[2022] Road to Fanfest - Structure Updates

Greetings Capsuleers!

As you may have read in today’s blog post - we’re making a slew of changes to the combat power of structures with the goal of allowing for more variety of fleet compositions in structure contests. This is just the opening salvo of a larger overhaul of how structures fit into the ecosystem of New Eden - and I look forward to talking to you all more about the next steps in the process at fanfest!

Here are the specifics for the changes you can find now on Singularity:

Standup Point Defense Battery

• Now requires ammunition to fire. You can find this new ammunition under the name of “Standup Flak Rounds I” on Singularity (name may be subject to change)
  • Damage per cycle reduced by 50% (250 damage of each type from 500)
  • Requires 200 rounds per cycle to fire
  • Reload time of 180s (new)
• T1 has a capacity of 3000m3 (3 cycles before reloading). T2 has a capacity of 5000m3 (5 cycles).

The PDS was very limiting in terms of the ships that were allowed to exist on grid with it. These changes are aimed at improving the survivability of smaller ships on grid during structure contests, and creating windows of opportunity for them during reloads, while keeping the PDS useful for doing tasks such as clearing bubbles for coordinated defense fleets.

Standup Guided Bomb Launcher

• T1 capacity reduced to 300m3 (holds 3 bombs rather than 10). T2 capacity reduced to 400m3.
• Reload time increased to 60s (was 10 seconds)
• Bomb radius reduced to 20km (was 30km)
• Can only be fit to L and XL structures

The structure bombs were particularly effective in limiting the types of fleets which were able to successfully contest an armed structure, particularly for battleship which were most impacted by them due to their larger signature radius and slow speeds. This change will shift structure bombs into being more akin to tactical bursts of damage, rather than continuous pressure against fleets.

Standup Missile Launchers

• Standup XL Cruise missile damage reduced by 50%
• Standup Super-Heavy Torpedo damage reduced by 30%
• All standup missile velocity increased by 50%

These changes are particularly aimed at reducing the damage a structure can deal to larger ships, which are generally a larger commitment on the part of the attacker. This will hopefully make it a bit more reasonable for attackers to consider putting small numbers of capital ships on grid.

Increasing the missile velocity allows the missiles to retain some use in being more likely to reach subcapital targets before they warp off.

Standup Arcing Vorton Projector

• No longer capable of being activated against subcapital ships

This was primarily being used as a means of removing enemy fleet commanders, and with relatively little counterplay besides bringing extra ships for them to jump into after this happened. While this weapon can still bounce to subcapital targets, it needs to be fired at a capital ship to do so. This change should cement this terrifying weapon as being for anticapital defense.

Please use this thread to share feedback of your thoughts on these changes!

~CCP Aurora

Citadels have been content deniers for far too long, and I’m happy to have had a chance to work with Aurora and the rest of her team on this. This doesn’t represent all the changes I’d like to see, but it hits a lot of them. The end goal, in my view, is to make structures a force multiplier, but not a content denier, and not something that makes fleet fights on the same grid impossible.

Current plan is to release the blueprints in the next major release, and then turn on the ammo requirement about 2 weeks later, to give you time to get the ammo built and moved. Ammo is just enabled on Sisi for testing at the moment.