Exclusive - Leaked Capital Changes Dev Blog

A Capital Idea!
By CCP Greyscale

When we revisited motherships and titans in Dominion we wanted to give them the power we felt they deserved on the battlefield. However our casualty models were not exactly where we wanted them to be at that time and we were caught by surprise at how quickly and intensely the player base adapted to the changes and started production of super capitals in large numbers.

And I mean really large numbers. When we started to see fleets of 50+ titans and supercarriers we knew there was an issue because these classes of ships were not meant to be used so often in such numbers. Something had to be done.

But we want to be careful because the players that own these ships spent a lot of time and ISK getting them so it's not feasible to simply cut their stats in half and call it a day. We won't do that. But we will look at making them somewhat more reasonable.

Starting Point
We asked ourselves "which capital seems the most right?" and the answer was carriers; the Chimera, Archon, Thanatos, and Nidhoggur. So we decided to use that as a baseline and tried to fit all the other ships in a logical progression in terms of cost to effectiveness ratio starting from carriers as a base.

First off, dreadnoughts will get a jump range boost to bring them in line with carriers. These will form the basic damage/logistics duo and will have the range to be more tactically flexible than heavier ships. In addition we plan to give them a specialized siege bay to hold more strontium so they can siege more often in an operation.

Next we looked at supercarriers and decided they looked like a combined dreadnought and carrier. We are OK with this so long as they don't replace both smaller ships more effectively. To prevent this, we are planning to reduce the jump range of supercarriers from a base of 5 lightyears to 4. We were also concerned that their effective hit points had become too high even for a supercapital so we are cutting their base hitpoints by either 25% or 33. Also, we are disallowing Slave Implants from working on capital ships.

We believe our models of capital pilot causality to be mostly accurate and we will stick to our guns for the health of the game. The changes will give the supercarriers a unique role in null sec warfare as "the Heavy Hitter". In contrast dreadnoughts are the flexible tactical damage capital and supercarriers are the short range "kill it dead right away" damage capital.

"But Greyscale, what about titans?"
They will retain their hit point buffers and the doomsday will be allowed in low sec. Also, we are reducing the activation time of the doomsday weapons to 6 minutes from 10.

There is some concern pilots will move en masse from supercarriers to titans but our null sec causality models suggest that pilot will stick with supercarriers for the most part, some downgrading to dreadnoughts perhaps as an option. We will watch trends and iterate as required.

Jump Bridging
There has been a lot of concern and discussion amoung the developers about mobility in null sec, especially in regards to jump bridges. We have plans for jump bridges at POS that will be discussed in a future dev blog, but I can address what we plan to do about the titan jump portal which we feel contributes to the current excessive mobility issue today.

We are planning to introduce a new capital class called mothership which will have a couple unique abilities. It will fit a revamped jump portal module which will allow players in fleet with the ship while sitting in a pod in space to jump to it when activated as long as they are within range and it has liquid ozone fuel. The motherships will have massive ship maintenance arrays (enough to hold 10 battleships) as well so players can jump to the mothership and then grab a combat ship to join the fray.

In terms of hull size and defenses it will match titans but will be virtually weaponless except for a modest drone bay. But when the module is active the ship is immobile and cannot jump, much like triage mode or siege mode. We're still working on the details, but we envision a mobile rally point base where pilots can get to combat and reship while still putting the jump bridge in danger more.

The flip side of this awesome new ship is that titans will lose the ability to fit jump portals.

Faction Future
Finally, we are planning a faction capital ship for each of the pirate factions. The Sansha have the Revenant supercarrier already, the Guristas will have a titan, Blood Raiders are getting a carrier, Serpentis are getting a faction mothership, and Angel Cartel will have a faction dreadnought.

Sorry, no love for rogue drones this summer, but we have plans for them in the coming winter.