It seems that the player base is open to discussing a few changes to mechanics to switch up current state of VO pvp and it has been quite some time since any big re-balancing patches have come out. More specifically the difficulty with balancing ships with large ports and their ability to fire swarms.

first a few notes about my general observation of swarms over the years.

1) their intended function and main role seems to be to take down capital and hive shields single handedly by their ability to stack, this is something that should indeed be preserved when talking about any changes made to them.

2) they have the most damage dealing potential by far of any seeking missile and require no energy usage which is inherent the their type.

3) they have the best tracking of any missile type. This is compounded by the fact that they are spread out in a fan like pattern.

now a few of their uses in game.

A) for taking down queen and capital shields solo on a ragnarok

B) being strapped onto an infiturbo ship and used as a hit and run technique

C) in turret form with a script that allows them to infinitely fire from a trident.

Now in the raptor UDV thread a lot of good suggestions have been made to make it more of a contender and a ship of nation pride along the lines of the SCP and the Valk but most suggestions are being shot down due to people not wanting another hit and run ship like the greyhound. I have a few suggestions to tweak swarms that would preserve their ability to down shields and other large targets but make them less of a spammy weapon that ship buffs and nerfs need to be worked around.

i) significantly reduce their tracking ability, when stacking swarms you are already in line with your target as to make sure they all hit at once, you could probably allow them to only move off course by 45 degrees at most and this would have no effect on their abilities in that regard.

ii) make it so they can only target ships in the heavy and above categories. This would stop a lot of the complaining about the swarming and running tactic that a lot of players are not a fan of and lock swarms in as an anti capital weapon. I know dent pilots will complain about the ability to not be able spam their swarm turrets at fighters and the like but they will still be able to defend themselves from solo ragnaroks, and it takes some specific set ups to down dent shields with energy that are not very common in general flying around the verse form. I think this point will generate a lot of discussion in this thread and there is more on it then i want to type in the OP.

iii) make power grid actually matter and do a weapons power consumption and grid redux. This is probably the most time intensive one and the one that would take the most testing so I do not really see it happening any time soon at least not when the devs have their hands full of doing mobile stuff and graphics updates.

in turret form with a script that allows them to infinitely fire from a trident.

The bug that allowed that to happen was fixed a while ago. Turrets only ever fire at their firing rate now. That's 6 missiles every 10 seconds for a (player) Capital Swarm Turret.

Swarms aren't supposed to be anti-capship weapons. I'll try to find the thread, but Inc's said before that they're supposed to be a defensive anti-fighter weapon. The only reason we bomb queens with them is because there's really not any better weapons for the task.

Most lightly loaded, well piloted, light fighters can dance around swarms.

Swarms are useful, as is, for targeting overloaded and/or heavy ships. I can kill a lot of stuff with a sun/jack/rag, but it is pretty much swarm bait. quad rail hornets are hard to get close to, without them ripping your nose off, but they are pretty much swarm bait. Swarms are an important part of the rock/paper/scissors equation, as they are now. I like that a heavy firepower taur or rag represents a significant threat, while being at significant risk.

That being said, I would not mind if they consumed energy to fire, had more mass, and/or had a slower fire rate.

But significantly altering their homing performance will alter the types of ships we commonly see in combat.

pey? you are a valk jock. what are you crying about. learn to dodge. a valk can fly right past swarms and blast the swarmer.

Crying? Really roda, Im glad you could skip the whole pretense of the thread and just jump to personal attacks makes the suggestion forum a much better place.

As it stands there are suggestions to make the UDV into an awesome megaposi platform interceptor type ship but they keep getting shot down because it would in turn be a more effective hit and run swarm platform like the hound.

A lightly loaded valk can. With 2500kg+ addon mass, The X-1 is just barely fast enough to clear a close range swarm spam without dying. Lag sometimes helps.

@Roda: Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.

I have seen proposal to increase the UDV turbo thrust, and that could make the UDV a better swarm machine. My own proposal is to increase combat thrust, which would not affect turbo performance in any way at all. So the UDV would be no better or worse at turbo swarming than it already is or isn't. If you want to modify swarms so they are less useful on ships that are good at running away, i may support the idea. But if you are just trying to make swarms worthless in general, my answer is no.

@joylessjoke: you should wait for your brain to catch up before you speak. genka will tell you when to speak, and what to speak.

I think increasing the mass of swarms would be sufficient. The only side effect I could see would be some turbo thrust for the rag to help it get going for bombing runs with the extra mass of the swarms.