The Capital presenation from Team Five-Oh has just wrapped up with CCP Nullarbor, CCP Punkturis, and CCP Larrikin fleshing out the sweeping set of changes to Capitol ships announced during the Eve Keynote on Friday. The presentation was very light on numbers since many of these details have yet to be worked out, instead focusing on the broad outlines of the planned overhaul. The presentation started with a series of profound changes intended to alter almost every aspect of how caps and supercaps are employed in Eve. First off there are some changes being made across the board to all capitals:
- Electronic warfare immunity for supercaps is being removed. Instead they will gain a resistance that reduces the impact of electronic warfare and very high warp core strength, stated to be between 20 and 50, which would require numerous points to overcome. Carriers and dreads in siege or triage will not be immune to electronic warfare either, just highly resistant to it. However, that resistance will also reduce incoming remote assistance.
- New capital modules including shield extenders, capacitor boosters, armor plates, propulsion modules, faction, and T2 varieties are being introduced.
- All capitals will get a hitpoint rebalancing to make them have lower hitpoints unless fit for tank. However with the new modules announced about this should provide more interesting fitting options.
- All capital ships are getting fleet hangars and ship hangars, allowing them to carry more cargo.
- Refitting will no longer be allowed on any ship with a weapons timer, putting an end to capitals refitting to maximize tank or DPS in the middle of a raging gunfight.
- Supercaps will be able to dock in the new XL Citadels.
Carriers are getting the biggest set of changes with the class being split into two distinct roles:
- After the changes there will be a DPS carrier which uses fighter squadrons to deal damage anywhere on grid and a “fleet auxiliary” which can triage and remote rep but has very limited damage dealing ability.
- Capital remote reps will become extremely weak unless used by a fleet auxiliary in triage, effectively making them the only capital rep platform. This also means that the max tank of a purely capital fleet will be the max tank of a single triaged fleet auxiliary instead of an infinitely repping spider-blob.
- The fighter attack carriers will become unable to use conventional drones or enter triage, relying on fighters to do damage.
- Fighter squadrons will come in support, fast attack, and heavy versions. Fast attack will target small ships and other fighters, support will provide electronic warfare, and the heavy attack will target larger ships. Fighters will have a variety of additional abilities to increase damage, survivability, and provide other effects.
- Fighters will be maneuvered using an interface that would appear familiar to anyone who has ever played Homeworld, something additionally supported by the new ability to completely detach the camera from a player’s ship and look freely anywhere on grid.
- Fighters squadrons will be different from drones in two very important ways. First off, a squadron will maneuver as a single unit but be composed of a number of smaller fighters. As the squadron takes damage the fighters will die, reducing its firepower and the impact of its electronic warfare. Because the fighters are dead the squadron will need to dock at its parent carrier to replace the losses; it cannot be repaired in space like current fighters. Second, no target lock will be required to attack with fighters, allowing them to be effective anywhere on grid.
Super carriers are also in for significant changes. The rebalance will put them squarely at the top of the carrier line.
- The distinction between fighters and fighter bombers is going away, with super carriers simply being able to field more and more effective fighter squadrons and carry more replacements.
- Super carriers are getting new remote electronic warfare abilities. Some ideas brought up by CCP Nullarbor included an AOE capacitor drain, stasis web, sensor damp, and perhaps a projected warp disruption bubble.
Dreadnaughts are seeing relatively little in the way of change, keeping their place as damage dealers intended to pump out massive firepower while in siege mode. The major changes here are more to the weapons they can mount than to the hulls themselves.
- Extra-large weapons are being split into two different types of turret, an anti-capital XL weapon familiar to dread pilots today and a “high angle” weapons platform intended to hit subcaps effectively.
- The anti-capital guns will be unable to hit subcaps, even if they are webbed and painted.
- The high angle guns will be effective against battleship size targets when the dread is in siege mode, hitting for the DPS of two to three battleships. They will have roughly the range of current short-range XL guns, and a very high rate of fire but low alpha strike.
Titans are also being reworked to become what are effectively super dreads, able to either fit for massive anti-capital/structure DPS or fit high angle guns in order to deal with subcaps. As well the menu of doomsday weapons available to a titan pilot is about to see a massive boost; the new doomsdays have a variety of effects that are intended to allow their victims to get out of the way but do horrible things to anyone too slow.
- The current Doomsday will stay in the game and operate normally, albeit with some tweaks to its damage.
- A “Sickle” doomsday, sweeping DPS over a wedge in front of the Titan. All Doomsdays besides the original one will, before firing, cause a massive capacitor drain effect on the area around them. This is to prevent huge blobs of titans from firing their doomsdays all at the same time.
- A “Pike” doomsday that projects a beam out the front of the titan for several seconds, doing damage to anything caught in it each second.
- A “Hand of God” doomsday that will teleport any ships caught in its effect to a random point in the system. All teleported ships will arrive in one location; they will not be scattered.
- A “capacitor overload” doomsday that causes the capacitor on the target ship to explode after a short delay, dealing massive AOE damage to anything around it.
All of this information is scheduled to be released in a Devblog in the next couple of days. As well CCP is planning to form a capital working group to allow for more player feedback as the concepts presented here are filled in with details; any pilot with a cap and a desire to make their voice heard is encouraged to apply to join.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written by FearlessLittleToaster, and originally appeared on TheMittani.com under his byline.)
