Posted - 2008.07.29 10:39:00 - [1]

 

Edited by: Astria Tiphareth on 30/08/2008 14:28:12
Edited by: Astria Tiphareth on 29/07/2008 10:41:04
A long time back, Oveur asked about environmental effects that could be in EVE. The idea seemed to rather die a death or get put on the back-burner, as it's no longer stickied or in the Common Ideas area. I'm sure it's been suggested before but I can't find obvious ones.

Having played around in Factional Warfare for a while, I found myself noticing that the complexes one can capture in FW add an interesting tactical addition to the PvP game. The way these are implemented are restricted deadspace gates that only permit certain ship types in.

This can have some interesting tactical results. A superior force can find itself unable to engage an enemy if they are missing ships of the requisite types. Alternatively, an FC is presented with the tactical decision of whether to split their forces. If anything, this is an interesting counter to blobbing, in that invariably only some ships can enter the complexes.

The notion I propose is to take this further. Instead of having complexes, one could have environmental effects that cover an area, restricting ship types due to scale (lots of potential RP ways of doing this, plasma storms, ion tornadoes, gravitational eddies and space-time washes, all of which restrict the ship size in some way).

How could this be applied? Lots of possibilities that could add to the game.
At the grand scale, you could add/change entire systems that are restricted, providing routes that only smaller ships can traverse or jump into.
On the smaller scale, you could have portions of the solar system affected by these effects. Anchoring some module within them (to pick a contentious one, lets say a cyno-jammer) means that your offence and defence is restricted to smaller ships. This might be advantageous for given groups.
You could have some belts inside an effect, meaning that resources and their access is restricted.
You could even have it occur randomly in systems for a period, and provided it appeared obviously on the map with adequate warning ('ion storm is approaching the system, it will arrive in 3 hours'), could provide strategic uses.

I could see small-ship strike forces attacking under the cover of a storm, for example...

To extend it fully might require some changes to what can be anchored where, as after all, the primary tactical reason to go to any system is to attack or defend something in it, and I doubt anyone fancies the idea of taking on a deathstar POS in cruisers. You could move soft-target infrastructure inside an effect and not allow POSes inside, for example.

I think there is a lot of potential, especially if CCP move away from all critical infrastructure being inside this heavily defended tower that just promotes dread blobbing.