EVE is scheduled to see it’s first release since the Aegis Sovereignty deployment: Galatea on August 25th. With this upcoming patch players can expect to see a great deal of tweaks and changes relating to the new sovereignty systems mechanics.
Many of the changes to sov mechanics that came with Aegis sovereignty have seen mixed reviews by players, leading even to near virtual-riots in some extreme cases. Of these “features” the most often upset seems to come from the barrage of “troll-ceptors” that have dominated sov rather than the actual fights that were to come with the changes. With the Galatea update come several adjustments to the new system that intend to fix much of the unintentional grief that came with it.
The man behind the Aegis Sov plan himself, CCP Fozzie has recently overviewed the upcoming changes in a recent forum thread on the official EVE forums. The thread goes over in detail what to expect in changes for the Galatea release and is intended for discussing these proposed changes. One of the changes that stands out the most is to the Entosis Link module which will cap it’s ship’s speed to 4000m/s when an Entosis Link module is active. According to CCP Fozzie “The mass penalty is being replaced with a “speed limit” to 4000m/s. This means that the normal subwarp engines of a ship with an Entosis Link fitted will never accelerate it past 4000m/s. This limit was chosen to have the smallest possible impact on ships fit for engagement and combat while having a larger impact on the escapability of evasion fits than the mass penalty.”
Major changes regarding capture times and Command Node quantities are also to be implemented, which are also intended to streamline the new procedures. Most significantly changed are the base capture times of Structure Command Nodes which are to be reduced from 10 minutes to 4 minutes, and Station Services from 5 minutes to 4 minutes. The initial reinforcement timer of the sov structures will not be changed and are intended to keep their current base capture time of 10 minutes. The tedious amounts of spawning Nodes has also been decreased from 20 to 10 in order to help “reduce the clutter that builds up in lower value systems when capture events are left for extended periods of time.”
CCP Fozzie assures us that Team Five 0 is committed to listening to, and working with players to keep sov exciting and ever improving with stating “The Galatea is just the beginning of our commitment to iterating and improving nullsec and sov. We are hard at work on the changing[sic] coming in future releases, including formal methods for dropping sov, the ability to turn IHub upgrades on and off, updates to the formula for calculating activity defense multipliers, new PVE experiences for sov nullsec and much more. Nullsec and Sov remain our focus here at Team Five 0 and we’ll be continuing to update you on progress as we go forward.”
Although the major point of focus in Galatea pertains to “fozzie sov”,in a recent forum thread by CCP Goliath we heard of some of the new visual improvements that come with it as well. A list of such new content will include :
- The Dominix has been redesigned with a complete visual overhaul, new warp animation, and better implementation of the latest materials and shaders.
- The “Look At” camera has been modified to linger on an exploding target before returning to the active ship.
- Effects for combat and support modules (including Doomsday Weapons, Warp Scramblers, Scanners, Salvagers, and Tractor Beams) have been visually updated.
- Updates to behavior of NPCs (Drifters and Amarr Navy) for NPC vs NPC combat
- Defense of the Throne Worlds incursion
CCP Goliath does add that “features will come in over time and that the list does not necessarily comprise the entire content of the release.”
Many of the new changes, including those applying to sov mechanics have already been implemented on Singularity, and as always players are welcomed to try and share their feedback of the new features in the appropriate sections of the forums.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Wolf Merrik.
