Thursday Matinée: Ragnarok
..in which Aiden attempts to segue from entertaining video to political discourse and hypothetical game fixes.
Being predominantly a high-sec griefer-type, I have almost zero experience with Capital ships. I’ve been around a Carrier all of probably twice, and I’ve (thankfully) never been in a major Cap battle where Supercaps, Titans, and crushing TiDi are blapping everything off the field before they can even cycle their guns (“huh, weird, why aren’t more people in null?” say the guys bringing nukes to a knife fight). So, videos like today’s are actually pretty illuminating to me to.
Supercaps and Titans certainly get their screen-time in plenty of usually hard-to-follow nullsec battle vids, but its a rare chance to get behind the wheel of one, so to speak, and view the blappage through the Titan pilot’s eyes. Way back when aggression rules in highsec were hilariously broken and Orca swapping was new, I used to go around in a shuttle can-flipping everything I possibly could to get literally every miner across 10 belts to aggress me before hot-swapping to a Cynabal and going on an all out rampage. A similar experience is being a kid and running across a field of dandelion puffs kicking them all as you go and laughingly watching them whimsically explode around you; hopefully, you can see why this video brought up that memory.
Oh, and for the love of god, turn the sound off after the first minute or two.
There’s always a lot of talk about re-balancing SCs and Titans; that they’re too powerful, that major alliance-blocs overly use them to project power in stupidly over-powered ways. I usually agree with that mindset, but watching that video certainly highlights some things.
Yes, null alliance-blocs over-use Supercaps and Titans, and yes, massive fleets of them are ridiculous power-projections. But, in my humble opinion there’s nothing unbalanced about Titans themselves; it is the ability to mass-produce and use them en-mass that is out of sync.
If we’re being lore-friendly (and I’m usually not), something as unfathomably massive as a Titan, which can literally effect the tidal patterns of planets it gets too close to, should be an absolute beast on the battlefield. It should be something that turns the tides of battle, a force of reckoning, and a seriously “oh shit” moment for the enemy. It can one-shot battleships? Why the hell not! It’s the size of a small moon and has guns that shoot bullets the size of a two-car garage 4 at a time.
Titans and SCs actually fill a pretty great role in large-scale null-combat, and yes, I do think that only the biggest, richest blocs should be able to afford to use them; that just makes sense. However the ease in which they’re both built and utilized has gotten to a ridiculous level. When you start having gigantic fleets of them running around, and that there are allegedly more than twice as many being built at any given time than lost, then things are officially out of hand.
What if we did something like raise the mineral price of Supercaps and Titans by 20x? Again, I’m hardly an expert on nullsec Capital warfare, but I wonder if that would be a step in the right direction. Certainly, the huge blocs would find a way to still fund building them, but at a sharply decreased rate. Committing a Titan or SC to a fight would have much steeper consequences, especially as the number of them in space began to slowly decrease with the dramatically lowered build numbers. Again, I don’t believe that Titans and Supercaps themselves are OP, but rather its the silly manner in which they’re so easily made and proliferated (speaking relatively) that is over-powered and unbalanced. Thoughts and discussion on the idea are welcome.
Anyways, happy Pi day, and enjoy the blappage.
-Aiden
Finders & Keepers 
The only problem with raising the mineral cost x20 is that you’ve increased the wealth of every super owner by 20x and decreased the ability of anyone not already owning one to have one by x20. If nukes are the means of war those without them aren’t playing the game.
Definitely a good point. On the other hand, it would also be 20x more devastating to lose one, and you might think 20x harder about committing yours to a fight. As for decreasing the ability of those not already owning one to get one, well, that’d be the point; that we’d hopefully get back to a place where only a handful of entities could afford them, as both using and losing them would be so much more costly. Granted, CFC and PL would still be the big kids on the bloc(k) for a long time, and I’m unsure if that would end up being a huge power imbalance or an Achilles heel for them, but an interesting thought.
The prices were originally designed to be prohibitive, that didn’t work out. As I understand it, the build time, rather than the cost, is the current bottleneck. Unlike cost, it is one that is quite difficult to circumvent (circumventing high cost just means having more money – and given the imbalance between a few of the biggest alliances and everyone else, it would be difficult to find a place where ‘middle class’ alliances could still possibly reach for a titan while making them reasonably expensive for the GSFs of the world.)
20x might help. Making them take even longer to build. Or, perhaps make them less effective the more of them there are on the field. Like, past a couple on each side, a lot less effective.
The longer build and “more = less” concepts are pretty interesting that work well together especially since I think the issue really needs a two-pronged fix: discourage supercap blobbing as well as de-escalate the already massive number of them out there. Again though, if we could get to a point where there were like, 30 supers out, I wouldn’t actually mind that only the GSFs of Eve had them. Problem is, until then, there are still closer to 5,000 out there, and so yes, prohibiting the little guy from competing in that sort of arena becomes a real issue.
I liked Two-step’s (or was it Trebor’s idea) in that supercaps should require a “core” from a previous supercap (which may not always drop).
I believe it was Trebor’s idea, and yeah, I kind of like it. There’s certainly an element of “rich get richer, poor get poorer” but at the same time, it goes a long way in the right direction of reducing the general numbers of SCs and Titans overall.