October 9, 2013

Attack Battleships, Attack! or How Warp Speed Changes Haven't Gone Far Enough Yet

With the upcoming warp speed changes, it's going to be a brave new world. Interceptors are going to be climbin' in yo window, snatchin' all your fleet-mates, and all that jazz. Ain't nobody got time for that. (That's all the bad meme references, I promise). It's going to be seriously awesome. Really. But I can't help but feel that there's a lot of missed potential here regarding battleships and battlecruisers. Credit goes to a fellow corpmate, Xavier Saskuatch for bringing the idea up on our forums.

Right now, all battleships and battlecruisers warp at the same speed of 3.0 AU/s.  They're huge ships. It takes a lot of energy to get them pointed in the right direction and then hurtling towards that destination.  But how awesome would it be if the attack battleships had a significant edge in warp speed?

The Mittani had an article about this that displayed the before and after effects of the warp speed changes reflected from CCP Fozzie's post on the forums.

Here we see the changes pre-Rubicon, where every battleship, battlecruiser, cruiser, and destroyer warps at the same speed. Any warp you take in Eve Online in one of those classes of ship is going to take you between 11 and 97 seconds (although I think the longest system is what, 180 some odd AU?).

And here we're looking at the after Rubicon changes, where every tech one battleship and battlecruiser warps at the same relative speed.  Each class is becoming a little slower over all.

But why? Why lump them all into the same groups. Why not bump up the attack battleships and attack battlecruisers to something like 2.6 and 2.9 AU/s respectively? It's not a huge increase, but it'd allow for some interesting dynamics. Just off the top of my head, roaming in attack ships would be ideal - fast, hard hitting, maneuverable; warping ahead of the fleet as support; and just being a generally mobile gun platform. It seems like an obvious idea, after it was pointed out. So what gives, CCP?

[Edit: The author of the graphs has been edited to reflect their true source. My apologies to Fozzie for not remembering you work!]