One Titan Too Many?

Published on 18. Sep, 2008 ... written by Havohej, Tags: Articles, Latest

by Havohej … As all of my friends know, I like forums. Can’t get enough of ‘em. In the last few months, there have been a lot of crappy whine threads about various non-issues and perceived non-issues. One such thread even made it to the point of having an Assembly Hall variant, where it was waved around in front of the CSM, as though just being posted in Assembly Hall lends legitimacy to a topic. So many whines and trolls get posted there that it’s not even funny anymore, even to a troll like me.

Still, this one thread is starting to look more and more valid to me as a player, as laughable as it may be to the ‘big boys’ in EVE. Actually, several threads: the whines calling for a titan nerf.
On the face of it, it sounds like just another noob whine about how “I’ll never be as powerful as somebody who played since Beta - look, he kan haz titan!!!11 :( :(” But then you look at some of the people posting in support of downgrading the power of the titan and when you find members of GoonSwarm, Band of Brothers and other major 0.0 sovereign alliances who have several titans under their control, the argument seems much more legitimate.

Without trying to sound as though I just want it nerfed because I can’t fly one, I’d like to say that I agree with folks like Guvante who believe that, when CCP designed and introduced the Titan ship class, they did not plan for one alliance (or coalition of alliances) owning more than one titan, let alone fielding multiple titans in a steady rotation.

In one of my blog’s Chronicles posts, I mentioned Fitz VonHeise’s CAOD thread, listing the known titans in-game. I’d like you to take a look at it, though the import of it may not be apparent to a reader who does not play EVE. Even if you’ve looked at it before, look again. Really take a few minutes, and look it over again.

	Against ALL Authorities - 9 titans.
	Band of Brothers - 13 titans.
	Morsus Mihi - 6 titans.
	Pandemic Legion - 6 titans.

Thirteen titans for BoB alone - that’s frightening for any enemy to think about and the defensive potential of it is immense. Coupled with cyno jammers, it’s no wonder that the weight of literally all of the other noteworthy 0.0 alliances wasn’t enough to topple their mighty stronghold in Delve. But that isn’t what inspired me to write this post. That’s just a little bit of background for the real reason I decided to run my mouth about the over-proliferation of titans.

See, when they were implemented into the game, they were a massive time and ISK sink. It requires the highest level of sovereignty to build one, literally more than a year of skill training, even with great implants, to be able to effectively fly one with all the bells and whistles. Once you get into the thing, you can’t dock so you really can’t eject from it to go fly something else - just like with Motherships, your only choices are to remain trapped in a ship that will certainly not be deployed to every battle (it’s not like you’ll go roaming in one… right?) or leave it floating free at a POS where anything might happen to it, and neither of these are attractive prospects for many - not where a multi-billion ISK ship is concerned. Naturally, most people who wish to fly the titan create an alt and train straight to their titan of choice (or simply purchase an alt from someone who has already trained it). It also requires an intimidating amount of material resources just to build the thing once you do have the sovereignty level 4 manufacturing array and the pilot capable of getting into the ship. There’s a reason why titans are valued at or around 80 billion ISK!

No, when CCP put these ships in the game, it’s safe to assume they envisioned maybe one or two per power bloc, and that the titan would be the center point of some truly gripping, epic battles over territory. Like the Deathstar of our favorite cinematic space opera, for example. Perhaps they should have known that it would get out of control the way it has, but CCP’s track record for anticipating problems isn’t exactly stellar. In his devblog regarding speed changes that are on the drawing board, after listing all of the speed enhancing items in the game and noting that a player can achieve up to 8 times the base speed of some ships, CCP Nozh states:

“If one then takes a look at the max velocity on missiles and drones, it is readily apparent that our combat system was never designed for such speeds. Even when we did some basic tests on our internal servers, with special high-speed missiles, we quickly noticed Destiny (our physics engine) behaving very strangely.”

Now, as a player, I have to wonder, Why wasn’t this all tested before these items were implemented on the live server? Why is it our fault now that we’re able to go fast after spending billions of ISK, when CCP put the stuff in the game to begin with? If it was tested before being implemented and the game’s physics engine couldn’t handle it, why was it implemented at all?

But, alas, dozens of noobs posted dozens of threads (literally, no more than a few dozen people whined about it, but they did it daily with sometimes as many as 20 different threads created per day) and CCP caved in, saying that they did some basic tests on their internal servers and their physics engine “behaved strangely.” This, mind you, years after the items in question were put into the game. To me, it seems that if you give CCP’s developers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they did test these items, they didn’t account for all possibilities. Otherwise, they would not have made it possible for “nano” pilots to do what we do - that is: fly extremely fast, attempt to dictate range, rely on numbers and focused fire to make our individually weak DPS adequate, and fly in fear of certain ship classes and fits that can nullify our “nanoships” in short order.

When taken in that context, it isn’t difficult to imagine a scenario where something that seemed like a good idea at the time was, perhaps, not as well thought out as it could have been. It should have been a given that, on a long enough timeline, everybody and their mother would have a titan and the most powerful of the alliance would have more than one - indeed, over a dozen already in the case of Band of Brothers, with Against ALL Authorities close behind with nine! After all, when you get right down to it the only thing required to own a titan is time. The time invested into training an alt to fly it, the time invested to mine the minerals and build it, or in the case of recent alliances, the time invested to farm enough ISK to outright buy one. Case in point: The Star Fraction.

A few days ago, -SF- executor and CSM chairman Jade Constantine announced that his alliance had come into possession of an Erebus, the Gallente titan. Now, I’ve got nothing against Jade Constantine or his alliance, either in-character or out-of-character. In fact, I don’t know him at all, never had dealings with him. But, -SF- is a roleplaying alliance and unlike some RP alliances (CVA, for instance), they are pretty much irrelevant in the grand scheme of player-driven content - they own no 0.0 space, they’ve never shown any indication of being a challenge for anyone’s space unless in NPC sovereignty where to be honest you can’t really evict anybody, just out-blob them (Foundati0n comes to mind). I don’t know what Star Fraction plans to do with their new Erebus, hopefully they have a plan to go and use it as it was intended - fight a war and become a relevent 0.0 power. If not, it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m not likely to be directly involved in it.

It just struck me that, when an empire-based RP alliance can get a titan, ANYbody can get one. They’re not special anymore. Then, I looked at Fitz’ thread and realized, “Wow, they really haven’t been special for a long time, now!” Look at some of the other known titans:

Circile of Two
Omega Factor

Who the hell are they? Ever heard of them?

Then you’ve got an assortment of alliances who have one or two titans, like Roadkill and Requiem, one titan isn’t anything out of control or crazy, nothing to see there. But look farther down, toward the bottom. Six titans not even in an alliance at all.

I don’t pretend to know what, if anything, should be done to/about titans. Obviously I think something should be done. I don’t know what manner of nerf or rethink would most benefit this part of the game, but I do think it was a good idea that wasn’t very well thought out. When all you need to get a titan is 80 billion ISK and a character capable of getting into it, this game feature is not working as intended.

Just my opinion. Meanwhile, I hope that Endeva and Drug Kito, the co-executors of <GODS>, are working on a plan to get us our own titan - preferably a nice, shiny Avatar!

22 Responses to “One Titan Too Many?”

Havohej

18. Sep, 2008

I somehow botched the Chronicles link. It should point to http://defiasblog.insurmountablelogic.com/archives/category/eve-online-chronicles, but the /archives/ is missing. It’ll be correct next time.
Smak

18. Sep, 2008

Hi Havo, fixed that one for ya
John Doe

18. Sep, 2008

This game misses maintenance costs for ships. if a Titan would cost eg. 1-2 billion per month just to keep the reactors running, it would be very different environment.
Havohej

18. Sep, 2008

Thanks Smak!

@John Doe: That’s an idea that’s been brought up, I think, on the RP sections of the EVE forum regarding sub-capital ships. For instance, a battleship might have a crew of one or two thousand people (see this thread on EVE Library forum section: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=756385). “Realistically” you figure these people have to be paid somehow - unless they’re slaves on Amarrian ships (racial bonus?) but even then a capsuleer would have to provide for their food, hygiene and medical needs.

I think it would be interesting to see maintenance costs introduced which scaled with a ship’s type. Tech 2 ships would require higher maintenance fees due to the more sensitive nature of the equipment and the more highly skilled crews required to field them, for example. I also think that a properly scaled cost wouldn’t be prohibitive; just as players can generally afford the skillbooks and ships they need when they’re ready to advance, we would probably easily be able to afford this sort of additional “ISK sink” game feature.

Unfortunately, I also think that this might be very difficult for CCP to consider implementing just due to the sheer load it would put on the databases: for every single ship other than a shuttle or rookie ship, these calculations would have to be made. It may seem like a simple thing to do, but given CCP’s response to the players’ request for being able to search containers remotely through the assets window, EVE’s database structure appears to be more complicated than one would expect.
Helicon

18. Sep, 2008

81 Titans isn’t 1 too many, its 81 too many.
Jebizael Hunter

19. Sep, 2008

Regarding you saying that SF should use their Titan to ‘fight a war and become a relevent 0.0 power’, I think SF are going to show there is more you can do with a Titan than play the blobbing game.
Fundamentally SF are guerrila fighters- my guess is that it will be used as a way to get raiding forces deep into enemy space. After all, why fight a stereotypical 0.0 war if your alliance doesn’t wish to ‘claim’ space?
Frank Flowers

20. Sep, 2008

@one of the other commentators:
you said there should be costs for running a titan… there are, you have quite some fuel requirement for using a titan.

@the author of this article
while i can follow parts of your article i cant get to the conclusion there are too many titans or they are to powerfull.

Tank:
titans dont have much more of a tank then other
capitals for example. granted they have a bigger buffer,
but a well fit carrier can out-tank a titan.

DPS:
well a dday is a pretty heavy weapon, but it also renders
the titan useless for a while and is pretty much putting the
titan at risk. The other weapons of the titan dont deliver much damage,
while beeing dread-sized (with all disadvantages of weapons of that class)
they do not have the bonuses a dread gets when sieging.

The real strengh of Titans is their ability to Jumpbridge fleets,
which gives a lot of mobility to the fleets, and offcourse
having more titans keeps an alliance more mobile.
but it comes with the drawbacks of fuel & logistic requirements
which also mean you need a lot of people working on
keeping those titans running - a fair deal imho.

The Problem most people talking about titans fail to address
is not that titans are overpowered, its the opposite.
Just to show a relation: for one fully fit titan you could also buy and fit about 100 carriers, and as i mentioned before, they dont tank better, and their dps is pretty weak. So i come to the conclusion (and this will be quite unpopular with most whiners) that titans need a boost. With the costs i just mentioned, you have a pretty high risk for a very low tactical reward when fielding a single titan, and this only leaves you the option to field more then one to reduce risk and maximize the tactical advantage. Which leads me to my conclusion that titans need a boost, not a nerf (i know this is a quite unpopular opinion) - to make it more interesting to frontline field those titans, leading in more losses and raising their tactical importance (so the deathstar battles you imagine might come true
Havohej

20. Sep, 2008

Very valid points, Frank. While I do see the problems you point out as well, those problems are only issues if you think of the titan as an offensive tool rather than a defense/logistics tool; and perhaps the titan SHOULD be more of an offensive weapon.

Most titan killmails I’ve ever seen did not feature capital ship turrets at all, instead fitting the long-range officer smartbombs as a means of trying to kill interdictors and heavy interdictors attempting to hold them down (at least, I think that’s why they spend the billions for officer smarties). On teamspeak last night, one of my alliance mates suggested that if titans had a siege mode then people might consider using those turret hardpoints for turrets and then the titan could participate in POS bashes and who knows what other manner of chaos.

All of that, of course, in addition to being a great big bullseye for enemy fleets to rally against. Everybody wants to be on a titan killmail.

Even with their offensive limitations, when coupled with a cyno jammer even a single titan piloted by somebody who isn’t brain dead is a devastating tool. Some titan pilots (who shall remain nameless) think it’s enough to “warp to grid, PUSH BUTAN!!!!, hope I killed stuff” but it isn’t quite that simple. When it’s done right, it can be very hard to overcome.

With their recent MAX campain, BoB has proven that it’s not impossible to break a cyno jammer defended by multiple titans, but look at what they had to do in order to succeed.
Titan proliferation in EVE Online | MMORPG-BAY

21. Sep, 2008

[...] that required a year of effort to produce at an astronomical cost, for someone who spent a… Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [...]
Mynxee

21. Sep, 2008

Titans are so off my radar from the perspective of a pirate living in low sec, that I’ve given them (and most 0.0 stuff) almost no thought. However, this article and the accompanying comments have made the topic worth reading about…thanks for insights into a part of the game that I doubt I will ever experience first-hand.
Titan proliferation in EVE Online | Game Pet

21. Sep, 2008

[...] Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [...]
Titan proliferation in EVE Online | Game Pet

21. Sep, 2008

[...] unknown, and it should be interesting to see how they put their Erebus to use. Read Havohej’s “One Titan Too Many?” for a breakdown of alliance titan ownership, and let him know if you feel titans are a problem in [...]
Frank Flowers

22. Sep, 2008

You are right about how hard it is to overcome such a fortified System.

But i do believe that this is not only intentional but also good.
When one or more alliances (and in most cases 0.0 regions are populated by more than one alliance) archieved sovereignity in a system, when they own stations there etc. then they should have such tactical advantage.

Please dont forget defending systems, even with cynojammers in place, is a hard task too. You need dedicated players and a constant cash flow to keep sovereignity poses running (fuel costs), you need those players to fill the fleets that defend (even with several titans you still need support) the systems.

Since you took Bob for an example as the aggressing alliance lets have a look just a few month back in their History, when bob forces had to retreat from the south. They had spread pretty far out and with that amount of territory compared to the rather small number of pilots they where not able to hold their ground. Even having several titans Bob could not defend until their pilots where all concentrated in one region again.

As we can see the game pretty much regulates itself when an alliance takes more space then they can handle - what i would call pretty balanced.

If the goal would be to make it harder to run/hold such player-owned-regions it might be an idea to add a fuel requirement to cynojammers, making it harder to keep ‘em perma-running in sieged systems (somehow you would have to get the fuel for ‘em in)
MMO Clerks » Titan proliferation in EVE Online

22. Sep, 2008

[...] Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments [...]
SarcasticDwarf

26. Sep, 2008

Regarding maintenance costs: Mankind, a game that in many ways was the predecessor of EvE did something similar. The way that game worked was that you could build and fly as many ships at once as could fit in each system (systems were 2d, and tens to hundreds of thousands could fit). Eventually that got to be too much and they required you to crew each ship, and that crew had to be raised from cities which you needed to build and which in turn took time to create. That worked for a while, but once everyone got their birth rate up and had enough cities it was like just another mineral. Eventually I believe they just ended up capping the max number of ships you could have.

So really, if we are talking about an isk cost then it will likely be just as ineffective as it does not scale well. If you want to charge 10b isk/month that is great, but that will likely limit it to only a few alliances. If you want to charge less then the cost for alliances is near trivial.

Another thought was to limit them to a certain number per alliance or even per 1000 people in alliance but that is too easy to get around by creating many small alliances or pulling useless alts into the corps.
Nocturnes

06. Oct, 2008

Jericho Fraction actually, back in the earlier days of EVE-Online, was VERY much a part of the player-driven content and DID own 0.0 space and did constant battles against the Phoenix Alliance. So, your point about them not “deserving” a titan is pretty moot. They’ve been around for a looooong time, and while they may not hold any space anymore, they certainly are and always have been very involved in EVE, in all aspects.
Sharuke

08. Oct, 2008

Everyone made very decent points however there is one thing you are overlooking. One thing that has made EvE unique is the fact that it is as close to a real life scenario as you can get out of a game. As a matter of fact you could probably accurately compare EvE to real life in many aspects.

Look in history. Rome shall we? Rome started out as any empire did at one time… a hole in the wall. However thanks to good leadership and technological advancements they were able to form a strong country followed by a larger country resulting eventually in one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Through the use of the materials they had on hand they created great equipment for highly trained soldiers as well as terrible siege weapons of destruction. Now say all of their wood and steel one day vanished… how would they fight? They would find another material and continue on their conquest. As long as there was land to conquer and armies to fight they would still progress. What happened when they recruited larger armies and needed more food? They took more land and planted more crops.

Point being, no matter what is introduced into EvE. If its Titans, Mother Ships, or even the lowly frigate. Where men gather they will unite and use whatever weapons they can obtain for their improvement. Even if they implement some system that has steeper requirements for the “Titans” corps will find another way to gain more money more efficiently and in turn buy more “Titans”.

The advancement of the human race is an unstoppable force. It can be slowed down but never stopped. Besides for those complaining about BoB and the like having to many “Titans”…. History Question: What eventually happened to every great empire in the world? China, Rome, Britain, Alexander the Great….
Charjed

21. Oct, 2008

I think he may be referring to the “death star” emotion a titan is supposed to evoke,

kinda like, “oh damn.. a titan, well we might as well just give up right now…..”

Something that strikes pride… or fear, into anyone’s mind, something near impossible to get, and just a little bit easier to lose.

but when an alliance has 13… it loses the shock value.

I think a remedy would be to literally have a “death star”
make it like I described above, a massive moon-like “ship” that can wreak untold amounts of chaos, but it also cripples your resources keeping it running, just as hard to move too.

one per alliance, just make the second one double the cost,
Lorzion

04. Dec, 2008

Idle Empire a pirate alliance located in ihakana has 2 titans. Star Fraction isn’t anything special.
Ecaf

18. Dec, 2008

So how many of these titans were funded by the POS moon mining exploit?

Maybe CCP should confiscate a few
Matt Kukowski

03. Jan, 2009

I WAS a HYDRA Alliance member. It was a well run alliance, had a strong indy base and an even stronger PvP fleet.

But, what made hydra cool, was the way the Executor ‘birdythebest’ ran the show. He made mandates, if you are PvP and caught ratting for personal profits, you will be fined.

Hydra made friends with Pure Alliance and many others, wisely. Hydra crushed (nearly) Triumverant Alliance.

But, Tri somehow called on BoB (Band of Brothers Alliance) which (you guessed it), Brought in their TITAN.

This really has nothing to do with the Titan, as being unfair, but rather Hydra PvP Fleet leaving their base (indy and outposts) to be over taken by BoB and Tri with the help on a Titan.

None of this had to happen, the PvP just left the Indies in the dust (in their eyes a bunch of CareBears), when really ‘All your Base Belong to Us’ is made by the Indy carebears, leaving hydra PvP with no home.
Ranik

05. Jan, 2009

Lots of good points raised here i think. I have, personally, never encountered a titan. But from what i have read, and what seems to be fact as to the number of them, i would be in favour of some sort of limitation or cap or some other way of nerfing them. Maybe thay could factor in to the fiction that all titans BPO’s came from a sweatshop somewhere and as a result somethign was printed wrong meaning all the titans explode on a set date, and then implement a cap after this? ok not a serious suggestion but still, could you imagine that?

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One Titan Too Many?

22 Responses to “One Titan Too Many?”

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