A new Tuxford Blokh,... I mean blog

First a bit about tier 3 ships

Well it looks like I stirred up quite a lot of emotion with my last blog but that was kind of expected and in reality inevitable. Battleships are pretty balanced right now, players say some of the ships are overpowered and some underpowered but all have their strengths and weaknesses. So adding four more ships is a dangerous business, and there is always the potential to upset that balance.

I've been reading a lot of your replies, been speculating and having intense battles on the development server with other devs (working at CCP rawks!). Some of you have gotten hold of some preliminary stats on the ships; those are severely outdated and have already changed. I have a few points on them some stuff I've already posted on the forums and some stuff me, Hammer and other devs have just been talking about.

• Hyperion's MWD bonus isn't really all that great, it's basically the same as Apocalypse cap bonus, which people aren't really fond of, but it only works when you have an mwd fitted. We've played around with other bonuses; the bonus that is on it right now is mass addition reduction bonus, if that makes sense to anyone. That bonus effectively makes you faster with ab/mwd with a reduced agility penalty when you fit one.
• Maelstrom med slots, the argument I've seen so far is that it needs at least 3 slots for speed mod, webbie and a scrambler, anything less than 4 slots is too little to tank with. I recognize that logic but we intend the Maelstrom to be a shield tanking artillery boat, relying on other ships to tackle for you. Then again shield boost bonus isn't really terribly effective in fleets where you have potentially a lot of ships firing at you and damage output exceeds your tank's absorption by a wide margin. That's basically the reasoning for changing the Moa's shield boost bonus to resistance bonus originally.

What other stuff have I been working on

Well there is the Tier 2 battlecruisers. I don't really have any solid info on those yet. So far they're favoring damage over tankability which makes them extremely vulnerable to bigger ships due to their big signature radius and sluggish feel, but would make them quite devastating versus smaller ships, like cruisers.

I'm also working on the assault missiles, basically a short range option for cruiser sized missile users. Currently they give about 25% more damage over time and have a range of about 15km with no ship range bonuses. They use more grid than the heavy missile launcher but uses less CPU. All subject to further balancing once it goes on SISI of course.

I've mentioned that we made a minor adjustment to inertial stabilizers. They now give you a mass reduction as well as agility bonus. Fitting an inertia stabilizer now gives you bigger velocity bonus when you fit an MWD and an AB and makes you more agile. However mass is now stacking nerfed, it doesn't affect any other module though since inertia stabilizers are the only module that affects mass in a multiplicative way.

Well that's all for now, there are some other things I'd like to mention but I'd rather just do a full scale blog about it.