What would be the outcome of a battle between a Titan and 60 dreadnoughts?
It shouldn't be a big surprise, ship power scales moderately with ISK in EVE and poor titans got the nerfbat again and again. The good question is why does anyone uses them? It seems alliances are doing something very silly. I mean they spend the resources to build a titan instead of building 60 dreads despite they have the pilot number and the dreads are clearly superior.
No, the answer is not training length, a titan is about 1 month longer to train than the dread. Also, the titan pilot is locked to his ship while a dread pilot can fly subcaps and most of his the skillpoints are useful in subcaps. The answer is neither "because we can't spend the ISK any smarter" since that could only be true if everyone would fly a dread or carrier already and the only way to increase fleet DPS/HPS is replacing dreads with titans, carriers with supercarriers. Even PL rarely fields slowcats and even that is only 60-80 ships. The reality is far from 1000 men capital fleets. No, the answer is not even doomsday alpha with the famous "16-17 to go through [alpha down] an Aeon. Not a lot." A dread volleys 100K, so 60 dreads alpha 6M, the double of the doomsday and they cycle in 14 secs instead of 600 like the doom.
My answer is "because I can't spend the ISK any smarter". I cannot fly 60 dreads. I can fly maybe two or three with insane multiboxing. On the other hand I can easily fly a titan. OK, Gevlon is being a nasty selfish goblin who ignores the greater good of the alliance just for peacocking in that titan. But what about the alliances full of "for the team" people, what about the alliances that are openly call themselves "space socialism" where people are taxed and the income is redistributed to newbies and those who lost their ships? Why do they go on the largely sub-optimal way of building titans instead of showering dreads and carriers to the people?
The solution lies in my biggest find in EVE: 10K member alliances are about as rich as a half dozen traders. Alliances can't afford to build dreads to their members. How can they afford to build titans? They can't. Those titans were built by their pilots. They are traders like me or farm sanctums/capital escalations for months, have a dozen Mackinaw accounts in highsec shooting Veldspar 8 hours a day or maybe they spent $3000 to buy PLEX but some way they individually gained the titan money. Then they faced the "because I can't spend the ISK any smarter" problem, they built the titan despite they knew that it's sub-optimal to dreads. But what can they do? Just altruistically donate their hard-earned ISK to lazy randoms who call them "lol carebears"?!
People keep commenting that my nullsec industrial ideas are pointless because the amount of rich industrialists who care about anything else than watching their wallet grow is near-zero. People are either in highsec counting ISK or happy blowing up things in battlecruisers in null. The existence of titans and supercarriers are exact disproofs: behind every single one of them there is a player with 100/40B ISK that he earned himself and that he donated to the war effort of his alliance. Supers can't enter highsec, can't jump to WH and it's pretty dumb to try to solo PvP in them. They are capable of nothing else but contributing the nullsec sov war effort.
The point is that every supercapital pilot donated 40/100B to his alliance, just in a very bad way. How could they be motivated to use the same donation in a much more effective way? Here I'd point back to my "ISKboard" idea. Topping the ISK board would be a much more visible and "famous" way of spending the ISK than having a titan somewhere logged off, hoping that you'll be online when some idiot warps supers to a station with thousand friendlies with interdictors. There are hundreds of people in nullsec who can make 100B in reasonable time. All we need is a system to reward/motivate the usage of the money better than building glorified jump bridges/command ships.
I'd like to show a good example instead of just preaching. I re-scheduled the training plans of my Ragnarok pilot. He will learn the fleet boosting skills after int/mem. If I find an alliance that implements the "ISKboard" or any other form of measuring and acknowledging those who contribute via ISK and not PvP time, I'll join and drop my titan plans. I'll use the pilot as simple offgrid command ship pilot. I use the titan money to top that ISKboard. If an alliance could grab just a few dozens of industrialists, and/or motivate those members who were already capable of getting supercap money to do it again, it will have more income than OTEC had. Before Tech nerf.
Wednesday morning report: 149.6B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
It shouldn't be a big surprise, ship power scales moderately with ISK in EVE and poor titans got the nerfbat again and again. The good question is why does anyone uses them? It seems alliances are doing something very silly. I mean they spend the resources to build a titan instead of building 60 dreads despite they have the pilot number and the dreads are clearly superior.
No, the answer is not training length, a titan is about 1 month longer to train than the dread. Also, the titan pilot is locked to his ship while a dread pilot can fly subcaps and most of his the skillpoints are useful in subcaps. The answer is neither "because we can't spend the ISK any smarter" since that could only be true if everyone would fly a dread or carrier already and the only way to increase fleet DPS/HPS is replacing dreads with titans, carriers with supercarriers. Even PL rarely fields slowcats and even that is only 60-80 ships. The reality is far from 1000 men capital fleets. No, the answer is not even doomsday alpha with the famous "16-17 to go through [alpha down] an Aeon. Not a lot." A dread volleys 100K, so 60 dreads alpha 6M, the double of the doomsday and they cycle in 14 secs instead of 600 like the doom.
My answer is "because I can't spend the ISK any smarter". I cannot fly 60 dreads. I can fly maybe two or three with insane multiboxing. On the other hand I can easily fly a titan. OK, Gevlon is being a nasty selfish goblin who ignores the greater good of the alliance just for peacocking in that titan. But what about the alliances full of "for the team" people, what about the alliances that are openly call themselves "space socialism" where people are taxed and the income is redistributed to newbies and those who lost their ships? Why do they go on the largely sub-optimal way of building titans instead of showering dreads and carriers to the people?
The solution lies in my biggest find in EVE: 10K member alliances are about as rich as a half dozen traders. Alliances can't afford to build dreads to their members. How can they afford to build titans? They can't. Those titans were built by their pilots. They are traders like me or farm sanctums/capital escalations for months, have a dozen Mackinaw accounts in highsec shooting Veldspar 8 hours a day or maybe they spent $3000 to buy PLEX but some way they individually gained the titan money. Then they faced the "because I can't spend the ISK any smarter" problem, they built the titan despite they knew that it's sub-optimal to dreads. But what can they do? Just altruistically donate their hard-earned ISK to lazy randoms who call them "lol carebears"?!
People keep commenting that my nullsec industrial ideas are pointless because the amount of rich industrialists who care about anything else than watching their wallet grow is near-zero. People are either in highsec counting ISK or happy blowing up things in battlecruisers in null. The existence of titans and supercarriers are exact disproofs: behind every single one of them there is a player with 100/40B ISK that he earned himself and that he donated to the war effort of his alliance. Supers can't enter highsec, can't jump to WH and it's pretty dumb to try to solo PvP in them. They are capable of nothing else but contributing the nullsec sov war effort.
The point is that every supercapital pilot donated 40/100B to his alliance, just in a very bad way. How could they be motivated to use the same donation in a much more effective way? Here I'd point back to my "ISKboard" idea. Topping the ISK board would be a much more visible and "famous" way of spending the ISK than having a titan somewhere logged off, hoping that you'll be online when some idiot warps supers to a station with thousand friendlies with interdictors. There are hundreds of people in nullsec who can make 100B in reasonable time. All we need is a system to reward/motivate the usage of the money better than building glorified jump bridges/command ships.
I'd like to show a good example instead of just preaching. I re-scheduled the training plans of my Ragnarok pilot. He will learn the fleet boosting skills after int/mem. If I find an alliance that implements the "ISKboard" or any other form of measuring and acknowledging those who contribute via ISK and not PvP time, I'll join and drop my titan plans. I'll use the pilot as simple offgrid command ship pilot. I use the titan money to top that ISKboard. If an alliance could grab just a few dozens of industrialists, and/or motivate those members who were already capable of getting supercap money to do it again, it will have more income than OTEC had. Before Tech nerf.
Wednesday morning report: 149.6B (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)
12 comments:
If you want iskboard developed, I reckon Peter could be persuaded with plex...
comparing dreads to titans is a little silly as they fill different roles and you will usually not find a lone titan (unless you go cruising in Amamake) - the real "problem" is that a (t2) sieged dread (unless it is a Phoenix) has about the same damage output as a supercarrier and supercarriers are supposed to be the primary anti-capital platforms.
Contrary to your belief even the large alliances don't have the manpower (and trained characters) to replace each of their titans with 60 dreads.
CFC+HB was able to field about 30 titans simultaneously in Delve, that would be 1800 dreads!.
"Even PL rarely fields slowcats and even that is only 60-80 ships."
Each PL pilot is guaranteed to have a carrier (recruitment requirement), is extremely likely to have a dread with t2 siege and is likely to have a supercarrier. SP or ISK is not the issue here.
(PS: suicide dreads are an option but usually dreads use active tanks)
60 dreads COST as much as a titan, not WORTH as much. 8 dreads play 50-50 against a titan. A fleet of 250 dreads+boosters would easily defeat 30 titans. They are practically popping one every second cycle. If -A- could reship from that tengufleet to a dreadfleet, they could turn the battle (assuming HBC can't do the same). The point is they can't.
Can't Dread bridge. Titans are vital.
Yes, 1 or 2 per powerblock.
What percentage of titans were built pre nerf(s)? Cyno aoe titans ruled the field in their day. When that was taken away, pbaoe titan packs still slaughtered entire fleets. Even when DD became single target, subcap blapping titan blobs still wiped the floor against anything but bigger supercap blobs. A lot of titans have been built since the day they were introduced. All the nerfs aside, as long as they remain powerful ships in their own right, why won't major power blocs keep using the swarms of them that were already built?
I think the problem is the in-game currency is more of a resource, something like wheat, than it is an actual currency.
Real-world currency is more of a social construction - it works the way the group decides it should work.
An alliance could define its own internal currency, not pinned to ISK, and demand taxes in that form, and hand out salaries and purchase goods in that form. Yes, it would gradually become interconvertible with ISK, but there are still more options available for the leadership of that alliance because of controlling its currency.
Supers and titans exist in low sec.
I am not sure about equating flying a titan with donating that amount of ISK to the alliance. When you buy a Titan, you get to fly it, so there is direct pleasure there. When you donate ISK, it's not quite the same.
Titans provide benefits to their owners beyond their basic statline, bonuses that Dreads don't offer. Firstly, they're infinitely more survivable thanks to their higher HP buffer, higher resists, mobility (not a word commonly associated with supercaps, but they don't need to siege to do their best work) and immunity to ewar and normal jams/scrams. Whereas dreads tend to be glass cannons in capital warfare, dying to one or two doomsdays or massed subcap fleets, Titans are vulnerable only when deployed without a support fleet and can benefit heavily from reps from Carriers/Supercarriers with their huge resists and buffer. Used with some caution a Titan might stay alive and fighting for years and outlive 60 dreads in that time. There are also far more engagements where a massed Titan/Supercarrier fleet will win with no losses than there are where a Dread/Carrier fleet of similar DPS would lose ships (and might even lose the battle as their DPS would drop off with those losses). In an ISK war, being able to field a force of supercaps that can win battles with no losses will beat out an alliance that keeps losing carriers and dreadnoughts. Likewise while losing a super hurts morale, crippling an enemy cap fleet with no losses is a big morale boost.
Second, both supercaps and caps can only succeed with a subcap support fleet. A supercap fleet offers equal performance while leaving more pilots to man the support fleet; replacing an entire supercap blob in standard caps on an ISK-for-ISK basis would leave very few pilots to support them.
Third, there are the ingame abilities to consider; doomsdays offer an incredible alpha, enough to volley any capital ship that hasn't been specifically set up to tank them in a single shot. While I agree that expecting alliances to field 16-17 Titans as a standard counter force is absurd, the ability to do such a thing and volley supers is an ability that dreadnoughts don't have. Jump Bridges afford subcapital fleets rapid mobility and open up a wide variety of tactical options, not least of which being bridging in interdictors to immediately bubble enemies for the rest of the fleet.
Fourth, there are the metagame bonuses to having a few supers over a lot of caps; as demonstrated between SoCo and HBC, having a large amount of supers at your disposal limits the availability of your enemy's supers, as they have to weigh the risks of committing their own super fleet. Because capitals are easier to escape or counter and harder for enemies to call together in equivalent numbers in a hurry, it's a lot harder to achieve the same effect with just capitals. Having a fleet of supers also makes the enemy less willing to commit capitals to the field for fear of them getting hotdropped and volleyed; that's mainly just an issue for smaller alliances that don't have a large enough super force to threaten their enemies, but it's still a useful tactic. It also forces the enemy to modify their fittings for capitals they do use to be able to tank DDs, which means less slots dedicated to damage, recharge or utility and makes the ships less effective at everything except surviving DDs.
Aside from all the benefits of using titans vs dreadnoughts, I think you're making a massive assumption when you claim that all the titans must have been financed by their pilots rather than their alliances. Your "source" for this is looking at the publicly kept books for a couple of alliances over a couple of months and that's it. You have no further information - you don't know about any 'off the books' income sources, you don't know how much ISK the alliances have banked, you don't know what other alliances funding looks like, you don't even have any alliance supercap pilots talking about how their ships were/are funded. Until you actually know how most supercap blobs are paid for it's hardly wise to start drawing conclusions from your assumptions.
..Gevlon, can't you see? No disrespect, but I think you are TOO smart to see, and you are so far beyond social behavior that you can't see.
I have 40b/100b, I can:
A) buy a dread/Titan and fly it to pwn with my alliance!
B) give away my 40b/100b and watch many others pwning with my alliance!
Can't you see that option A is superior to the individual in every way besides optimal use of his money?
Ok, so option B. my money was used optimally. Awesome. Can't wait to brag to my friends about how much good use people who are not me got with my money.
At the end of the day every alliance only has so many people they trust with a cap ship, and by trust I mean a combination of not idiotically wasting the ship and not being an thief.
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