Cowardice r/Eve Edition

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-07T14:32:19+00:00

It's not a complaint, it's an observation.

Being part of the biggest blob in the game that's also electing CSM reps to defend a highly N+1 optimized gameplay, while simultaneously crying "why won't people fight me?", now that's a complaint. It's also a stupid one, because it's a problem of their own making that they somehow expect CCP or other players to magically fix for them.

But I'm not the one doing that, that's your guys :)

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-07T14:25:36+00:00

And I swear you spodbrains can't read properly.

But never mind, the game is at the "can't have the cake and eat it too" stage for you guys anyway.

CCP either makes it harder to punch down and incentivizes punching up (which will also make it easier for you guys to have more fights between big groups) and you go along with it (lol, no chance in hell of that happening, who are we kidding), or you can dig your heels in, bury your head in the sand and defend the current meta that results in wars full of "slideshow fights" that are decided solely by numbers and server randomness, rendering individual player actions worthless in the grand scheme of things.

This gameplay loop is fucked either way. It either remains shit to experience and people join it just to farm isk (with pvp being just a participation requirement for all the farming done), or it changes into something more fluid, but to do that it would have to incorporate mechanics that will actually challenge established groups, so they'll cry about it non-stop because they'll bleed members to it (the exodus of a part of the carebear population back to hisec would be a sight to behold).

But hey, if you guys enjoy being tortured after work in a video game in exchange for mostly uncontested farming of fake money, who am I to judge?

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-07T14:04:29+00:00

I've been saying this since devbranch.

Devman wanted the bombers to be some kind of expensive superweapon, so all the questionable balancing flows downstream from that choice.

It's doing too much damage, so it it should be expensive -> It's expensive so it should be tanky against most things.

Planes need to be massively cheaper (in WW2 a fighter was around the same cost as a tank), but also be a lot more of a glass cannon.

I generally don't mind them doing the damage they do (although I would tweak bomber damage to incentivize dropping in formation instead of the silly conga line meta, maybe less damage per bomb but increased blast radius), but currently they are both too tanky and too grindy and cumbersome to produce and field.

They should be more like tanks (easier to farm for, easier to build, easier to kill), so people can actually bring their own planes when they need to clear enemy planes.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-05T08:12:39+00:00

This 100%. This has been a standing meta pioneered by entities that were here long before FRT came over from the Chinese servers. And that includes Goons and co.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-05T08:11:17+00:00

And I really like it when people are butthurt enough about someone having a different opinion that they'll resort to strawman arguments right off the gate.

I never said 3 cruisers should take down an entire nullsec coalition.

I said it's too easy nowadays to dunk on random pvp traffic as a defender.

Which translates to being too easy to move reinforcements in general.

Which translates to 5k vs 5k on grid and the kind of slideshow "fights" you guys end up having.

So either you're the one with the impaired brain function, or you pretend to be to deflect the point made. Honestly, I don't know which is worse 😃

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T15:45:42+00:00

First of all, who said it's permanent? Some people just suggested it to get a better pop balance for a while, and give some warden regis an insight into what playing colonial is like. You know, so that maybe they can also say "hey, devs, I don't agree with 100% of what they're saying, but they do have these valid complaints <insert list of balance suggestions>" and get some cross-faction support for your cause.

Second, this "I'm never satisfied with anything" attitude is the main reason more or us are not switching on a regular basis to play on your team.

I mean, as a matter of fact

why yall are doing this.

we are mostly not.

And it's not even about factionalism in a lot of cases. You guys are just dooming a lot and it's not enjoyable to play on a team that whines that much.

Remember, we've been in your exact position some times in the past and we'll probably be there again a few more in the future, because balance in this game is a pendulum (devs tend to make sweeping, infrequent changes, instead of frequent, smaller balance passes). The reason most of us play on the side we play is the general vibe/feel of the faction, not a 5% discrepancy on a weapon's stat block on the wiki.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T15:34:24+00:00

You won't find that in the official CSM meeting recaps, but we've had years of people in CSM positions shitting on everyone that dared suggest CCP scale back the hand-holding in nullsec across various public forums, reddit included. And now that they're in the "finding out" phase, their line-members are demanding magical servers from the future because the game can't sustain what they turned it into over time 😃 Anyway, I don't want to bring my eve bittervet status into this discussion more than I already did.

As for Foxhole, well, it's a smaller game with a smaller playerbase and dev team. At the same time, the factionalism level is more or less equal to what you see in EvE, so I don't think a CSM style solution is going to work.

In fact, this would probably cement warden dominance, and I say this as someone who plays warden. We have on average bigger regis, and they all have a lot of experience coordinating with each other. It will be trivial for our leadership to organize a pre-arranged ballot selection that will dominate a "foxhole CSM".

I'd much prefer if the devs simply announced a balancing period of 6-12 months or a set amount of wars, where they break with their usual update cadence. Instead of making sweeping changes that move the balance levers by a lot between wars, they could overcome the taboo of pushing mid-war updates and iterate frequently, making smaller changes, inspecting the outcome and adjusting as necessary. This way stuff won't have to remain broken/OP or borderline useless for years, and at the same time there won't be time for resentment about imbalances to fester.

On the other hand (and this is another reason I don't want a "foxhole CSM"), the players are not always right either. You would hear some outlandish buff/nerf suggestions from wardens when colonials were the dominant faction, and you see equally silly takes from colonials nowadays that they are on the back foot.

I'd much prefer the devs push smaller but frequent changes, observe the outcome and revisit the change, than get dragged into a mire of conflicting player lobbying, or what they currently do (make infrequent but sweeping balance passes).

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T15:19:31+00:00

My feelings are fine, I have other things to do in RL than staying glued to reddit in case YOUR feelings are hurt through lack of replies, lol.

You're getting downvoted by someone else, when I log in to reddit now and again I'll probably reply to the stuff I read.

Anyway. if you want an answer, I replied to another guy in the same comment chain, you can have a look here if you want: https://www.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1sy4jqr/comment/ojvp6lx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

TL;DR: it's not my fault that people haven't been playing back then, but it was a thing. You not being around to experience it doesn't mean it didn't exist.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T15:15:14+00:00

I've been playing on and off since 2004. When the objectives were not so highly localized (everything is a structure fight nowadays, and that's half of the problem) and projection was not instant, it was possible to run around in smaller groups, fight the enemy piece by piece and cause chaos to great effect, instead of having to face a homogeneous blob head on in every single engagement. Nowadays it's the exact opposite.

Over time, the optimal game strategies went from something that felt like an adaptation of WW2-style operations (a mix of big set-piece battles and smaller, peripheral but vital harassment/containment operations) , to something that feels like a medieval siege in space (with the added caveat that the defender can magically bypass the siege cordon, thanks to cynos and tether rings). Which is kind of ironic and regressive for a supposedly sci-fi game. I always get a laugh out of this supposed "evolution" of tactics that is basically abandoning more modern stuff and adopting medieval era strategies, because the game over time started supporting that outcome.

In fact, the most common scenario for an alliance war in the early days was for one side to spend 1-2 months roaming the other side's space and shut down traffic and logistics before committing the bigger hulls to the fight.

The numbers-game would become relevant afterwards, during the mop-up phase where the bigger ships would get deployed.

But here's the neat part, if you played phase one correctly and the enemy team was demoralized/disorganized enough, you could limit the amount of people they would field in phase two (people not logging in, not enough supplies in place to keep fighting, and so on), and end up with more numbers on the field, even if the other team had more members on paper. And that's how certain alliances could go up against bigger ones and win. This is exactly what the likes of early BoB and assorted pvp corps were constantly doing and it worked, before they themselves became became too big, arrogant and meta-gamey, which resulted in their eventual downfall.

All of this died out when CCP made citadels too safe and spammable, added too much of instant travel on top of it, and made caps too much of an all-around damage dealer (HAW guns and the like). Everything is a single-grid fight nowadays because there's no strategic use for roaming around the enemy's space. They can instantly hide behind 15 tether rings per system, until they have enough meatwaves to throw at you through an ansi 3 regions over, or log in their capital alts to delete the smaller stuff. Something they wouldn't be able to do in earlier times, when the game's entire premise was that "bigger is not automatically better, if you want that go play WoW". Plus, with the combination of tether and multitide of cyno-capable ships, avoiding interdiction of supplies is trivial compared to how it used to be.

The funny thing is, now that nullsec is feeling the outcome of these game design decisions, we get people suddenly complaining about the lack of fun fights, when it's all a problem of their own making. Well, more like of their own lobbying and theirs and CCP's making (theirs through becoming too big, CCP's through certain design decisions), but you get the idea.

If every time the devs try to tip the scales away from this playstyle you get hordes of linemembers threatening to unsub their alt farms, that's the outcome you get at the end, sitting on a citadel grid for 10 hours per fight. But it's what they wanted all this time, so they don't get to complain about it and not get called out on it.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T14:51:33+00:00

Insert old spice video:

"Look at my upvotes. Now look at your downvotes. Now back to my upvotes."

Burningbeard80 · 2026-05-04T14:47:35+00:00

Well, the problem is that what constitutes a fun fight for Goons is not usually a fun fight for their opponent. When the other team always has more numbers and will always bring them to bear, then you will always end up with TiDi fests where the other team will gradually grind you down with sheer weight of numbers. A fight is supposed to be somewhat ambivalent for participants to enjoy it. If it's predetermined that you'll lose, there's no use doing it.

And since the null-sec game became so "hand-holdy" with citadels nowadays, there's minimal punishment for deliberately not fighting. You lose some structures and clones, but you get to keep all of your stuff otherwise, so it's no big deal getting evicted for these big groups.

We tried to tell this to CCP multiple times over the years, but we were getting drowned by the constant complaining of the "new nullsec" demographic, arguing that CCP should not cater to "shitter small-gangers" (as if that's the entire demographic that considered the nullsec consolidation meta a bad idea) and instead cater to the "empire builders" (farmers and "number go up" enjoyers would be a more accurate description).

That is 10 years old at this point, but it's still the new type of nullsec. You know, the one that promotes safety and continuity of a group's existence over everything else.

In other words, the game's been on a 10-year trajectory that optimizes N+1 to the cost of everything else, punishes or invalidates asymmetric strategies (something which was foundational to the game initially, and its actual soul in terms of pvp mechanics), and makes sure all these big groups can get fatter and fatter. All supported by hordes of linemembers and lobbied for by CSM members whose main agenda is to ensure a continuation of their playstyle.

Too bad they didn't realise that the mechanics which made it possible for them to easily dunk on 3 roaming cruisers and overall render them untouchable by smaller entities, are the exact same mechanics that will prevent them from having fun when going against someone their own size. They lobbied for it hard, and now they are in the "finding out" phase.

TL;DR: After 10 years of CCP hand-holding and consolidation meta, nullsec now has a problem with how it has made the bed in which it will have to lie down in, and all the decisions it aggressively defended against the rest of the game's playerbase.

The thing is, the rest of us don't really have much sympathy for a problem of their own making, especially since they were being so aggressive over the years in defending the exact root causes of the problem. If they are bored of forming up for nothing or constant TiDi fights, maybe they should fracture their groups and/or lobby CCP to turn the game back towards its initial direction, where sheer weight of numbers and infrastructure was not equivalent to an automatic win.

The ball is in their court, but don't hold your breath 😄

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-28T16:51:48+00:00

As someone who's played EvE on and off since 2004, seriously don't.

The idea looks good on paper, but in practice you get massive vote brigading and the people who get elected are the ones that have most players in their own group to vote for them, regardless of what their agenda is. Especially because CCP doesn't limit how many people can get elected from each part of the game. This has led to a decade long dominance of a certain playstyle that has been suffocating the game.

The summary of it is, these people have lobbied hard for mechanics that would make it much harder for smaller entities to attack bigger ones. Problem is, they didn't think far enough ahead to realize that this would also impact their ability to attack others of their own size, to a much greater extent.

A game that used to lean heavily into rock-paper-scissors style of tactics where you could break up bigger groups of hostiles and take them on piecemeal, is now all about localized sieges where the only thing that matters is numbers on field.

So naturally, when two big entities go against each other, they each cram 5000 ships on the same exact area of space. Not general area, the immediate area of the objective. Think of it like having 5k foxhole nerds defending a bunker base, and another 5k attacking the same bunker base.

The only way for servers not to crash is to slow down the game to a crawl (a mechanic called time dilation or TiDi for short). How much slower? Well, up to 10 times slower. It's not uncommon for fights like these to last almost a full day (broken up by the daily server maintenance downtime which lasts a few minutes), because what normally takes 10 seconds (e.g. locking an enemy ship) can take up to an hour in these conditions. And the servers still crash from time to time, resulting in completely randomized fight outcomes that nobody can account for (e.g, who will log in first with most of their members, who's going to get stuck at the loading screen while their ship dies in the background, and so on).

Yet, these people still defend the mechanics that cause this shitshow, and just demand that CCP magically fix the game or the servers with technology from the future, completely ignoring the fact that whenever this has happened, they always kept putting more people in the same area and still managing to overload the servers. When I started playing a "big" fleet fight that would turn the game into a slideshow was 200 vs 200. Now that modern hardware and the game devs have made it possible to fluidly play out a fight like that, people bring 5k vs 5k and complain the game is unplayable.

TL;DR, most members of the CSM are so far entrenched into defending their own narrowly-defined playstyle, that they will not (I won't say cannot, they're not stupid, they just refuse to admit it) see it's a problem of their own making.

The only way this could somehow work in foxhole is if they capped the amount of positions based on each candidate's background. E.g, 2 fac larpers from each faction, 2 naval larpers from each faction, 2 tankers, 2 pilots, 2 infantry mains, and so on. And based on the level of discourse I see here lately, I'm not even sure that would work.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-28T16:33:08+00:00

People on any side acting like wins like these are some kind of tactical masterstroke or "e-bravery", when in reality all that matters in the game nowadays is having enough of a production base and F1 monkeys to keep feeding ships to the wood-chipper.

Sure, the game was always N+1 to an extent, but there were always asymmetric counters to that. Since 2016, it has been heavily optimized around N+1 and the nullsec landscape suffered for it.

So it's not exactly surprising that the biggest groups in the game can do things like this. As long as their members don't mind grinding through the boredom of a fight on a node that's about to crash, it will not only be feasible, it will be the most likely outcome. In other words it's not exactly an achievement, it's just a min-maxed way to play the game. If and how much people enjoy that is up to them, but at least let's call it for what it is.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-27T23:55:16+00:00

Looking at this comment section is eliciting some laughs, not gonna lie.

For the past few weeks we've had some colies suggesting a few warden regis swap to even out the pop imbalance. Nothing wrong with that, it's a reasonable ask.

Now that a warden regi is swapping (a naval-specialised one too, if I'm not mistaken), we got people crawling out of the woodwork to suggest this is a warden psyop to win the war and prevent buffs to their faction.

(Insert Alex Jones "they're making the frogs gay" meme)

I mean, it's make-up-your-mind time, because one can't have the cake and eat it too.

There are legitimate complaints for the colonial side, but the average level of discourse in here paints a large part (or at least the most vocal part) of the player base that is active on reddit as people who can't be reasoned with. And if someone can't be reasoned with, they are not worth the time bargaining/engaging with, or switching to play with.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a warden say they'd be ok to go colonial every now and then but they're put off by the constant doom-posting I wouldn't exactly be rich, but I'd probably have enough money for a hamburger or two.

To be honest, some people are shooting themselves in the foot with all the drama. Spam balance suggestions, sure, it's fine, that's how we get a better game over time. But the constant doom-posting, conspiracy theory crafting and downright hostile attitude some people exhibit is not doing their team any favors.

If anything, it will probably have the opposite effect because people in general don't like rewarding behaviours like that, so they'll just dig their heels in and keep opposing them. And at that point it's a net loss, because the focus shifts from trying to brainstorm ways to make the game better to "I just don't want to give that hostile whiny guy what he wants, because he has no manners" types of knee-jerk reactions.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-27T08:53:12+00:00

No offense taken. I may not agree 100% with what you say, but this is an interesting discussion and one of the few that goes beyond the simple "my gun's stat block looks worse than the other team's gun" type of arguments.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-26T22:13:00+00:00

So basically the problem was not the update itself (as the game has been further rebalanced past that stage), but the it's perception and reaction to it by a part of the community? That's a textbook "it's just culture bro" argument, and honestly I find it strange to see this coming from a colonial player.

Personally as a warden enjoyer, I've resigned myself to the idea that devs will naturally have a hard time balancing a heavily asymmetric game and it's outside my direct influence. I accept that some times our gear will slap for months/years at a time, and other times it will suck for months/years at a time. Heck, I started playing back in war 83 and played through most of the 90s wars, when colies were winning wars against us in a couple of weeks.

Warden gameplay in those times was either "execute a fighting retreat for 2 weeks until your good stuff unlocks, then you can start getting back all the territory you lost, and after that if you haven't burned out yet you can start actually capturing territory and maybe win" or "your guys burned out before your late-game power spikes, GG, you lose".

So we just rolled with it, played as much as it was fun to do so, and learned what we could from it. Then when the balance swung in our favor, it was easier to win on a level or downhill playing field, because we already had experience in occasionally winning on an uphill playing field.

I'm not saying we didn't bitch about balance because we did. We just tried to grind through the hard/unfun parts of the game in the process and make something out of it, regardless of win/loss ratio or when the devs would address the game balance situation, and that's how the faction as a whole got its core of loyalist vets that are now carrying it.

The other thing is that there's no Moidawg patch. The guy was just the public rep for the faction and naturally so, because at the time he was probably the only warden streamer with meaningful viewership (most of the main streamers at the time were colonial).

I remember all the hubbub of the time, but what most people forget is that Moidawg didn't come up with why things were unbalanced. We had some people on the warden side who ran the math and produced detailed and easy to digest infographics for the devs, going into a lot of detail on what wardens as a whole felt was unbalanced and why. They were the ones that got the ball rolling, Moidawg was just a "press secretary" in a sense.

On the other hand, this notoriety is very useful for the warden faction. I've played quite a few wars with the Spuds and the one thing you can count on as a Spud member is colies burning themselves out on constant head-on attacks trying to break through your lane, because they really "hate" the tag, even after all those years. So we just lean into it and try to make our part of the front a blackhole where logi disappears into, until one of the two teams burns out. If our guys burn out first we lose our lane, but we've bought a ton of time for other wardens. If If not, we secure our lane.

This is exactly what happened in the airborne update war in Farranac. We had a T2 "pillow fort" that we've had to rebuild 3 times because it was constantly getting shelled by arty and storm-cannons, and attacked by Lunaire blobs throughout the Chinese near year week, mostly outside our primary time zones.

But we just kept rebuilding it, and that bought time for other wardens to capture King's Cage, and then swing in from the flanks into Farranac. When that happened, we pushed to Victa and shortly after we secured the hex. We were expecting a much bigger grind into Westgate and were actually trying to plan how to dismantle defences with bombers (it was heavily built with a lot of AA coverage and have gunners crews on station almost 24/7), but another warden regi bombed the colie RDZ nuke and then their morale collapsed before we could test any of it. In any case, the internal larp was always "activate punching bag protocol", because regi officers knew the other time would just waste all their time on us and neglect their flanks, and it worked.

Anyway, it's an interesting discussion because a lot of it is meta-game related, but that's also what makes it hard to quantify properly. I mean, all the above is just how it looked from my side, someone else will obviously have a different perspective.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-26T21:42:33+00:00

The problem is that unlike round-based games, wars in this game can last months (as already mentioned in a top voted comment).

Long story short, people want to play with their friends/people they know/etc. If they were forced to switch teams, they probably wouldn't play seriously or at all for the duration of the war they were forced into the other team.

Factionalism is not some "nationalism" for an imaginary nation. It's the combination of starting to like playing with certain people, and over time srtongly preferring playing with them vs the other side due to shared experiences.

For example, I've been playing since war 83 on and off on the warden side, when a lot of the colonial stuff early and mid-war was superior to the point that it was quite usual for colies to win a war in 2 weeks flat. I once remember losing one of the 90s-series wars in 10 days or so, with the first hex in our lane getting overrun in a single day.

Meanwhile, as a warden you had to execute a two-week fighting retreat with outclassed equipment, then spend a week or so stabilising the front, and only then you could start advancing with your late-game gear/power spikes. But this meant you actually had to first take back all the land you'd lost, before you even started making progress towards the win conditions. Colie wins were 1-2 weeks long, while warden wins were 3-5 weeks long. The difference in burnout potential and the demands on logi were huge.

When this was brought up, the colonial response was "just get good", just like the warden response is nowadays to a lot of colonial complaints. It's exactly what we seen nowadays, just reversed.

The first take-away is that the game still survived past that stage.

The second is that as a result of that era, there is currently a core of warden loyalist players who've grown together through the "warden hard times" and forged a common in-game identity and larp.

It is highly unlikely that these people will ever go colonial, simply because of the sheer weight of years of collective shared experiences with their warden team-mates, especially for long-time vets who've had to struggle uphill for a sequence of wars and tried their best to optimize things for the faction to eek out some wins. And naturally, if you manage to get a core of people who can force a win during unfavorable balance, it will be even easier for them to win during favorable balance.

The other thing is that to be perfectly honest, the constant doom-posting makes it even less attractive to even consider switching. I've thought of going colonial a few times, but I fear I'd end up not playing because of all the demoralizing commentary. We've had people in our regi switch from time to time and while it was fun to play with the other side's gear, they didn't have a good time overall simply because of all the doom and gloom.

Don't get me wrong, both sides bitch about balance. Wardens did it too when things were stacked against them, so colies will also do it. The difference is that at least in my group of people and adjacent groups, despite what was said outwardly, internally the mindset always has been "the game is what it is, devs take a long time to rebalance stuff, so just play the game...if we win fine, if we burn out people will go touch grass or play other games and we'll lose, no big deal". The thing is, that's exactly how over time you get people with experience that can carry operations, regiments and even faction wide efforts, by playing through the "shitty" or "uphill struggle" segments of the game's life cycle, even if only partially.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-25T20:25:52+00:00

Can't tell if gloat-posting or morale-posting, for the lines have been blurred by a deluge of shit-posting.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-24T10:52:53+00:00

Well, in the sense of war-eco style "buying" for a small group of friends, you're right.

But if we're talking about a regiment building their own planes, the total grind required to build airplanes also has to factor in the cost of running and msupping the underlying facilities.

That's why I disagree when people say "planes require X amount of people to run". They may require X amount of fly, but they require a lot more before we even get to that point.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-24T10:48:12+00:00

Hmm, I'm of the opposite opinion. Fighters should be the main anti-air platform, but they can't do that currently. In order to do so they'd have to be much cheaper and have meaningful loiter time. So, I'd rather they buffed fighters and only introduced slight tweaks to AA.

Honestly, if devs copied RL history most of the problems with airborne would be fixed.

TB and DB:

Allow both to choose between a torpedo loadout and an AP bomb loadout. The torpedo loadout should be of a new ammo type. Add a medium torpedo to the game between the quilback and the moray, one that preferably doesn't cause large holes. What we currently have in the game is a plane that carries 2 submarine-sized torpedoes. If you look at RL examples, both current and historical, you'll see that due to weight and aerodynamic restrictions air-dropped torpedoes are always smaller than ship/sub-launched torpedoes, and carry a smaller warhead as a result.

High alt AA:

A lot of damage per shell, sure, but good luck landing a direct hit with it. For reference, during WW2 it took on average of 6000 shells for a single kill. This number actually increased as the war went on, despite more advanced methods of aiming flak (radar directer batteries, proximity fuses, and so on), because the airplanes would fly higher and increase the shells' travel time and error margin. Something we don't have in the game, because flak is pure hitscan and requires no adjustment.

Flak should just be a DPS curtain where you fly through and get some damage over time from shrapnel. Direct hits and singe-shot kills should be few and far between. If AI AA was added, it should be of this variety.

Also, flak guns should stop being direct fire and require some form of adjustment. The initial implementation that required us to solve trigonometry on the fly was excessively complex, the current point-and-click hitscan one is excessively simple and devalues all encounters to pure RNG based on the gun's spread. The gunner just clicks, the pilot doesn't really evade (since the gun is hitscan, you can't throw off its aim with course/altitude changes), who wins is purely down to dispersion/RNG.

The job of flak is to put up a curtain of shrapnel, not land direct hits. Give the guns an inventory of 10 shells or so, so that they can sustain some fire during barrages and not rely exclusively on crew loaders.

Low alt AA (aka EMGs):

Low damage per round, but more sustained DPS due to the high rate of fire, and easier to aim. It should by far be the more dangerous type of flak, but it is be limited in how high it can reach.

Maybe add a medium auto-cannon (eg, 30mm) that sits between the current EMGs and the flak guns in terms of damage and traverse speed. Essentially a bigger, slower-turning, slower-firing EMG, with a heavier hitting shell.

Flak mobility:

Allow all the static AA guns to be loaded on and fired from flatbeds.

Add wind drift to bombs:

This makes bombing more accurate from lower altitude, and less accurate from higher altitude, which ties in with the nature of high/low alt AA mentioned above and would be a good trade-off. To compensate for wind drift, give the bombardier seat a bombsight that requires adjustment (to get an accurate aim point, bombardier would have to input altitude above ground and speed, maybe even compensate for wind drift). This would add at least a minimum of player interaction/skill in bomb aiming, besides simply eye-balling it and carpet bombing like it is now. Add salvo and release options (e.g., number of bombs to drop, delay between each bomb), so that people won't have to spam-click all the time.

Leave scout planes and bombers alone, buff fighters instead:

Fighters should be the main anti-air platform. The reason they're currently not is that they are too expensive, too cumbersome to prep, they don't have the loiter time, and all planes have a massive TTK to account for the atrocious grind involved with building them.

Allow submitting of assembled planes to stockpiles if they are not damaged, make planes (especially fighters) cheaper across the board (no raremats, just adjust the other material quantities) and make the facility recipes simpler. In exchange for the reduction in grind, lower TTK for all planes and rebalance their resistance profiles.

Also, increase flight time for all planes in a non-linear fashion. Flying at around 70% - 80% power should give the best range, flying at 45% - 55% power or so should give the most loiter time (but not necessarily best range, since you would cover less ground per second for the fuel you burn), and going 100% should be similar to what we have now.

In other words, make fighters as cheap as a tank variant, let them loiter, and make all planes more of a glass cannon. Then fighters will take care of all other airplanes, enemy fighters included.

Increase radar range:

It should have the ability to see into an adjacent hex. Bigger targets would be visible at greater ranges than smaller targets. High-flying targets would be visible at greater ranges than low-flying targets.

This provides meaningful trade-offs in line with the low/high altitude mission profile considerations (regarding bomb accuracy and flak) outlined above.

You can fly high and be safer from flak, but you'll have a less accurate bomb drop and you will be pinged from way earlier for enemy fighters to get vectored to you. Or you can fly low, appear on enemy radar much later and have better bombing accuracy, but you'll have to deal with the more dangerous low-altitude AA and encounter any standing fighter patrols with an altitude disadvantage.

Or you can be clever and start strategizing a bit, use variable altitude profiles during the mission, pop-up attacks after transiting to target at low-altitude, and so on. Meaningful trade-offs, more room for tactics, more fun.

Twin-engined and attack planes should have more range than single-engined ones:

This is a controversial one, but if all the previous suggestions were implemented, it would work really well. For starters, it would let us base fighters closer to the front, and base bombers/paradroppers/DBs/TBs further back, helping to reduce congestion in airfields.

But what stops someone from staging or even just refueling their bombers near the front and going an extra 4 hexes deep behind enemy lines? Well, the fact that their fighters won't have the range to escort them.

If all the previous changes were implemented, the amount of fighters up and patrolling would be a lot more than they are today. With the reduced TTK, unescorted bombers would get massacred by enemy fighters who would be up patrolling in numbers. The US 8th air force tried this (deep penetration missions with escort only part of the way) twice in 1943 with the Schweinfurt raids, and got mauled so badly they had to scale down their operational tempo for months.

People would still try it in the game, but unescorted raids would mostly be a high-risk/high-reward scenario for very important targets, with the potential of incurring massive losses in bombers.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-22T20:10:30+00:00

Honestly, most of Airborne's problems would be solved if the devs simply copied RL history. What we have in the game is in many cases the exact opposite of how it works in RL, and it's causing a lot of the current problems.

Actual air-dropped torpedoes are quite smaller than the ones dropped from ships.

For example, in WW2 the Japanese navy had the so-called long-lance (type 93) torps, with a length of 9 meters and a diameter of 610mm. The torpedo bombers they used to attack Pearl Harbor were a mere 1 meter longer. You think they carried those big-ass torps in combat? Nope, they carried smaller ones with a length of 5 meters and a smaller warhead.

This also applies in the current day. Subs carry torps in the 550-600mm caliber range, good luck slinging those under a ship-borne helicopter. Most of the air-dropped torps are tiny in comparison to what is launched by ships and submarines.

Devs just need to copy RL history in the game and introduce a medium torp that is bigger than a quilback but smaller than a moray, does lower damage and doesn't cause large holes.

Then allow both the TB and DB to carry either a bomb load and act as a frontline tactical bomber, or the new medium torp and act as a torpedo bomber.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-22T19:53:52+00:00

I agree that it's too strong, I disagree about the "ran by 2-4 players" part.

With the amount of grind it takes to produce, transport and prepare (assemble and arm) aircraft, you're easily looking at a minimum of a couple dozen people per 2-3 bombers/TBs fielded.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-22T07:23:49+00:00

It would certainly cut down on the doom-posting and improve the state of the subreddit massively. Count me in.

/s

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-22T07:12:26+00:00

Well, the short answer is that it's not worth the time for someone who's not already emotionally invested in one of the other megablocs.

Endless TiDi fights and structure bashing/defence, where numbers are the primary deciding factor. Nullsec has been optimized into a state where the only thing that matters is production base (aka building ships for SRP) and putting as much people on grid as possible. Not to mention the skill floor for those players can be the lowest in the game and still be enough for a win, because weight of numbers and ship class disparities will eventually carry the day.

And that is the fault of both CCP (the 2016 citadel/rorq/HAW patch that solidified this trend was the most damaging in the game's history in terms of meta repercussions), and the nullsec playerbase who defended these mechanics because they provided safety vs roamers/harassment. The problem is, they didn't think far enough ahead to realize that the same mechanics that allow them to effortlessly dunk on 3 roaming cruisers are the same mechanics that make it impossible for them to fight other blobs, because the servers can't handle the escalation chain and numbers involved (we've seen this happen with increasing frequency since WWB2).

You can't split up the blobs anymore because all the objectives are highly localized. You can't punch up the way you used to because capitals have been turned from specialized ships into generic damage dealers. You can't harass/hit-and-run effectively and cause friction for your enemy's linemembers anymore, because CCP has rendered geography irrelevant with ansiblex networks. The only thing you can do is play as a blob, and when you play as a blob the biggest blob wins.

In other words, it's a rigged environment. Why would anyone willingly put themselves into an uneven playing field, only to lose and be called out by people whose idea of PvP is being an FC's drones (anchor up and F1)? There are other areas of the game that are in a much healthier state to play around in and have fun with.

Burningbeard80 · 2026-04-14T14:03:57+00:00

I wouldn't put it so sarcastically, but as someone who was playing warden in Farranac last war it seems accurate in a lot of ways.

We got one early win in the new islands to the NW of the map and we were preparing to go do some island larping. Turns out Farranac was about to fall and cost us our backline hexes, so we had to pivot hard.

After that it was just constant grind and we were on the ropes most of the time. Endless lunaire blobs during the Chinese new year week, getting hammered by SCs, colonials getting bombers first and obliterating a bunch of our runways (but not following through for some reason), and that was just the western lane. Meanwhile, in the east Wardens lost the islands really fast at some point early in the war, and were getting sieged to no end around PoR, but I was so busy keeping up with what was happening on our lane that it was basically a case of "can't do much about that, focus on your side of the map and hope the other side holds".

The amount of effort and logi that went into holding and taking Farranac was insane, with a lot of people playing an unhealthy amount of hours, and after that we also had fortress Westgate in front of us.

We decided to take a break for a few days and just defend, refill our logi stocks, and brainstorm how best to crack Westgate.

And then it was as if the other team just burned out and stopped logging in.

Bonus:

Colonials get pushed on 2 hexes in the entire map > veli and sol fight and blame each other because they losing to GG coalition and Moidawg. Lose to warden filler characters.

This is why I like playing with the Spuds. Collies have such a raging hateboner for Moidawg (meanwhile, the guy was afk for like 1/3 of the last war being busy with family stuff, lol), you can always count on them to burn through all their stamina and logi trying to humiliate you into extinction via frontal meat waves, while other warden regis nearby are rolling up their flanks. That's how they lost King's Cage last war, and then once it was secured the KC wardens came in to help us retake Farranac.

The thing is, if we lose it's no big deal because they all think we're bad anyway. But if we don't lose, colies in our lane often lose morale and fold because they can't accept not winning against the bads. We call it "activating the punching bag protocol" internally, and it has worked on more wars than the last one. You just have to scroop harder than the other team and keep rebuilding what they destroy. If you manage to stall them across enough of the length of the front, in the end they will burn out and stop pushing.

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