ECM
-The obvious thing is to have it break all target locks and keep them broken for some period, but so few things require target locks that this becomes unusably situational, and would be used almost exclusively by vehicles. That said, I honestly don't have a better idea. The best I can think of is disrupting the sensors on all enemy suits/vehicles in the area so that their radar is screwed up. Y'know, that on top of breaking locks.

Why not just disable turrets?

I would like to see vehicles be more complex and nuanced. I would like to see them require more player skill and practice to field effectively. I would like to see counters more complex than "Hit it with a bigger gun".

Vehicle pilots should be a breed apart from infantry and that means it should take a different skill set. Right from the start I've been lobbying for an equal and seperate role for vehicles that treats them as more than an accessory to the infantryman.

Capacitors would facilitate flexibility and nuance as you could ditch the clunky activation/cool down mechanism. Not having played EVE I'm a bit concerned at how well they could be managed in real time by a pilot who has other duties, but I think it should be possible to design a workable system.

I also believe balance demands that the larger vehicles should require multiple players to operate effectively. I wrote a post way back in Precursor that called HAVs a "Super Heavy Fat Suit" because they were one man operated, moved faster than a scout, hit harder and had more HP than a heavy. They didn't need anything. That leads to the current "debates" about balancing vehicles and AV. The AV guys point out that they should be able to solo a vehicle if the driver can operate it solo, yet the pilot points out that his ride costs far too much to support that reasoning. There's no way to settle the argument.

If you add additional operators you can justify it being harder to kill. You also add something much more important for the long life of this game, teamwork. Yes, it's fun to roll over the enemy team solo in your killing machine, but I believe that would pale in comparison to the pride in being a member of an elite tank or fighter team. One person can only perform so many tasks at once, that's why real world vehicles have multiple crew members. They can do more and be more complex. They can be more than an infantry accessory.

There is too large a focus on public matches as far as vehicle balance and use is concerned. Balance it for pub matches and you ruin it for corp play. Random masses of blue dots will never present an organized response to a vehicle, leading to AV strong enough to solo the vehicle. Then AV dominates in corp matches. I don't know the solution to this problem other than to allow larger squads into pub matches to increase the coordination of infantry or the elimination of larger vehicles from public matches. The first risks rolling a team of randoms and the second leave vehicle pilots with no outlet except FW and PC which is a tiny fraction of available battles.

Tank drivers don't want to share thier baby with blue dots, and I understand that. But that doesn't mean they can't share with a corp mate. This is a team oriented game and the larger assets should reflect that. This isn't CoD. Of course that introduces a requirement to share expenses to field the asset. You can't ask one person to foot the bill for the whole vehicle squad. Shared expenses plus also help bind the team together as they would have a strong sense of shared ownership.

There is a place for one man vehicles at the low end. LAVs, MTACs, maybe light tanks. Those would be simpler to operate and less powerful as a result.

I'm not huge on the idea of destroying turrets, simply because you run the risk of ending up stuck in a HAV that can't defend itself, but you have to stick out the match with it because it's too expensive to just abandon. It has the potential to turn into a really un-fun mechanic.

This is why I prefer the idea of using eWar on them. It only disables the turret for as long as the eWar guy is able to do so.

I would like to see vehicles be more complex and nuanced. I would like to see them require more player skill and practice to field effectively. I would like to see counters more complex than "Hit it with a bigger gun".

Vehicle pilots should be a breed apart from infantry and that means it should take a different skill set. Right from the start I've been lobbying for an equal and seperate role for vehicles that treats them as more than an accessory to the infantryman.

Capacitors would facilitate flexibility and nuance as you could ditch the clunky activation/cool down mechanism. Not having played EVE I'm a bit concerned at how well they could be managed in real time by a pilot who has other duties, but I think it should be possible to design a workable system.

I also believe balance demands that the larger vehicles should require multiple players to operate effectively. I wrote a post way back in Precursor that called HAVs a "Super Heavy Fat Suit" because they were one man operated, moved faster than a scout, hit harder and had more HP than a heavy. They didn't need anything. That leads to the current "debates" about balancing vehicles and AV. The AV guys point out that they should be able to solo a vehicle if the driver can operate it solo, yet the pilot points out that his ride costs far too much to support that reasoning. There's no way to settle the argument.

If you add additional operators you can justify it being harder to kill. You also add something much more important for the long life of this game, teamwork. Yes, it's fun to roll over the enemy team solo in your killing machine, but I believe that would pale in comparison to the pride in being a member of an elite tank or fighter team. One person can only perform so many tasks at once, that's why real world vehicles have multiple crew members. They can do more and be more complex. They can be more than an infantry accessory.

There is too large a focus on public matches as far as vehicle balance and use is concerned. Balance it for pub matches and you ruin it for corp play. Random masses of blue dots will never present an organized response to a vehicle, leading to AV strong enough to solo the vehicle. Then AV dominates in corp matches. I don't know the solution to this problem other than to allow larger squads into pub matches to increase the coordination of infantry or the elimination of larger vehicles from public matches. The first risks rolling a team of randoms and the second leave vehicle pilots with no outlet except FW and PC which is a tiny fraction of available battles.

Tank drivers don't want to share thier baby with blue dots, and I understand that. But that doesn't mean they can't share with a corp mate. This is a team oriented game and the larger assets should reflect that. This isn't CoD. Of course that introduces a requirement to share expenses to field the asset. You can't ask one person to foot the bill for the whole vehicle squad. Shared expenses plus also help bind the team together as they would have a strong sense of shared ownership.

There is a place for one man vehicles at the low end. LAVs, MTACs, maybe light tanks. Those would be simpler to operate and less powerful as a result.

I believe we should add a new breed of tank tht is more powerful, maybe somehow fitting 2 large turrets, and needing a team of 3-4 swarm/fg to kill. In no way should 1 guy with std av nades drop an 800k tank simply because it's armor based.

So there's an old vehicle dev blog that talks, at the end, about a dropship fighting a Marauder HAV by neuting its capacitor.

What is capacitor?

Skip this section if you're familiar with them already. If you're not, allow me to explain. Capacitor is EVE's analog to a mana bar. It is required for activation of most modules and regenerates passively over time. The dev blog linked above talks about DUST vehicles having capacitors as well, implying it will be required for active mods and even for turrets. There is no indication that dropsuits will use capacitor, which I think is for the best.

Isn't that just a vehicle nerf?

On its face capacitor seems like a way to make vehicles even weaker. All it is is one more thing a vehicle driver has to worry about. Now in addition to cooldown timers, you also have to make sure have enough cap to repair yourself, after all. I believe, however, that with a restructuring of the way active modules work around this new mechanic it could be neither nerf nor buff, but rather a complete change (for the better!) to how vehicles interact with the battlefield.

And what changes might those be?

Well, first off, I say we don't need cooldown timers on most active mods anymore. Well, not longer than their activation time, anyway. We could even couple this with allowing them to automatically reactivate when the cooldown ends. This means that when a HAV activates a booster, it reps 324 health once a second for five seconds, then, after five seconds, does it again! When you activate a hardener it increases your resistance by 30% for ten seconds then, after ten seconds, does it again!

You're an idiot, Alan. That sounds OP as hell.

It does, doesn't it? Well, don't write me off yet. Remember that these are limited by the HAV's capacitor. Running a shield booster continually, especially while shooting, could drain the capacitor in thirty seconds if not less.

Thirty seconds is a long time, and it still sounds like a huge buff to vehicle hp!

Well, you're not wrong, hypothetical conversation partner. This is indeed intended to make vehicles much more survivable. In what I'm envisioning a well fit HAV would be able to continuously tank a single forge gun, and tank against two for a good while. Given this it probably sounds like HAVs, and even smaller vehicles, would be nigh unkillable. Now, while unkillable isn't really my goal, "trickier to kill" most certainly is. This is where we talk about electronic warfare.

What in the name of satan's bright red pecker is electronic warfare?

In EVE it comes in several varieties. Sensor dampeners reduce locking range and scan resolution, target painters increase signature profile, tracking disruptors reduce optimal, falloff, and tracking speed, ECM breaks target locks, stasis webifiers reduce speed, and cap neuts remove capacitor.

Those things don't help me kill a HAV!

In those forms possibly not, with the exception of cap neuts though I suspect that infantry mounted cap neuts would have a hard time actually draining a HAV's cap. We have to think, instead, how can those things be applied to DUST in an interesting way?

• Sensor Dampeners
HAVs don't need to lock targets, so reducing targeting range and increasing lock-on time is useless. But HAVs certainly need sensors. That's how the operators see outside. So let's make sensor damps an equipment item with cooldown that causes periodic disruptions in the vision of the driver and turret operators of a vehicle. Frequency and duration of these disruptions are a function of the disruption strength of the dampener and the sensor strength of the vehicle, making them more effective against smaller vehicles. Warpoints could be awarded, perhaps a small amount for every friendly able to pass in front of the afflicted vehicle unmolested, or perhaps simply as a flat "vehicle disruption +15".

• Target Painters
-Probably has no bearing on this discussion. A better application of these might be in allowing forward scouts to give firing solutions to artillery vehicles, so they can hit things they can't see.

• Tracking Disruptors
-Used similarly to sensor dampeners, but not affecting the vehicle's ability to see. Instead, the rotational velocity of turrets is reduced, and the controls are scrambled. How badly the controls are scrambled would be a function of the disruptor's strength and the turret's tracking speed. So a small blaster might be largely unaffected, but a large railgun would have be extremely difficult to operate, making this most effective against larger vehicles. Warpoints could be awarded based on the size and number of turrets. +10 for each large operated large turret and +2 for each operated small, for example.

• ECM
-The obvious thing is to have it break all target locks and keep them broken for some period, but so few things require target locks that this becomes unusably situational, and would be used almost exclusively by vehicles. That said, I honestly don't have a better idea. The best I can think of is disrupting the sensors on all enemy suits/vehicles in the area so that their radar is screwed up. Y'know, that on top of breaking locks.

• You probably don't need me to cover how webs and neuts might work, I feel like those are pretty obvious.

So as you can see, it would remain difficult for infantry to kill vehicles without significant effort (you would have to cripple it with eWar before you'd be able to kill it), but much much easier to avoid being killed by one. One person with a tracking disruptor or sensor dampener will allow a whole group of friendlies to escape a HAV's withering blaster fire. Awarding WP ensures that there will almost always be someone ready to jump in and do so.

+1 from a tanker. makes tank killing a greater tactical challenge and makes electronic warefare meaningful.

I just posted this in another thread, it seems relavant.

Why should a tank be able to be unrivaled on the battlefield with no counter, you are just 1 guy, why should your 1 guy in 1 tank be better then 1 guy with his AV. I see HAV as a corp weapon more then a pub weapon where you are going to run into problems getting any kind of support.

I feel kinda sad when I read the forums because everyone complains about this or that being OP, but none of the examples really ever give examples of good squad play.

Really a vehicle is just a really big suit, a fast heavy suit.


[Edit]: However cap sounds good. Cap is life. I could see Cap allowing broke modules to be put into the game with specialized use that allow you to do certain things amazingly "at a cost"