Thoughts on Changes to Faction Battleships

The winter expansion, called Dominion will bring about new releases and changes to faction ships.

In this article I will focus on the Battleships, since CCP has finally decided to release Tier I battleships in Navy versions. Also, quite a few changes are to be made to the Tier 2 (Navy versions of the Megathron, Apocalypse, Tempest and Raven).

You can read the improvements to navy versions compared to the vanilla versions in the forum thread linked above - basically all navy Battleships will recieve +10% CPU and PG, +25% racial sensor strength and will lose some calibration compared to the T1 versions. All Tier 1 Navy Battleships get +50% hitpoints on Hull, Armor and Shield, making them pretty hard nuggets.

It is worth mentioning that the Tier 1 Navy Battleships will only be available for purchase from their respective Militia's LP store, with a price tag of 150'000 loyalty points. I expect the tier 1 versions to be rather expensive at first, given the scarcity of Militia LP, but they should go down as more people sign up in search of wealth and nice toys.

The Navy ships of particular interest to me are the Armageddon, Dominix and the Megathron (of which I used to own one for running missions, but which I sold because of its inability to fit T2 railguns without faction mods to spare on CPU)

Now then, on paper the Armageddon looks like a real monster. The slot layout will be 8/4/8, with 7 turret slots. It receives an extra mid slot compared to the standard version, which is CRUCIAL, since it can now fit much better for PVP (Has room for MWD, Cap Booster, web/sensor booster, warp disruptor/scrambler), and also for PVE (one extra cap recharger or AB or whatever). It also gets 50m3 additional drone bay space (which can mean 1 full set of sentries and also other drones; yay for rape-grade DPS).

The new Dominix receives 1 additional mid slot, making the slot layout 6/6/7, adding even more
versatility to what can be considered the Swiss Army Knife of battleships. It also gets a small capacitor boost (+5%) and +25m3 drone bay space, bringing the bay on par with the one on the Sin. All in all it will be more resilient, more versatile (can fit more ewar, more tackle, more drone mods like the omnidirectional tracking link and so on). I sure hope they'll make the paint job Jet Black, like the one on the Navy Megathron.

Finally the Megathron Navy issue will get +5% agility and speed when compared to the current version, +50m3 drone bay capacity and with the PG/CPU boost it'll be good to fit my full T2 setup, including the guns.

Time to start the count-down until Dominion gets released... I can't wait.