First Impressions of Mining Barge and Exhumer Changes

Last week brought about Inferno 1.2, with significant changes to the ORE fleet of barges and exhumers. After spending a bit of time looking at them, I think CCP let the pendulum swing too far the other way.

Barges before were paper thin, a 10-hour old character in EVE would have enough skills to destroy one with ease. In addition, only 3 of them were worthwhile. Miners would fly a Retriever, Mackinaw or Hulk, there really was no reason to fly anything else, based on the skills required and the bonuses and capacity of those ships. That was then.

CCP blogged about the changes to the mining fleet, and although the concept is sound, the implementation is a bit off. To summarize, there are basically three types of ship now: tank, capacity and performance. It sounds good in theory. The "Tank" is the Procurer or Skiff, with a high EHP and a small hold. The "Barrel" is the Retriever or Mackinaw, with a whopping 30,000m3 +/- of capacity in the ore hold, and the "Performer" is the Covetor or Hulk, with the smallest ore hold and the fastest cycles. Again, this still sounds good. You can fit up a Skiff or Procurer with a solid tank to withstand gankers in any hisec system, the Retriever and Mackinaw are the kings of the ice field with amazing capacity, and the Covetor or Hulk are the fast cyclers, making them ideal for fleets (or the unlikely lo-sec/null-sec solo mining). Unfortunately, CCP really hasn't built any downsides into the middling ship of the fleet: the Mackinaw and Retriever.

This ship needs to be iterated quickly. It is the ultimate AFK mining machine, which is the antithesis of what EVE should be about - player interaction. I have spent three days mining ice in my "new" Mackinaw. It gets around a 70% reduction in cycle times, and holds 35 sheets of ice, with 26,000 EHP and middling resists (66/63/72/77). It sits, ignored, in an ice belt, for 48 minutes, then I can warp to the station, unload, and go back. Yes, I can (AFK, at work on the sly) pull in 350 sheets of ice during a workday, and only touch EVE 10 times.

If the price of ice doesn't crash soon, it's only because the CFC and the HBC are bridging 800 man fleets around for the fun of it, artificially inflating the price of ice.

Using a Mackinaw in a mining configuration (less than ideal) I'm pulling in about 100,000 units of Pyroxeres every 15-odd minutes.

I'm no game designer, but there is no reason to own or fly a Hulk today. The "performance" boost of a Hulk is no match to the sheer volume and AFK nature of the Mackinaw, and with a 26,000 EHP tank, CCP had better improve their bot detection routines, because real people can mine AFK far to easily with this new ship.

I think the following things need to happen with the barges, specifically the Mackinaw:

• Ore Hold size needs to be revisited.
• Mining Rigs need CPU drawbacks.
• Mining Upgrades need stacking penalties.
• CPU/PG levels need to be revisited on all mining vessels (lowered, in general).
• Role bonuses on Tech 2 ships need to be revisited.

Practically every other ship in EVE requires you to make a compromise (the other obvious failure in this is the Drake). In the Mackinaw, you get a solid tank, with huge capacity, and shortened cycles, resulting in a very imbalanced ship. It's no wonder this ship costs almost twice the price of a Hulk right now.

Ships in my Hangar

I've not been logging in a lot lately, but I've been collecting my ships from around New Eden into a central staging system. After 4 years, I had a lot of ships scattered around, and now I find I just have a lot of ships. It doesn't help that I used to play Somer.blink and collected my wins instead of cashing them out.

Upon doing this list, I realized that I have a serious problem – too many ships. So the first thing I did was donate some hulls to Hulkageddon for prizes. The other interesting tibit was that I don't have a single battleship in my staging hangar. I have a couple hulls stored in HiSec, but not one fit up Battleship. I never really liked them. Too slow and deliberate for my style.

Saying that, I like frigates a lot, even though they aren't the hardiest of ships. I added up the numbers, and (excluding T1 hulls) I have almost 48 frigates in my staging hangar. Here's a sampling of them:

Enyos (a lot) - I really like this AF, and it's even more awesome since Crucible.
Ishkurs I keep meaning to set one of these up as a losec PvE boat.
Jaguars and Wolves - Did I mention that when AFs were buffed in Cruicible I bought a lot of them?


Helios - A decent LoSec prober for exploration. Less useful in Null (where I fly a Cheetah instead)
Keres - I've never fit up the Keres. I am really annoyed by Sensor Damps in PvE, so I really have to try it soon in PvP to see if it annoys others. But it requires good support to survive.

Ares - tackle. Because fleet tackle matters.
Taranis - tackle with a bit of a bite. Also a good 1v1 boat.

Hounds & Nemesis' - my old CEO loved bombers and hot drops. I've bombed badly a number of times, not sure I've ever done it well.

I won't go into the other hulls. Lets just say I have too many ships, and I need to start losing some.

On ships, skills, and balancing

CCP released a doozy of a devblog today. Initially not having clear language about skills and ships flown with the suggested change to racial battlecruisers and destroyers brought up a threadnaught in the forums that is settling in at 30+ pages after a couple hours. In all this, the concept of changing ships from straight tiers to roles has been largely ignored, but the skill change got me thinking, which is never a good thing.

Ship skills are the basis of everything about EVE. So I'm going to suggest some changes that actually make  more sense than racial destroyers (but I agree with racial battlecruisers).

Tech 1 Ship Skills
Tech 1 ships (and Pirate/Navy ships) require the appropriate Tier 1 skill (frigate/destroyer/cruiser/battlecruiser/battleship) and a matching skill in Spaceship Command, but not the class below it. A new player in EVE always gets basic Spaceship Command and racial Frigate skills. Currently that player has to grind up through both to get to the next tier, and so forth. My suggestion is to streamline this path and allow a player to drop in at whatever size ship they want.

To train for a frigate, you much have Spaceship Command 1
To train for a destroyer, you must have Spaceship Command 2 (not Frigate 4)
To train for a cruiser, you must have Spaceship Command 3 (not Destroyer 4 or Frigate 4)
To train for a battlecruiser, you must have Spaceship Command 4
To train for a battleship, you must have Spaceship Command 5

If a player wants to leap straight into battlecruisers, why force them to train ship skills that are not relevant to the battlecruiser class at all? Spaceship Command 4 then any racial Battlecruiser is open to you to train.

Tech 2 Ship Skills

For Tech 2 ships, change the skill tree to require Advanced Spaceship Command (the cost of this skill should come down to around 10 million +/-) with a corresponding change to the pre-requisite of Spaceship Command 4 (instead of 5). The Advanced Spaceship Command skill level would have to increase with the ship size, just like the Tech 1 version:

Tech 2 Frigates require Advanced Spaceship Command 1

Tech 2 Destroyers require Advanced Spaceship Command 2

Tech 2 Cruisers require Advanced Spaceship Command 3

Tech 2 Battlecruisers require Advanced Spaceship Command 4

Tech 2 Battleships require Advanced Spaceship Command 5

 In addition you would only need the minimum skills to fly the Tech 1 version of the ship. Using a frigate as the example, Tech 2 Frigates require Advanced Spaceship Command 1and the racial Frigate skill to fly the Tech 1 variant of that frigate. Then for the ship bonuses, map the bonuses based on the source ship type. So (for example) the Enyo is based on the Incursus, which requires Gallente Frigate 3. So to sit in an Enyo, you would train the following skills:

Spaceship Command 4
Gallente Frigate 3
Advanced Spaceship Command 1
Assault Ships 1

A skill tree that makes sense, and can be applied across the board at all levels, and makes it more interesting, since under-training (for newer players) would get them into shiny ships faster, but still leave lots of room to improve how those ships behave. In addition, the ships themselves have the bonuses built to support this model. Keeping with our example of the Enyo, the ship has the following bonuses:

Gallente Frigate Skill Bonus:
5% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret Damage per level

Assault Ships Skill Bonus:
10% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret Optimal Range per level
7.5% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret Tracking Speed per level

These bonuses would unlock improvements in the ship as the pilot continued to train the related skills, but you wouldn't need Gallente Frigate 5 to get into the Enyo.

One of the best things about this change is that it could be announced in advance (far enough in advance) so that players could train the single skill (Advanced Spaceship Command) to the appropriate levels long before the launch of Inferno. In addition, a skill that currently has very little actual value until Capital training, suddenly has value for all classes of players and ship sizes.

What's in your hangar

Well, as I'm trying to get back in the swing of the blogging, I thought I'd join in on this one. I'll use my combat hangar in 0.0, although technically it's 2 hangars in two stations...

• 1 Nasty Neut Domi


• 2 Megathrons - one is a sniper, one short range melter


• 2 Myrmidons - one for ratting, one for roaming


• 1 Brutix - Blaster Brute, nothing unusual here


• 1 Arazu - this guy is my covert cyno pointer. The second most expensive ship I fly


• 2 Phobos - set up with a heavy tank, EFT claims over 100k EHP - these are the most expensive ships I own at the moment


• 3 Eris' - yep, more interdiction fun. My favorite is the one with the prototype cloak...


• 4 Nemesis' - two are standard painter/damps, two are...tackle bombers


• 1 Viator - because sometimes you just gotta GTFO


• 2 Taranis' - my favorite. That's why I only have two left at the moment down here, and 3 in transit...


• 1 Ares - not sure how I feel about this guy yet.


• 1 Thorax - because you sometimes need a T1 fit, T1 cruiser


• 2 Enyos - these are my alternates for the Taranis


• 2 Helios' - duplicates, cloaky scout/small transit ship


• 1 Ishkur - this is still a naked hull, not sure how I want her set up


• 2 Rifters - gee, what a surprise...


• 1 Fed Navy Comet - because everyone needs a faction ship in their hangar

Just for the fun of it I did a quick ship inventory in all of New Eden - Ignoring Noobships and Shuttles, I have 65 ships around, at least 50 of them are cruiser or larger, at least 15 are T2 hulls, and about 55 are fit and ready to go. That helps me sleep at night, knowing I am mostly prepared.

And very off Meme, yes I fly Gallente, but not super drone man - I have a rough 8.5 million SP in gunnery, and it's almost all in Hybrid Turrets and support skills. You do the math...