We are all used to the status quo of typical ship progression in EVE. T1 to Navy to Pirate with T2 for specialization and T3 for flexibility or generalization. You can see this progression as indicated in an older dev blog about ship rebalancing back from 2012.

As mentioned above, you’ll see Navy is an improvement over T1 and Pirate is the pinnacle of “best” ship in terms of progression. Keep in mind, I don’t mean best ships in the game for any situation, but as far as progression goes, they’re at the top of what progression would call the “best” package of EHP, DPS, projection, and utility.

Navy directly competing with Pirate ships

I made some adjustments to the chart above. Here you can see I’ve placed Pirate and Navy on the same “improvement” path, but have split them to be on the same axis to indicate that they are equal. In this new path Navy benefits from a general improvement and Pirate ships gain a unique improvement (which, depending on the ship can also be specialized).

This is what I’d like to challenge in this article. I feel that Navy and Pirate should be very comparable to each other, except that Pirate ships gain unique roles/bonuses that are otherwise not found in the game. Navy/Fleet ships should be more DPS/EHP orientated ships (sometimes exceeding Pirate ships for DPS), instead of being mostly inferior to their pirate counterparts (with some exceptions).

I feel there is a fine line here for adjusting these ships. Pirate ships inherently will be more expensive (though prices continue to fall due to the accessibility of farming them) than Navy ships. We wouldn’t want Navy ships to completely dominate Pirate ships, as that would just cause the pendulum to swing in the Navy ships direction. But, adjusting PG/CPU, some trait bonuses and careful manipulation of slot layout would go a long way to bringing Navy and Pirate ships closer competitively. Also, keep in mind that pirate ships have unique bonuses not found in any other ship line, so you would be paying for those unique bonuses more than anything.

Lorewise, it also never made sense to me why the empire factions – who have massive fleets and engineering power – command ships vastly inferior to pirate ships. Which, to add on to that, are somehow not able to keep up with pirates “reverse engineering” their own ships and tweaking them to fit the pirate life of hit and run. The unique roles pirate ships retain makes sense lore-wise, but what doesn’t make sense is that some pirate ships have vastly better DPS or EHP than navy ships. Which is most likely based on ship progression in the game. Anyway, back to the actual game discussion.

When comparing pirate and navy ships, there is one ship class that works very well at the dynamic I mention here, where navy/pirate are on nearly equal footing; the frigate line. Slicer, Firetail, Comet and to a lesser extent, the Hookbill, are all strong and have similar strengths to their pirate counterparts. They’re flexible, do respectable damage and have good slot layouts for control and all are quite fast.

The only pirate frigate that really shined out against the navy ships was the Worm. That may have been more of a balancing concern with that one ship, rather than how pirate ships should have been in relation to navy ships.

Navy Cruisers

The disparity in power becomes even more prominent once you reach cruisers and above. Navy cruisers are in some cases worse than their T1 versions, or are so short on fitting and anemic in DPS, that the pirate counterparts completely dominate them. There are some decent navy ships for PvP, such as the Omen Navy Issue, Osprey Navy Issue and the Vexor Navy Issue. The Scythe Fleet Issue has a couple of niche to fill, but the Osprey Navy Issue is better with RLML than the Scythe Fleet. The Navy Augoror also has some niche roles in fleet fights (especially in lowsec), but is mostly relegated to a bait ship. It is, however fairly unique in what it provides; there isn’t really a direct pirate competitor to the Navy Augoror, and with that, it can still find its unique role to own.

Now you’re left with things like the Stabber Fleet Issue, Caracal Navy Issue, and the Navy Exequror.

Stabber Fleet Issue

The Stabber Fleet Issue (SFI) has had a fall from grace in the past several years due to the fact that other weapons/ships were buffed, while medium autocannons received less attention. Speed creep (everything else in the game getting faster) and then brawling became less favorable. On top of this, after the T1 Stabber was buffed, the T1 Stabber and SFI do nearly the same gun dps (T1 is 351 dps, SFI is 366, before drones), but the T1 Stabber gets a range bonus, which is actually somewhat useful when kiting with autocannons. Not to say the SFI can’t kite with a/c’s, but the lack of a 50% range bonus does affect how well it can apply that damage past 15km.

Then, you set the Stabber fleet next to the Cynabal, and the Cynabal outperforms it in almost every way. Lets compare the base stats just to help illustrate my reasoning:

*All ships fit with 425mm Autocannons with faction ammo and x2 Gyro’s and a Quad LiF MWD.

Stabber Fleet Issue Base EHP: 13.1k DPS: 366 gun dps, 501dps with 3 hammerheads and 2 hobgoblins Speed: 2184m/s Cap: 1.27k GJ with a +10GJ/s regen, 3m30s cap with MWD running Targeting Range/Signature: 50km/100m Powergrid: 1.188k MW CPU: 387.5 tf

T1 Stabber Base EHP: 7.59k DPS: 351 gun dps, 450 dps with 5 hobgoblin II's Speed: 2455m/s Cap: 1.2k GJ with +9.36GJ/s, 3m with MWD running Targeting Range/Signature: 59.4km/100m Powergrid: 893.8MW CPU: 425 tf

Cynabal Base EHP: 12.1k DPS: 439 gun dps, 598 dps with 5 hammerheads Speed: 2545m/s Cap: 1.42k GJ with +9.63GJ/s, 3m40s with MWD running Targeting Range/Signature: 58.8km/115m Powergrid: 1.225k MW CPU: 418 tf

To start with, I recognize the drone layout is most likely not what you’d be using on some of these ships, but it’s just for demonstration purposes for the highest attainable DPS you’d be able to achieve and to keep them all on the same page for comparison purposes.

Looking at the stats, the Stabber Fleet really only beats its T1 counterpart and the Cynabal in potential tank. The paper DPS on the SFI is higher than the T1 Stabber, but the T1 stabber can apply its gun DPS at longer ranges. The Cynabal’s DPS with guns alone is nearly 100 dps over the SFI, plus it gets a range bonus to even further make the SFI a poor choice for anything other than brawling.

In terms of fitting, the Cynabal needs to fit 1 less gun than the SFI, but gets more PG and CPU while the T1 Stabber gets 38 more CPU than the SFI. Seeing the tracking bonus on the SFI looks promising as maybe you can squeeze some artillery on it and make for a high tracking, semi-speedy artillery platform, but it simply doesn’t fit well. Yes, you can “fit” artillery on an SFI, but you’re normally gimping the fit with multiple power grid mods or using 650 artillery (which is terrible). Even if you did manage to squeeze in artillery, your lock range is less than the T1 Stabber and Cynabal, so you can’t even utilize the full range of artillery. Also, with this being a “Fleet Issue” with the hope to see usage in fleets, targeting range is fairly important to have so you’re not wasting mids on SEBO’s (although info links help here) just to be comparable to other offerings.

I can continue picking out other details of how the SFI is inferior to the Cynabal/T1 Stabber (even its scan resolution is lower), but I’ll leave it at that for now. Now, how can we improve the Stabber Fleet Issue so that it can compete with the Cynabal?

First, it needs better fitting across the board. More CPU and substantially more powergrid (+16 CPU and +52 PG as a start). This would allow artillery fits without major gimping (needing 1 PG mod would be fine), as well as making niche fits like a single XLASB easier to fit for brawling.

Next, we could increase the hull bonus from 5% Rate of Fire per level to 7.5% Rate of Fire per level. This brings its gun DPS up to 439 dps with 425mm autocannons using x2 T2 gyrostabilizers, the same as the Cynabal (before drones). For artillery, you’d be at 379 dps with 720’s. The Cynabal would have better alpha, but the stabber would shoot faster. For it to take advantage of the extra range artillery provides, maybe compromise and go with a 55-56km targeting range, instead of the current 50km.

So, in the end, this would keep it directly competitive with its Pirate counterpart, but not inherently better than it. They have the same dps, but achieved in different ways. The SFI has better tracking and the Cynabal has better application range and retains its unique role bonus of warp speed, it’s still faster than the SFI and is slightly more flexible in slot layout which includes a utility high as well.

Caracal Navy Issue

Note: CCP recently released patch notes saying that the Caracal Navy Issue will get 25m3 of drone bay space/bandwidth. It will help in the “paper” dps department but it doesn’t really solve the main issues with the CNI. In this section i’ll propose an alternative balance method to bring it in line with other offering and to help paint a clearer picture of the interaction between Navy Ships and Pirate ships that I’m exploring in this article.

I think an even better example of the thought process of giving Navy ships more parity with Pirate ships would be a comparison between a Caracal Navy Issue (CNI) and an Orthrus. The goal is to make the Navy ships attractive and competitive with Pirate, but not gain any unique role bonuses, or directly compete in speed and mobility (unless they lack dps or tank to their pirate counterparts such as a Nosprey or Scythe Fleet Issue).

The CNI shows great potential in its stats, with a very strong missile application bonus (explosion radius bonus), 6 launcher hardpoints (the most out of any Navy/T1 cruiser) and a reasonable damage bonus (5% Rate of Fire per level). From my perspective, the current theme of the ship with 6 launchers and an application bonus, is that it wants to be a pure missile ship. You get max application with HAMs/HML to work without drone dps being a factor in available DPS (which drones also aren’t really Caldari’s focus anyway).

In theory, this all sounds great. The issue is, the ship lacks fitting for those 6 launchers and its actual potential dps is quite low in comparison to other options. Also, its slot layout is identical to every other “Caracal hull” in the game. This, in turn, limits your ability to fully utilize the application bonus in some cases as you have to share your 5 mids between tackle, prop mod tank and application. It also does not have a range bonus, so HAMs are still only 20km range and Rapid lights are not range or application bonused. Meaning a T1 Caracal, Cerberus, Nosprey or Orthrus would be the preferred RLML platform since your missiles are faster than most small ships.

As a quick note, the Navy Osprey (Nosprey) does slightly more missile volley (lower dps) than the CNI, but is considerably faster, more agile, has a full drone bay and 2 utility high slots (or turret slots if you want to be that person). I feel that the Nosprey is well balanced in general and in comparison to pirate offerings.

Let us do a quick current stat layout:

*All DPS values with faction missiles and x3 BCU and speed with a Quad LiF MWD

Caracal Navy Issue Base EHP: 13k Heavy missile launcher DPS: 359 Heavy Assault launcher DPS: 475 Rapid Light Missile Launcher DPS: 402 Speed: 1965m/s Cap: 1.45k GJ, 4m 10s with MWD running Targeting Range/Signature Radius: 71.9km/125m Powergrid: 893.8 MW CPU: 581.2 tf

Orthrus Base EHP: 13.2k Heavy missile launcher DPS: 392 Heavy Assault launcher DPS: 519 Rapid Light Missile Launcher DPS: 440 Speed: 2183m/s Cap: 1.55k GJ, 4m 50s with MWD running Targeting Range/Signature Radius: 62.5km/135m Powergrid: 1000 MW CPU: 575 tf

As you can see – to no one’s surprise the – Orthrus beats the Caracal Navy Issue in almost every way, except targeting range and signature radius.

Some glaring issues are that the CNI needs to fit 6 launchers, whereas the Orthrus needs to fit only 5, yet the Orthrus has over 100 more PG and only 6 less CPU. With just 6 heavy launchers and prop mod, the CNI is at 80% PG capacity, before any tank is added. The Orthrus is 62.5% with the same layout. A better example, within the same class, is that the Navy Osprey has 3 launchers, yet has 20 more PG than the CNI.

With rapid lights, fitting improves, however you are not able to utilize your second bonus, nor are you getting any kind of range bonus. A T1 Caracal is better if you want to actually be anti-tackle with RLML (plus it’s cheaper). With no range bonus, it also means HAMs are strictly a means to brawl with. Also, in general, the rate of fire bonuses are weaker for RLML. Things like the Scythe Fleet, Navy Osprey, Orthrus, Cerberus are better options to upgrade to if you’re looking at an RLML platform after a T1 caracal.

This comes to the next point. To actually utilize your second bonus for HAMs, your mids are now fighting for tank/prop/tackle. If you go with the almost mandatory scram, web and mwd, you are left with 2 mids of tank and no additional mid for things like a second web which is helpful against frigs to fully utilize that application bonus. Or using a missile computer to help heavy missile application at range (although in theory, you could drop tackle altogether for a missile computer with heavy missiles). If you want to go with an application rig, then you lose tank and need to start downgrading things as you’ve run out of CPU, which in turn lowers your tank further.

So how can we improve the CNI and make it competitive with Pirate offerings? In my opinion, we don’t need to add drones as CCP has mentioned. As stated above, adding drones does absolutely nothing about the Caracal Navy Issue’s PG shortcomings and lack of space in the mids for application/tank, etc. It does slightly help the dps issue, but is a false impression as your drones aren’t going to hit that ship at 65km range where your heavy missiles might, nor will they catch that interceptor orbiting you and holding you hostage.

To help make the CNI competitive:

Add 60-65 PG and 20-25 CPU

Upgrade its damage bonus from 5% Rate of Fire to 7.5% Rate of Fire

-1 Low +1 Mid

Looking at the numbers, you may think the 7.5% bonus may be too much. I disagree. For 1, losing the low means you lose either a BCU or DCU. A 2 BCU CNI with 7.5% RoF does only about 30 more dps now with HML than before. If you triple BCU you and lose your DCU, then you sacrifice tank for a substantial increase in DPS, which I think is fair.

6 mids then gives you the option of adding in dual web or tracking computer(s) to make heavy missiles apply well or further increase your tank in a fleet/doctrine setting.

Looking at our side-by-side of the CNI and Orthrus now, we see these changes:

Navy Caracal with 7.5% RoF bonus Heavy Missiles: 426dps w/ 3 bcu and 383dps with 2 bcu RLML: 492dps w/ 3 bcu and 438dps w/ 2 bcu w/ 936-950 volley HAM: 569 dps w/ 3 bcu and 504 w/ 2 bcu

Orthrus Heavy Missiles: 392dps w/ 3 bcu and 349dps with 2 bcu RLML: 440 dps w/ 3 BCU and 391 dps w/ 2 bcu w/ 1791 volley HAM: 519 dps w/ 3 bcu and 462 dps w/ 2 bcu

It really depends on the fitting of the CNI with 2 or 3 BCU, but a 2 BCU version brings it in line with the Orthrus, while 3 BCU betters the Orthrus in pure missile dps. Keep in mind that the Orthrus has better volley damage and range, meaning it is more effective with rapid lights, even if the CNI’s paper dps value is higher not including the Orthrus’ drone damage.

This reinforces the theme of the article. The CNI is now considerably stronger than before and also competitive with the Orthrus. They get similar damage (through different ways), the CNI applies better, while the Orthrus has better range with missiles. The CNI does not have any unique bonuses like the disruptor/scram range on the Orthrus and is slower. This adds a distinction in the “Unique Roles” of the Orthrus, but doesn’t make the CNI massively inferior from a stat/performance perspective.

The Remaining Navy Cruisers

I won’t dive in too much here, as this article isn’t about rebalancing every navy cruiser or comparing every Navy Cruiser to its Pirate counterparts. The idea here is to bring navy ships in line with pirate ships, with a more generalized improvement while still being competitive in DPS/EHP. This also allows for outliers, such as being fast, but losing some dps (Omen Navy Issue) or having higher dps and less tank (Vexor Navy Issue compared to Gila).

The Navy Exequror could use some tweaking as well, but it’s a fairly solid ship. Just restrained some by fitting (as is usual). It also already is somewhat following my proposed suggestions of matching closely with its pirate counterpart. Its only 20 dps less than the Vigilant (both with neutrons) and similar tank. The Vigilant is faster though.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the VNI lose 25mb of bandwidth and then adding 2 more turret slots. as heavy drones are technically a battleship-sized weapon. The full 125mb of bandwidth should only be available on specialized hulls (like the Ishtar) and battleships. I understand that this would feel like a major nerf to a ship that is already in the crosshairs of a lot of other potential nerfs and is getting a drone speed nerf in the upcoming patch, leaving it as is would be fine for now.

In general, the vast majority of Navy Cruisers would benefit from fitting adjustments to help open them up to be more competitive.

Navy Battleships

On paper, Navy battleships aren’t too bad. They are competitive in terms of EHP and some are on par with DPS compared to Pirate offerings, though there are several that need some big improvements. First though, before we get into the details of the ships and comparisons, there is one thing that undoes any change made to Navy Battleships, with or without changing the progression.

Navy Battleship and Pirate Battleship Pricing

Even going by the previous/original ship progression tree of T1 → Navy → Pirate, the pricing standard is completely out of balance. This is due to Pirate battleships being so easily farmable through LP and DED sites. We see things like a Bhaalgorn approaching 200m ISK, almost the same as a T1 battleship! Meanwhile, the Navy Armageddon and Navy Apocalypse are 432-700m, with someone having fun with the Navy Armageddon market and putting them up to 900-1.2b. Keep in mind, the Navy Armageddon is only seeing 16 units moved per day in Jita per eve-marketdata’s stat page.

Then you have the Tempest Fleet Issue, which at the time of writing this is at a relatively low 250m-315m (all the farmers must be in Minmatar Militia or they’re getting used for doctrines somewhere), whereas the Machariel is at 370m. For an extra 70-100m though, you can easily jump into a Machariel and get better DPS/alpha, faster warp speed, sub warp speed, and agility. So, for most, an extra 70-100m is no big deal to get into a ship that offers essentially the same thing with some extra, unique offerings. Also, for comparison to the Navy Armageddon, the Tempest Fleet Issue sees 150-300 (up to 1600 sometimes for fleet doctrines) units moved per day in Jita (with other navy battleships seeing a 200-400 unit movement).

The same story can be said for the Megathron Navy and Vindicator, Rattlesnake and Navy Dominix and almost every other pirate to navy battleship comparison being nearly the same price or cheaper. The only outlier is the Barghest at 800m, which I will get into here in a moment.

Before we even get into the numbers and comparisons of Navy battleships and Pirate battleships, the easy farm-ability of Pirate battleships should be looked into. Removing the BPC’s from DED sites would be a good start. Then maybe increasing their LP costs in LP stores just to help create some distance between Navy and Pirate battleships. Then using the Mordus mechanic for introducing all of the faction’s pirate battleship BPC’s via adding Pirate faction battleship spawns into Low sec belts to their corresponding faction. So Sansha space only has the chance to spawn Sansha faction Battleship spawns, Guristas space can only spawn Guristas faction battleships, etc. This improves a few things in one balance pass:

Makes Pirate battleships rarer and more expensive, thus, restoring the price disparity

Introduces new ways to make isk in Lowsec

Puts more people in belts, and not in areas that you need probes to scan down, meaning more risk to get those BPCs, which can also generate content

I know some of you may think; “But why should Navy ships be cheaper and still get comparable stats to Pirate ships?”.

My answer to that is: because you’re paying the extra amount for a pirate ship for its unique bonuses not found in any other ship. If you want a fast warping, highly agile Machariel that can do better damage than a Tempest Fleet Issue, you should pay more than a 70m difference for it. Or if you want a Vindicator with 90% web and 1800 dps, it should cost a bit more than a 30m difference than a Navy Megathron.

I’m going to go over a couple of examples of Navy battleships and how they can be buffed and be competitive with Pirate battleships, without being “better”.

Raven Navy Issue

Not going to hide my bias, but the Navy Raven Issue is a diamond in the rough, I’ve flown it several years as mainly a torpedo platform and have also been using it with cruise missiles lately and is effective at both. The RNI can also use rapid heavy’s, but that’s not really its strong point in the same way that the Caracal Navy Issue isn’t ideal for RLML.

It suffers from a similar issue as the old Drake Navy; it has 8 Launchers and no damage bonus. Because of the 8 launchers, its fitting suffers considerably and it’s hard to squeeze 8 launchers in with a decent shield tank and damage/application mods/rigs. To compound this, unless you’re going max mid slot tank with no tackle/application, its tank is really weak (struggles to break 100k with DCU, Invuln, LSE and tank rigs). It’s actually better to hull tank the RNI than it is to shield tank it if you’re going to do solo stuff with it.

Some of its fitting issues are caused by torpedos themselves, but you need a CPU mod+moderate pimp for a pretty bare bones tank (XLASB+Invuln+DCU+rigs). The scorpion navy fits two fewer launchers and has the same amount of CPU (does have an extra mid, but technically get away with less tank as its baked into the hull). Cruise missiles are a little better, but you still need a CPU mod and some tweaking of mods to get the same bare-bones tank (79k EHP before XLASB).

So, to change it and make it desirable and competitive, you’d see bonuses like this:

5% bonus to heavy missile, cruise missile and torpedo damage 5% bonus to cruise missile and torpedo explosion radius -1 Launcher +35 CPU -1500 Armor HP -500 Hull HP +2000 shield HP

Dropping the launcher frees up fitting a fair amount and adding CPU helps make sure you’re able to utilize the utility high.

Shifting the HP values around allows EHP to remain the same without introducing EHP bloat, but gives it a stronger shield tank, which would be nice to have with a race that is supposed to be shield focused.

With that damage bonus and 7 launchers +3 BCU, here is the dps you’d see with each weapon system:

Cruise Missiles: 752 dps w/ faction (was 688 dps) Torpedoes: 1037.5 dps w/ faction (was 948 dps) Rapid Heavy Missiles: 907.5 dps w/ faction (was 830 dps)

In comparison to the Barghest:

Cruise Missiles: 774 dps w/ faction Torpedoes: 1067 dps w/ faction Rapid Heavy Missiles: 934 dps w/ faction

The Barghest is still king in pure dps, but the RNI is only 20-30dps behind and will apply significantly better with cruise missiles and torpedoes. This makes the RNI a better missile brawler or long-range cruise sniper, while the barghest is faster, does slightly more dps, more missile range and has the unique long point/scram bonuses. This allows the RNI to find its niche as the application focused missile battleship and the Barghest remains as the kitey skirmisher.

Note: It’s possible to increase the damage bonus to 7.5% per level which puts Torpedoes at 1141 dps, Cruise missiles at 827 dps and Rapid Heavy at 998 dps. While its the same damage bonus the typhoon fleet issue has, plus an extra launcher, the typhoon fleet gets 125m3 of drone bandwidth so it can use a full set of heavy drones, whereas the RNI only gets a set of mediums (or 3 heavies if you want to max out dps). Which sets the potential dps on both ships to be about equal, just with the RNI having more missile focused damage and Typhoon FI being split between missiles and drones (which goes with the flavor of Caldari).

Tempest Fleet Issue

The Tempest Fleet Issue (TFI) is sitting in an OK place, but there is a niche in the large projectile line-up that isn’t filled. One that every other ship class has filled on the Minmatar side. Which is a tracking focused ship. You’ve got the Slasher, Firetail, Stabber Fleet and Hurricane Fleet Issue all with tracking bonuses for T1/Navy factions. There is no T1 or Faction battleship (Pirate or Navy) with a projectile tracking bonus.

Also, every Navy faction has a tracking/application focused battleship (Napoc, Navy Megathron, Raven Navy Issue) except Minmatar. If anyone remembers before the battlecruiser rebalance, this used to be the same case with the battlecruisers, until CCP buffed/changed the Hurricane Fleet Issue and gave it tracking bonus+damage bonus.

To make the TFI competitive and have it occupy a niche not held by any other battleship, we’d want to change the bonuses to something like this:

7.5-10% bonus to large Projectile Turret Tracking per level 10% bonus to Large Projectile Turret Damage per level

Now, if we fit T2 800mm autocannons with 3 gyrostabilizers, your dps is lower than the old tempest fleet issue, which is now 741 with faction short range ammo. Which is pretty low. We can work around this in 1 of 2 ways.

The first way would be to give the TFI 125m3 of drone bandwidth. With a full set of heavy drones + gun damage, you’re now sitting at 1058 dps, which is comparable to other battleship dps.

The second way would be to add a 7th turret. Which brings the total gun dps to 861 and then another ~150 dps from medium drones, puts you at about 1011 dps. The only issue I have with this method is that you are then the highest alpha battleship in the game by a far margin above the mach, and track better. With only 6 1400’s and 10% damage bonus, you get an alpha of 12715, which is about 1k over a Machariel already. Add in 7 turrets and it goes up to an insane 14833. If you go the route of a 7th turret, dropping the damage bonus to 7.5% per level would probably be a better-balanced bonus.

Keep in mind, without a rate of fire bonus, 1400 artillery on this ship will have a 22-second rate of fire. So even though the Alpha would be huge, you’ll be firing less than 3 shots per minute (unless you overheat).

While I do want navy ships to be competitive with pirate, I also don’t want them to be so powerful (at least in alpha) that they make certain logi/reps completely ineffective. I suppose a 3rd alternative would be a RoF bonus only, instead of a damage bonus.

Either way, there are several options here for the TFI to be a competitive projectile ship with uses in fleet and small gang by filling a niche for a tracking bonused projectile battleship that doesn’t cost 2b (Vargur). This way the Machariel would be the longer range, fast, flexible battleship, while the TFI is the higher tracking, slower battleship.

The Other Navy Battleships and Closing Comments

As mentioned for the cruisers, I could go on about how to balance the rest of the navy battleships, but I think you all get the idea. Adjust traits, fitting and slots to make Navy Ships competitive with Pirate either by having more dps, better application or in some cases EHP.

Each ship should bring something unique to the table so there isn’t overlap. Which is a lot of what we’re dealing with now. The Mach/TFI being nearly identical, but the mach being better through an extra turret and speed bonuses. Or the Rattlesnake displacing both the Navy Domi and Scorpion Navy Issue as the drone/missile battleship of choice for PvE and PvP.

The Navy faction has a lot of room to grow and are very underutilized, especially for the battleships. If we adopted this mindset/policy for progression, then the Navy ship line would find a lot more uses and help give more variety in fleet comps and small gang options, as well as things like PVE or highsec applications like structure bashes.

Featured Image by Razorien