Jonquill Caronite
Tronhadar Free Guard
Minmatar Republic
115
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Posted - 2012.08.18 03:15:00 -
[1] - Quote
There have been suggestions to make this happen, it is possible, and many of them were reasonable. HOWEVER, it would be initiated by EVE player and the ways it would work would be VERY balanced, but also very peculiar and costly to unlucky dust players...
Basically it would work like this, EVE players buy highly sophisticated and expensive slow ammunition (Missiles), these would be fast, but have a huge signature radius (Yes the Ammo has a signature radius, think really really small VERY fast frigate with Microwarpdrive on crack). In any case the attacking EVE ship buys this Ammo, and needs to buy a special Warefare Siege module to scramble a team to go on board the module, and load into the special ammo, this requires the ship to go into Siege Mode making it vulnerable for 5 minutes while it loads targets, and fires... Then the defending ship gets its shot to shoot the ammo before it even impacts...
Now assuming the ammo is destroyed in route, that's where the huge gamble comes into place for the Dust players, the destroyed ammunition will along with it, destroy the required CRU on board, all the clones, gear and equipment you decided to take into battle, which you must designate before the battle even begins... Effectively you throw away you couple hundred million ISK in Dust equipment without even getting a shot if this happens...
Then comes the next gamble... Depending on where you hit the ship a number of options will become available... Hit a non-critical area of the ship, far from any command structure, and you will have to complete OBSCENE amounts of objectives to move to the next area of the ship (Lots and lots of securing, and hacking, and controlling), and you must fight a series of 5 battles to get there... OF course you could get lucky and just hit the command center, in which case, its just one battle (Smallest odds of this happening like 5%)...
But before that even happens I forgot to mention how this ammo works, it does penetrate shields directly, so that's the first perk, but the downside, is it must drill through the armor of enemy Capital ship, and this process is a 12 hours process... What this means is just like laying Siege to a POS, attacking a Capital ship is NOT an immediate action, but a planned action, which means the Capital ship, has the opportunity to mount a defensive force to counter the oncoming assault...
After all this is said and done the various defenses on board these ships will be formidable... There will be some slight disruption in capabilities of the capital during battle, from sabotage, but not so much from crew deaths, and unfortunately for the Dust players they will quickly learn exactly how good EVE structural repair is when they realize that their sabotage efforts are quite limited unless they entirely destroy a module (Forced overheating until it shuts down). However, the real Coup de gr+óce only occurs when the Dust pilots after a long series of matches, incredibly complex control point and objective scenarios, and huge numbers of efforts to avoid ship countermeasures (Depressurizing sections of the ship, closing of routes that aren't hacked in time, internal sabotage by the crew to prevent raiding party progress, inaccessibility due to pilot using additional ship defense modules, etc), FINALLY reach the pod pilot, and then they can win... Anything short of this and the EVE player doesn't even notice this...
The way the balance should work is thus... Each piece of Ammo should cost 200 million... 1/10 successfully deployed and embedded (Meaning not stopped before it even gets a chance to hit the ship) attempts to board the ship should result in a successful match with standard default ship defenses, and standard default dropsuits used to assault. Since most wont get that lucky first match command point hit, this translates to roughly 1/25 chances in dusts favor at 200 million a piece only AFTER you successfully hit the ship... You can improve your odds with a specialized boarding EVE ship, specialized proto gear on the ammo, et cetera... They can improve their odds with drones and small turrets to stop the projectile, internal defenses, and a good counter boarding team, as well as their inherent odds...
Overall an EVE player who just shrugs off one of these boarding rounds even if it gets through should still have the odds in his favor, and will. Thus they can get lucky... But given the size of investment a capital ship is, most wont take that risk, and so they will be provided plenty of opportunities to swing the balance in their favor, and overall it will take MANY assaults to breach a standard capital ship, unless the boarding party is both EXCRUCIATINGLY LUCKY and SKILLED.
This allows for those miracle war stories and holdouts for both sides, but also makes logical sense, and is balanced from a cost benefit perspective since all said and done it will cost a Corporations at the very least hundreds of millions to use this method to take out a cap, and on average Billions of ISK. |