large enough that you can house a Super in them safely and fixing the bump issue so they become persistent in space.

As it stands in their current form Supers are broken and I think they should be used as grounds to start a rebuild of Null-Sec and Fix POS's etc, all these mechanics are interconnected and simple balancing won't help much - shit needs to be done from the ground up again.

[orange]

I really like the idea of the Titans having a direct impact on the battlefield (as their weapon).  "Deploying" obstacles and area of effect impacts.

[Mithfindel]

On cost of supercapitals: Once upon a time CCP projected that supercapitals were so expensive that this alone would limit their number to a handful. Doing that again would solve nothing.

Similarly, making it more risky to use titans would mean that they simply would not be used except when odds were already heavily in the favour of the side using titans. A suicide module for a 30B ship? Not going to get used. Killing a battleship, after insurance, is a few tens of millions of loss. This means that nothing short of killing over a thousand battleships at once would be "cost effective" for the folks watching K/D ratio and other important things like that - and a few people using such modules "for the lulz" simply isn't enough.

So, in order to curb the amount of supercapitals ingame, there needs to be a reason to put them into danger (and risk having them killed), there needs to be a way to kill them and, more importantly, it must be possible to limit the amount of them being built. Or, offer something better so the supercapital pilots will move to that instead of using their supercapitals.

A lot of this could be done as a part of the POS revamp. One of the more important things is the possibility of removal of the starbase force field, therefore making it possible to potentially surprise a bridging titan. Of course, allowing the ship to be anchored / berthed in a future starbase (for example, password protected to allow only the owner to board it) would also encourage people to use their supercapital character to fly something else. Main thing would be to offer something fun to fly instead of the supercap. Of course, it might be possible to still attack the starbase. This could be combined with the always-in-space supercapitals, meaning that in order to procect the ship while not online, it would need to be berthed. If it were possible to insure the berthed supercapital, it would again lessen the risk to use one in combat.

Other parts could be straight nerfs. You've no doubt heard the usuals, such as changing EW immunity to simply very good sensor properties.

And finally, limiting the possibilities to build a supercapital. Require a rare material. For example something that comes out of a once-per-character COSMOS arc, or something with an otherwise limited drop rate (has a chance to drop only from officers, nullsec Sansha incursions or a nullsec epic arc). One interesting thing would be if the materials to build one of the required components would be possible to get only by salvaging something specific - such as very rare nullsec and/or W-space sites or other capital ships (say, a "ship AI" which would be constructed using "shards of already experienced AIs"). It would be ideal if the drop rate could be controlled by CCP. If it's a random chance to drop from capital ship destruction, then it would simply increase the price of the supercapitals - which we have previously agreed to be only hindrance, not a barrier to the growth of supercapital ship numbers.

So, my path to limit supercapital ship numbers would be:

1) Introduce a rare component, limiting the availability of new supercapital ships.
2a) Revamp POS. No shields, allow berthing supercapital ships.
2b) Berthing may require buffs so people trust their shiny toys to be stored there.
3) After people are used to berthing ships, make supercapitals permanently stay in space, therefore making berthing a requirement.
4) Add a "mothership" class, transferring supercapital ship properties (bridging, clone bay) to this class. Keep the requirement of rare materials (and therefore, the bottleneck) intact for the supercaps, but otherwise decrease the required build components to make them "cheaper". Potentially couple this with a slight nerf.

Hopeful end result:

• A new class of support supercapitals, the Motherships. Awesome and stuff, supercap pilots do have something to look forward. Build numbers limited by a rare component, therefore the amount of ships in existance can be controlled. Bonus if Mothership build components could be confirmed to drop from titans and supercarriers (at a rate where a few dead titans could build the Mothership rare component). They retain current supercapital features, such as immunity to EW. Motherships are designed from ground up to be "mobile stations", requiring some technology that doesn't yet exist in game, so getting here might take some time.
• Titans are still a class of supercapitals. Their role is fighting, and they retain the doomsday and guns. Introduce doomsday scripts to alternate between capital-killer beam and a "remote smartbomb" (perhaps slightly more powerful than a stealth bomber bomb, but targetable) and possibly other scripts. Titans have great stats, but are otherwise suspect to EW (even a very lucky ECM attempt) and are otherwise the same, but with reduced endurance etc.
• Supercarriers are now big carriers. They can also dock. Their speciality is fighter bombers.
• Regular carriers and dreadnoughts are alright.

The goal would be to transform some of the current supercaps to Motherships as well as curb the building of new supercapitals. After having the New Awesome Thing, it would create less resistance to nerf the Current Pwnmobiles.

[orange]

Would the Mothership get powerful weapons?  It could be interesting for it to "anchor" itself and then deploy up to 8 Starbase Weapons platforms.   Again, going back to the mobile station idea.

[Mithfindel]

If and when the POS lose the force field, it might be interesting for the hypothetical "motherships" have the possibility to activate some kind of a siege or triage module and generate a small force field around themselves. This might also unlock defensive batteries for the mothership. However, if they are allowed force fields and guns, we again run to the problem of someone just fielding a blob of them, necessitating some kind of checks - most importantly, that a force field cannot be activated in the vicinity of another force field. (Otherwise, you'd get some people literally sieged in force fields, if an enterprising party would get a sufficient number of these in the same place.)

But a lot of this depends on the POS revamp, and needless to say, is my daydreaming. The most important thing is that if CCP wants to limit the numbers of something by cost, it must depend on a resource of which only a limited supply does exist à la tech two BPOs. The difference with supercapitals, eventually, would of course be that they would be forced to be permanently in space (which required the berthing mechanism to work to avoid RABBLE RABBLE RABBLE), which in turn means that unlike T2 BPOs, which one could just potentially hoard in a station never to be seen again, one has at least a theoretical chance to destroy an existing supercapital, thereby signalling the system controlling supercapital numbers (whether this is automatic or run manually once-in-a-while) to make it possible to spawn new components again. (Or simply kill enough existing supercapitals to build the components from salvage.)

The build tree for the limiting "supercapital control chip" would be something along the lines of:
Capital wreck salvage + Unique salvage -> Supercapital control chip of the Appropriate Size

Capital wreck salvage means that new ships could be manufactured only after killing regular capital ships or other supercapital ships. The unique salvage would have a chance to spawn from dead supercapitals only or as a rare (CCP-controlled) random chance from exploration sites.

The amounts for the unique salvage components from player wrecks would be such that a handful of dead supercarriers could be salvaged with a reasonable chance for the parts to build a titan. A handful of dead titans or a large group of supercarriers could be salvaged again with a reasonable chance to build a mothership. A dead mothership could be salvaged to build a supercarrier or two, perhaps just shy to build a titan. So while existing supercapitals could be used to build new supercapitals, this would mean diminishing numbers - a supercapital death is, even when salvaged, a kind of a "supercapital sink". At first it might not be harmful to have the mothership class slightly OP to actually encourage people to not fear having their titans or motherships getting destroyed. (Or to motivate them to kill someone else's supercapital to get the parts.)

Exploration (or possibly, null/low incursions) would be used as a faucet for new unique salvage allowing the contruction of new supercapitals. However, the drop rate of the parts acquired solely by these means would limit the build rate of supercapitals to a very low number, perhaps one or two supercarriers per month - which would roughly translate to one supercarrier per month and one titan per year, or one mothership per two or three years (assuming no existing supercapitals were killed). After supercapital numbers were sufficiently culled, this faucet could be used to stabilize the supercapital population.

Especially if the supercarriers would be dockable (and thus insurable) I assume we would see quite a few cases of insurance fraud, killing unfit insured blue supercarriers to harvest mothership parts. (And oh joy if someone figured out to cut the middle man and self destruct - only to find out that when you do self-destruct, you don't drop anything.)

[Hamilcar]

Good points all around here.  Making them more expensive/easier to kill will not solve the issue at all.  They are overly expensive as it is and it will lead to smaller/poorer alliances using them less. Proliferation of overpowered ships is the main issue.  Difference between carrier/dread vs supercarrier/titan is just too much.  They should be bigger carrier and bigger dread, that's it. And reducing bridging/cyno capabilities as suggested.  In addition making planets and other than tech moons more valuable.  Today alliances leave systems behind in a blink because losing supers is more damaging than losing a whole region.  CCP started that already but not enough impact yet.

[scagga]

Then you can find innovative things they can offer. A supercarrier would become again a mothership and could serve as an accelerated factory on field, instant producing frigates and tacklers for example for people to reship, at the cost of ore stored inside. It could host shield drones, offer boosts to other carriers...

A titan could be used as an emergency shelter forcefield carrier that use strontium to deploy a forcefield that can hardly be pierced through, but immobilize the titan until the stront is consummed. It could also project graviton effects that have various suppressing effects on a huge area (not stackable). Like area webs, area disruptors, etc. The same way, at the cost of stront and mobility.

Of course, that would mean the removal of doomsdays and weapons that deal apocalyptic damages to make sure that their primary role is a unique role inside the fleet.

You propose titans possess qualities like:

Shield generator:



Mobile war factory:



And a Massive, hard to crack target which a commander can sit in and lead the battle from:



I would suggest that to rethink titans, i.e. change their inherent abilities by adding such things as the ability to create forcefields, war factories / banks of extra ships, etc, would be unfair.  Titans are already in the hands of the powerful and already have proliferated through the game.  Adding new abilities to enhance them or make them more enjoyable on paper will increase the disparity of power in my view.

I would suggest that such abilities would be excellent as new classes of ships.   To me, it's always been interesting to think about ships that can deploy and become structures.   Think of the 'dug-in' tank:



You could effectively fly several ships to a distant location in space, deploy them and 'wire them up' into a perimeter and create a something like a 'fire support base'.  All weapons would have to be manned.



But I don't think it would catch on.

[scagga]

Back on topic...

Titan Vulnerability

Looking at Titans, I would propose that, given that they are so large, it could be possible to target subsections of the superstructure. 

For instance, I would think it reasonable for the superweapon and jump-drives to be vulnerable to direct targeting and disabling (through advanced hacking skills and covert ops).  This would not destroy them, but it would  mean they would require repair / reactivation at a high cost of capacitor.

This would put the ball in the park of the skilled, clever pilot in a smaller, specialised ship to make a decisive blow rather than brute force.


Mothership utility

I think that when looking at the options that a mothership could have, we may agree that very few of them are available in the game.

Where are the abilities mentioned in the last post?  Mobile factories, extensive ship hangars, etc? The solution may lie in the design of T3 ships.  They are modular and thus can have many different phenotypes.

It may be too tricky to take the existing motherships and make such changes to how they are built, bearing in mind how many already exist.  The solution may be in 'Tech 2' motherships, that are built in a similar manner to T3 ships (except with conventional minerals).  This would lead to Industrial-leaning motherships, Covert-leaning motherships, Transport-leaning motherships, Firepower-leaning motherships, Defense-leaning motherships, etc.

Stations

I do think stations should be more vulnerable than they are now.  Currently a simple undock/repair option undoes hours of hard work.  I think a station that sustains significant structural damage should require significant material delivery to re-establish service, in the form of minerals, intermediate industrial goods and fuel.

However, I do not think they should be entirely destructible.   Stations could be disabled to the extent that nobody can dock/undock at them, but I do not think it would be reasonable to create a world where destruction cannot be undone.  Otherwise we set ourselves for space where a station wrecks will just litter the skies and reconstruction locations will be hard to find.   It would also set an unfair difference between NPC 0.0. stations and player 0.0. stations. 

The fun of partially restoring the functions of a 'wrecked' station also could be considered (some bandits living in a barely functioning station that they put back together).

[Lyn Farel]

I may have not been clear enough. I did not want to add all these features to Titans and moms. I wanted to delete the ones they have currently that make their power cumulative, and replace them by the ones I proposed above, which are for most of them supposed to make them encompassing to a whole fleet with only a single unit of Titan/Mom, much like with commandships. You do not need more than one commandship.

My examples are mostly rough ideas that came as examples to my mind, but I know they are definitly not well constructed or would need a lot of refining before being taken seriously.

[Alain Colcer]

I'll write here what i once wrote on FHC

Change 1: all capitals get the same jump range (dread-like in comparison)
Change 2: all capitals are vulnerable to  sub-targeted systems (weapons, propulsion, electronics), this means we can temporarily disable turrets/launchers, movement or jumping, disrupt EWar inmunity or reduce sensor properties.
Change 3: removal of the drone control unit

Carriers: Main role is the remote repping and combat assistance (tracking links, remote ECCM, remote sensor boosting). Can only field 5 drones or 5 fighters and nothing more. Bonuses do not give additional damage to drones/fighters. Small corporate/ship hangars.

Dreads: DPS projection, increased armor resists per level, cannot deploy regular drones.

SuperCarriers: DPS projection through fighter/f-bombers, +1 fighter/f-bomber per level, bonuses to damage of fighters/f-bombers, cannot deploy regular drones. Small corporate/ship hangars.

Titans: command ship role, uber-gun, fleet projection. Bonuses are centered around warfare links, fleet bonuses and other goodies. Cannot fit cloaked devices, cannot deploy regular drones. Can fit capital sized weapons, however they are unbonused.

To me that would be the best balance....ensuring your supercarrier or titan is not killed can only be accomplished by also deploying regular carriers as logistics, you wish to expose the titan? break the logi chain on the carriers ....

Also, sub-systems in capitals make more sense than in sub-capitals since they are such large plataforms....





On the "berthing" thing mentioned in this thread, i like it. I always thought it should be a requirement to somehow park the titan and supercarrier than to leave it attached to a character forever....