Sometime soon, probably at the end of the month, the way missiles work in Eve is going to be changed. At the moment they work so that as long as your target is slower than your missiles then odds are they're not going to be able to avoid being hit. The changes will mean that bigger missiles can't hit smaller ships and so if I launch an anti battleship style missile at a frigate then it's going to do a lot less damage if it hits. Also the speed of the target reduces the damage caused, which means that teh really fast frigates are going to be laughing.
So how does this effect me in missions? At the moment I'm using Cruise missiles in all 6 of my launchers and I'm basically unstoppable against everything in my missions, but when the missile changes come in although I'll still be fine against the larger things there are frigates that I'll not be able to take down as easily. The annoying thing is that it's the frigates that can stop you from bugging out halfway through a mission so they're the ones that can cause a fight that's going badly to end in a nice slow trip home in your pod. There's plenty that I can do to sort all of this out though. I might just fit a couple of smaller guns along with my missiles and deal with the frigates that way or I can add some equipment to make it easier for me to hit the smaller ships.
This does effect how I'll have to equip my ship in a big way, but it's something that anybody who plays an online game should expect to happen. The rules of the game change as you play, and this should be expected by everybody now. Of course the boards are full of people moaning that they have to change the way that they play (before they have fired a single missile with the new system of course), but that's to be expected with the typical board posters.
The best bit of the changes is that against something that is of the right size for my missiles they actually get more powerful because of a few new skills being added. The skills will also reduce the penalty for smaller and faster targets so I suspect that within a month I'll be back to spamming everything with cruise missiles and perhaps needing a few more hits to destroy some things than I do now.
posted @ Tuesday, June 14, 2005 3:44 PM