I had a thought this afternoon at work… I just come back now from work, and didn’t took proper time to check if this was already suggested, or not… I must say I’m a former Eve Online player. I played it for a little bit more than 2 years, and as in Gratuitous Space Battles (extended to a very much larger range), there are a lot of modules to build your ship. While I was in a corporation, we had to survive in 0.0 security status system, meaning no rules (great scotch !)… One of those setup we had built (not invented though…) was a setup of 3 ships. Two remoters, and I damage dealer. Every player of Eve know this setup.
I don’t have all the modules unlocked in the game yet, maybe it’s one of them, but for the moment, I still haven’t found anything like that… Apologies if it’s already in the game, or already suggested.
How this setup work ? Let’s take the remoter. A remote is a rather small ship. A cheap one. Its engine produce energy, which is used in a small shield. The remoter send a part of its shield power to the shield of the damage dealer, who is heavily armed, but cheap shielded. This strategy could benefit certain strategies around it, and if the remoters are destroyed, then the strategy dies with the damage dealer. In this setup, the damage dealer should destroy the largest ennemies as fast as possible, not letting the time to shoot at the two remoters.
Another setup with remoters, is the very same, but act on the hull or the armor. In Eve, drones are used. Two remoters, who regenerate their shield as mentionned here up, and sending repairs drones to the damage dealer either on its armor or hull… That’s not a 100% strategy that works, there are also counter measures against it, but I think that could be a nice add and a lot of new strategies that could be possible…
remote shield generation/support systems… pretty interesting, gah wtf, i love it!
This opens a window to A LOT of new tactics, possibilities and fun!. The shield regen beam is one thing, but ships designed for make powerful the shields of your flagships.
Remote Armor Repair, another great idea/tactic, but all of this need a limit, because with one cruiser and dozens of Remoters, the cruiser will be invulnerable, and the AI will shoot at the closer ship (cruiser). Im thinking on a new AI order like “kill the annoying remoters” xD or a very limited range or time.
Anyways GREAT IDEA!
Your tankers Cruisers, attackers
Your logistics ships (remotes) frigates, Supply other ship with shield and armor repair.
The AI already can AND does counter this, its called setting engage frigates order.
However you wil run into trouble with it also liek the shield support beam that the empire has. and its ballancing would be a pain in the BUTT.
I AM a Logistic pilot in Eve, and can and do fly both the Basalisk and Guardian in fleet action. As with the ocasionaly Phoneix for pos bashing and cap fights. I can even fly ina carrier but can not triage just yet and might not for now.
And i like this idea too and would like to TRY and put it into my eve-online mod I’m workign one but that will be after I have all four races done and maybe the Jove and Concord ships.
I agree that I like the idea of a supply ship with repair drones that fly around repairing other ships, but it seems like local cargo holds full of supplies and repair drones still make much more sense. Still, it would be cool, and provide a different strategy, provided it didn’t run out of supplies.
As it is, however, something like your shield remoters already exist in the game in the form of the shield support beam – small frigates that could augment the shield regeneration of larger ships, until those smaller ships are taken out of course. To me, the idea sounds a little goofy. I don’t know about the small cheap ship somehow providing shield power for the larger ship. Why not just stick the power/shield generators on the larger ship to begin with?
(In GSB, the answer is because the shield generators won’t “fit” in the hull, so you need to stick it on a second ship, which of course doesn’t seem very logical either.)
(edit: It occurs to me that this “remoter” design philosophy would make sense under a doctrine of flexibility, allowing the remoters to be reused elsewhere on the field even if the main ship is destroyed. The remoters in this case would only make sense if 1) they were fast enough to get away [which is a bit of a stretch given GSB maneuverability] and 2) they would go attach themselves to some other ship once their main ship found itself in a hopeless situation [like when the shields have collapsed!] )
That is great, a support ship searching for hopeless cruisers
Another option is a Supply Ship, what do the same thing than ctiah said, but just give supplies for the supply-empty repair/shield system of the victim, the only problem is the needing of fast movement, fast attaching and fast supply process. For make all of this ideas a reality, we need a new hull, a Supply Ship Hull!
Fast, Weaponless, Defenceless (maybe one gsb) but full of supplies and maybe some GOOD repair systems for rise the lifetime of this great idea
