The possibility of AvA in EVE.

By mandrill | Published May 25, 2008

The interior of a Caldari Station

7. The Skills of a Soldier.

It will be obvious that the skills needed to pilot a starship will be wildly different from those needed in the heat of a close quarters battle. As such I propose that an entirely new category of skills be implemented. These skills should reflect the various roles that a soldier will play in battle.

Assault skills would be broken in to a variety of groups, with combat skills being the most prevalent. Use of types of weapons, explosives and other equipment. Battlefield skills such as sapping, first aid, and electronics should also be available so as to allow players to master specific specialisations in the feild.

Command skills would also come into play and should be different from those associated with commanding fleets or corporations. These battlefield command skills should be a branch of the leadership skill tree but should require some assault skills also.

8. Other Considerations.

The inclusion of this kind of combat in EVE opens up more subtle forms of warfare for consideration. Covert insertions into an enemy station (extremely difficult and hazardous), lightning raids for resources, or even kidnap missions.

Could, or should, gates be vulnerable to assault? What about POS’s and Capital ships? would it be possible to assault a titan? Logically if Ambulation is taken to its logical conclusion the answer to all these questions should be yes, but the mechanics and implications of making these things possible in the game are complex and the results unpredictable.

Then, in the far future, there are the planets to consider. An assault on a planet would be something to see, and until it is decided whether planets are even going to be accessible I am reluctant to speculate on the means by which such an assault would take place.

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  • Steve
    Meh. This would be a whole different game than EVE. It shouldn't become a Jack-Of-All-Trades, Master-Of-None. EVE should stick to space combat (which will hopefully soon become the real-time, joystick-able, twitch type). Station avatars are all well and good, but combat like that would be too much in one game. How would the combat be implemented: Street Fighter Arcade style, Runescape click-'n'-kill, Halo? Also, it would require massively more people.

    Someone mentioned boarding actions? So we have our current EVE-Online player contingent flying ships and then another 10-30x that playing the people sitting in their ships? Not a hot idea. Especially when you only get to play while two fleets are fighting...
  • Anonymous
    As someone said pod pilots are immensely rich compared to normal humans. I think an additional aspect to EVE and the station environments could be the ability to recruit and train armies. If these armies could then be fielded in battle it would be much more realistic.

    Also if station population became a factor for raising these armies it would add a whole new dynamic to the game, and add mechanics necessary for planetary interaction. Station managers in 0.0 would have to seed their stations with settlers and give them time to mature in order for them to be able to recruit armies from the stations. With an over abundance of people in empire space station populations would not be a huge issue, and in some cases pod pilots would be able to recruit from nearby planets.

    Army units could be handled similar to Blue prints are now. With the ability to train the unit to make it more effective, or to arm the unit with more advanced technology.

    I think that overall station invasions should be much cheaper then traditional planetary bombardments. The scope and size of station invasions should be upped to be a lot larger then squad based combat. If anything squads would be the smallest possible unit of control. Your strategy would revolve more around sending which armies where. Whether they need to take the power structures, docking areas, suppress the local population, eliminate military resistance, or weaken the stations shields in preparation for a traditional military environment.

    The possibilities are endless, but they will be very limited as game designers since they will be starting off with programing that is not designed for this type of fighting.
  • Brian
    Good thoughts it sounds good but I have one thing that is a problem. Ok think about this, eve is a *spaceship* game NOT a battlefield game. You just simply can't combine these styles of gameplay it would never work. Simply because after this only half the people will want to fly and the other half stay in ambulation and fight in this way. Now I can understand maybe bar fights and fist fights with another play or two but not what you are talking about it would well quite frankly ruin EVE. So I would never ever ever want this in eve sorry. =(
  • Ushatuhkwa
    Something to keep in mind, would be the infinitely cheap value of human life in eve. Look at the price of commodities in the market, then look at the chronicles and the starting character atributes. 10,000 isk is enough to send someone through your capsuleer academy of choice, get trained, and graduate with 8,000 isk balance in your wallet.

    As I posted on the Eve-O forums earlier,

    "Let's say we come to the day where there are 5 million people on the server.

    5 million capsuleers

    Each inhabited planet in Eve has over 500 million people, and there are over 5,000 solar systems that are inhabited. Let's go with High capsuleer numbers, to low population. So let's assume only one planet on each solar system is sparesly populated.

    You have then, say five million capsuleers, for a population of 2,500,000,000,000 (that's 2.5 trillion people inhabiting the eve cluster) - so that would make for 0.00019999999999999998% of the population being capsuleers.

    To put this in perspective, the 8,000 isk you started as a newbie was the remainder of a 10,000 isk family fortune inheritance that was enough to put you through school, and get you a basic frigate.

    To say that capsuleers are Gods among men would be an understatement. We can buy and sell scores of mercenaries with the equivalent price of two capacitor boosters. Why in the world would we stoop so low to want to carry a gun and go shooting people in the face? The poorest of us can make any station manager tremble in fear of making us unhappy and having to report to his superiors that a capsuleer was unhappy with his service.

    Even low-sec stations would consider being visited by a capsuleer enough to kick everyone out of the bar and put more security than God around to make sure that their capsuleer doesn't get their boots dirty. On the off chance that you decided to tip them 3,000 isk."

    1 million isk would be more than enough to set a "commoner" up for life, ensure that all his debts are paid, make sure he can get a swell pad planetside, servants for three generations, and all his children living comfortably for a couple generations.

    With that in mind, why the hell would we, as pod pilots, even bother assaulting a station, when we can just send several hundred mercenary units in for the price of one the "cheap" clones that you speak about.

    I think this is part of the reason for the current mechanics of station capture, and one of the biggest barriers to FPS or AvA style combat in eve. Not just the mechanics of "how", but the justifications of "Why".

    The resources we command, as capsuleers, are so far beyond the understanding of the "common man" - that you could probably recruit several willing armies for the cost of a cruiser.

    As such, the idea of the pod pilot as a "grunt" in any capacity in terms of ground-warfare is laughable.
  • mandrill
    Thanks hyperforce, I'm still reading through the chronicles (I'd much rather there was a dead tree collection of them) and so welcome any correction of details I might get wrong. Your correction also neatly removes what I thought was a barrier to third person action combat in EVE :)
  • Hyperforce99
    Actually in several backstories and chronicles (also featured in one of the stories in an EON magazine

    (where some guys pathways get scrambled during a bad resurection and he's forced to live a 'normal life' for the rest of his life... until they manage to undo the mistake and a friend shoots him in the head to 'force' him to resurrect.)

    Thus, people with pod implants can be brought back if they are killed outside of they're pod.

    It might have some side effects as death in a pod is generally much quicker than if you were to say... bleed to death by the hypothetical teaspoon scenario

    How this works exactly I don't know, but i've never seen any writing saying its NOT possible to be resurrected if your not in a pod, and several pieces of official writing say that it is possbible.

    On the backstory about PODS it says that the BRAIN FLASHING technology is used in pods (more specificly POD IMPLANTS in conjunction with PODS) because usuage in normal vehicles like cars could cause someone to be flashed TO EARLY when he might not die (but flashing kills the user anyway :S), Or the system could flash him to late causing him to experience his death after the resurrection and thus have a very traumatic experience engraved in his memory.

    The reason Pods use the technologie is because if the hull of a pod is breached theres 0% chance the pilot will survive the ordeal, and thus flashing a mind would be perfect at that time. 0% chance of survival, but not yet dead.

    I hope that made sense.

    Thus, your conclusion that one can only resurrect if one is killed in a pod is false.
  • mandrill
    Hurricane,

    The RTS angle hadn't occurred to me and is worth some further consideration. The way I see it, fleet combat in EVE is already an RTS of sorts for those in command. With the added wrinkle that instead of issuing orders to AI troops, those under your command can choose to ignore your orders or make mistakes. I think this element of large scale warfare is essential to making the experience of large fleet battles in EVE something very special.

    My vision of assault actions in EVE is one which is akin to Planetside, where the troops you are commanding are real people who can make their own decisions and mistakes.

    Assault actions should not simply be a few commanders pointing and clicking their way to victory but should involve every member of a corp or alliance. This level of personal involvement, the feeling of achievement it gives, and the camaraderie it engenders are all things which I think would benefit the game and the community immensely.

    On the technical side, third/first person combat in EVE could easily be hosted on separate servers which are only running for the duration of the action but which have a persistent effect on the wider EVE universe. EVE is at the cutting edge of MMO server technology and as such there are going to be problems, and not being an expert I wouldn't presume to tell CCP how to make the game work. The people they have working on the various issues they have with lag and such are some of the best in the world and I'm sure they don't need a layman telling them what they're doing wrong.

    This is my vision of how Ambulation may pan out, CCP may do something completely different from both our ideas, only time will tell.
  • Hurricane
    Some interesting ideas. I like the combat by cloning attrition concept which would actually fit into the Eve Ethos rather well.

    However; I am not convinced the CCP has the technical ability to allow this level of sophistication to their combat system.

    CCP has had long problems with lag issues that is a hallmark of their fleet to fleet combat. Adding in base combat on top of large fleet combat will make the already laggy combat grind to a halt.

    Also; Eve has never been an action oriented game. CCP like to describe their game as a Strategy Sim. If they do decide to make Avatar combat a reality they will prolly make it some sort of RTS based system. I for one would be upset that avatar combat would be a third or first person shooting when space combat is not a direct flight control system. Alot of people have been clamoring for direct piloting of ships so I doubt the CCP would allow direct manipulation of Avatars in combat.

    More than likely I would imaging avatar combat in bases to be like a RTS; certain players will have corp designation as combat leaders. combat will run in RTS syle with the base layout being the map. Cloning vats and command structures will be the buildings that will either be built or taken over on the base to maintain . It will be zone base control combat. With opposing sides having to take control and defend important base centers. The final obective would would be something like the control command structure or primary generator or some other combination of areas.

    Nice ideas though; but I highly doubt that is the dirtection CCP is going to go with this.
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