Beren Hurin
OMNI Endeavors
O.M.N.I. Initiative
327
   |
Posted - 2013.04.04 14:12:00 -
[1] - Quote
So looking at Planetary Conquest (PC) right now, I'm wondering if people will have to really start to think about budgeting and escalation of effects. What I mean by this is, we are sort of operating off of the assumption right now, that it OUGHT to always be mostly profitable to bring your best gear to the party. It is looking like PC will require people to be pretty fiscally clever with their dropsuits and vehicles.
This is where escalation comes in. It is a pretty core principle in Eve, it evolves probably a little more slowly than it would in Dust, but it is a corporations way of managing the cost of risk over time.
In Eve it works something like this:
Day 1
You are a pirate corp going on a probing mission out of your NPC nullsec space in Curse into the rather benign Immensea region. The residents there are fairly new and their organization and tactics are unkown. You decide to roam with a fleet of fast tackle, attack cruisers, kiting frigates, and a little bit of t1 logistics cruisers. These are fast cheap ships totaling no more than 15 million isk that will 'feel out' the capabilities of your new neighbors.
You jump into what looks to be their main mining system to find some rather lucrative mining ships. You tackle and pop 2 ships worth already about 150 million isk. You proceed further into Immensea to their busiest hub hoping to find some people fighting NPCs with something even bigger. You get lucky and spot a carrier, tackle it, and get it into structure as a response fleet arrives to try and pick you off. They are mostly a fairly overpowered, shiny, expensive non-unified mix of ships that sloppily take out your heaviest cruisers' dps, but not before your group kills off a battlecruiser with a faction module, dropping 120 million isk worth of loot. You then return home with more loot than your whole fleet costs to build.
Day 2
Having an idea about what kind of response you could now get from your neighbors, you now know what to expect a little better.
This time you decide to undock with t2 shield tanked frigates. You get assault frigates, interceptors, and EWAR frigates. Your total fleet cost is around 200 million, but you can do a lot more damage, are significantly more mobile, and can nuetralize their damage much more effectively.
You scout out their system and most of them are docked. 1.5 hours into your mostly boring harrassing patrol you finally spot a scout frigate that turns out to be a spotter for a response fleet of about 850 million isk worth of battlecruisers. They have definitely escalated this time and are showing they want to play. You decide now is the time to test the mettle of their FC with a cat and mouse game to try and separate their fleet. After another hour of dancing through their system you come away with fairly even losses (100 mill on either side), but the victory is yours since you had the smaller fleet.
Day 3
You now know that they have the numbers and tactics to pull together a sizeable fleet. But so far, you have not seen hardly any disruptive cruisers or advanced cruisers fielded from their end, which means you still have a few cards you can play. You decide to run two fleets tonight one black ops battleship fleet and a decoy T2 frigate fleet mirroring the prior night. In all your fielded assets are worth over 1.5 billion isk. Your night is extremely successful though as you trap 15 battlecruisers in a dead end system and cyno jump your battleships into their system catching them off guard and getting 450 million isk in loot with no losses.
So this is the picture of escalation. Risk starts low and goes up over time as you discover more about the enemy. Right now I don't see this mechanic playing out too much, as people may spawn in a scout suit to grab a few initial locations, but proto suits will stay proto throughout a match, even though they could minimize their risk while downgrading their suits.
Thoughts? |
Beren Hurin
OMNI Endeavors
O.M.N.I. Initiative
327
|
Posted - 2013.04.04 14:39:00 -
[2] - Quote
Laheon wrote:Thoughts:
A hulk alone costs 200mil. So two mining ships (in nullsec, they'd be in hulks), that'd be 400mil total. Not including modules or rigs.
Also, I'd find it very hard to believe that 15m worth of cuisers would be able to break the tank on a ratting carrier. Especially before it managed to get out its fighters/sentry drones and wtfbbq all of you to the moon and back.
On escalation in DUST, I often do what Daedric just said. There's no point in starting a match in a militia suit, to go to the proto on the first death. Might as well run the proto suit right from the start, and if you die, switch to advanced/militia.
I didn't want to take to long thinking about the math a whole lot. So my numbers are off as you pointed out. He could have been an AFK carrier...? And they could have called in bomber support...
Anyway, I think you guys are making a good point, the direction things go in Dust is probably more from highly risky down rather than low risk, to high, then to something more level. |
Beren Hurin
OMNI Endeavors
O.M.N.I. Initiative
329
|
Posted - 2013.04.04 18:47:00 -
[3] - Quote
Kay High wrote:right now the escalation that I see is thus, When we started the open beta people mostly ran mlt assault, HMG and lots of LAVs. Then everyone started to adapt to the LAVs and heavies by equiping AV grenades and move in groups. As the SP got higher we started to see blaster tanks killing infantry left and right, now we are seeing more Railgun tanks and Long distance AV (SL and FG). You wardly see LAVs anymore and people are starting to complain about the heavies and the fact that they are more expencisve at proto level than the rest.
TL:DR dust is about escalation just on a different scale than EVE.
I'm really starting to think that these long distance battles will once again be disrupted by cloaking, low dB profiles, and deployable shields. It will force people to close distance and use lighter HP variants to compensate for these technologies. |