User:Uryence/newfitting

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Fitting any ship is a dense, complex process involving many trade-offs. Devising a potentially-viable fit that might work for a group doctrine can be even more challenging. This page lays out some of the thinking and questions involved; the exact details of the fit crafted here are not necessarily current to the present game mechanics due to updates, but the principles remain useful.

Who Devises Fits?

Anyone can create a fit. Whether or not that fit is good is a different question. Coming up with doctrine fits that can be used at an alliance level is a long process that requires everything from a ground-level understanding of the basic items you should probably fit (such as propulsion, tank, and role modules), right up to the slight differences in various types of the same module and the repercussions that fitting that module will have (fitting space, stat alterations, etc).

A good theorycrafter or fit-crafter and a good fleet commander are not the same thing. One player might be a brilliant fit analyst, able to decide what meta-level of MWD a Machariel needs and why it should mount 800mm autocannon instead of 650mm artillery, but not able to command a fleet of fitted Machariels. Some fleet commanders are not (and need not be) expert theorycrafters. Some players are neither gifted commanders nor gifted theorycrafters: there are many other ways to "be good at" EVE and to contribute to your corporation.

Where to Start?

We'll assume that you already know the ship you will be creating a fit for. Let's imagine you have been asked to create a fit for an '"armor fleet brawling Tempest". That's enough of a goal to begin with

We strongly suggest you download and use a third-party fitting tool, such as PYFA. The in game fitting tool is ok, but nowhere near as easy and quick for prototyping new fits.

We'll start with the hull itself first. You want to think about the bonuses the ship gets, even if you know them automatically. Per pilot level of Minmatar Battleship, the Tempest gets:

  • a 7.5% bonus to Large Projectile Turret rate of fire
  • a 5% bonus to Large Projectile Turret damage

There are also a few other things we need to ask ourselves first:

  • How do other people fit this ship?
  • How should I make use of the ship bonuses?
  • How should I balance tank, damage and utility?
  • Do I need a propulsion module and if so, what should I fit?
  • Will everything fit within the ship's CPU and powergrid?
  • How blingy should I make it?
  • What other modules or rigs should I fit?

Broader contextual facts should affect your answers to these questions. For example, a theorist crafting a fit for a selective PvP corporation which requires 50 million character skill points for applicants to be eligible for consideration can expect perfect or near-perfect fitting skills—and therefore more ability to put loads on the CPU and powergrid—and also substantial resources available to put expensive faction modules ("bling") on the ship. The same theorist crafting a fit for an organisation such as EVE University, which specializes in fostering newer players, might want to consider more forgiving fitting requirements and cheaper modules or, at least, a "new player friendly" second version of a fit which is less demanding. Since the ship at hand in our example is a battleship, we might expect relatively good character skills and ISK resources.

Step 1: Copy

So, let's start with the sincerest form of flattery: imitation. We look at what people have been flying:

In practice, a theorist working on an alliance doctrine might look through many more zkill entries than this, but let's stop here for now.

So looking at the above fit, take note of what it has fitted:

  • Armor Plates - for buffer
  • Autocannon - the closer-range projectile weapon (check the Tempest's bonuses to large projectiles again)
  • Microwarpdrive - for manoeuvring
  • Cap Booster - to avoid running out of capacitor
  • Utility Neuts - for capacitor warfare

Step 2: Make Your Fit

We'll start in Pyfa, by fitting a few basics to our empty Tempest. The balance between tank and damage is important; one must be fitted before the other, but then both must be weighed against each other. In this example, let's fit tank first, to begin by double-checking that the ship will actually stay alive longer than a few seconds.

We know we need tank, so we'll fit 2 armor plates like the fit above. (Most battleships will fit 2 1600mm armor plates for armor fleet fits.) We'll also fit a Damage Control, a fantastic module that does not get stacking penalized by other resist mods, and boosts resistance to damage across all of shield, armor and hull. (As a rule of thumb, don't fit a fleet PVP ship without buffer.)

Fittingship1.png

We have three low slots left now. Perhaps we need some armor resistance? Let's throw on a few Energized Adaptive Nano Membranes. We only really want two on there, because stacking penalties will hit us quite hard after that. Finally, our explosive resist is quite low, so let's throw on an explosive membrane on too.

Fittingship2.png

We probably need some weapons, so let's grab some 800mm autocannon. We definitely don't want artillery (the other form of projectile turret), because they are not designed for brawling, and brawling was our starting-point goal. Artillery is better-suited for longer ranges, as its tracking speed is horrendous up close. Artillery it also has a huge cycle time.

We've still got quite a bit of room left after we fit the 800mms.

Fittingship3.png

We'll probably want to fit a propulsion module of some sort to get around the battlefield.

Both afterburners and MWDs have their proponents for brawling battleships. MWDs offer much higher speeds, but fitting one reduces the ship's entire capacitor pool, and a warp scrambler will shut an MWD down. Running an MWD also blooms a ship's signature, making it easier to hit with turrets and easier to hurt with missiles. Afterburners don't have these drawbacks, and use less capacitor to run, but offer a far smaller speed boost. In practice, lots of factors would weigh on this choice; let's take an afterburner for now.

After we've stuck a propulsion module on, we need to decide a few other things in the mid slots. Usually, for this type of fit, we'll have several "refits" for our mid slots that are designed to be switched around depending on what you are fighting. For now, we'll add a scram (for tackle or boosh resistance), a sensor dampaner, and a tracking disruptor. We can add some refit mods to the cargohold just in case. The reason we fit these is that they use the spare mid slots freed up by using an armor tank in order to apply additional pressure to our enemy. A Tracking Computer might be another good option here.

Fittingship4.png

One mid slot is empty for now. There are two empty high slots on the Tempest that remain even when its turret hardpoints are all filled. You can put missile launchers on there, but they won't have any hull bonuses to damage. A strong alternative option is heavy energy neutralizers, which can have a devastating impact on the capacitors of small- and medium-sized ships that stray too close. However, with two heavy neuts active, alongside our mid slots running, we run out of capacitor in 3 minutes.

Fittingship5.png

While that's not terrible, you also don't want to be in a situation where you are neuted back and you have to drop your tackle, electronic warfare and propulsion. So we'll throw a capacitor booster on. It has to be a meta level one as otherwise you run out of powergrid.

Fittingship6.png

We're just missing a few finishing touches. Let's load the guns with some default close-range, high-damage ammo, add some drones, and finalize rigs.

Pictured here is the optimal drone choice for maximum DPS: 2 heavies, 2 mediums and 1 light. They will be vulnerable to smartbombing, as they will fight close to their target, and they will also spend time not applying DPS as they move between targets. The alternative is to fit sentry drones. They do less DPS, but you can drop them in a safer place and they'll stay alive longer (and have no travel time).

Let's—for the sake of this fit—try spending all the rig slots to increase the buffer tank.

And here we have our first iteration of a fit.

Fittingship7.png

Step 3: Tweaking the Fit

Once you have what you think is a complete fit, you must play devil's advocate and test its details, perhaps tweaking some.

We've purposely chosen a simple ship to work with here, as there's really not a huge deal wrong with the basic draft fit at all. That said, dedicating so many of the available slots to tank is quite a considerable tilt towards only one part of the ship's purpose. The damage output isn't stellar. Let's have a think about what we can do to increase our damage:

  • We could remove a plate to fit a Gyrostablizer, the standard low slot module which augments projectil turret damage. That would, however, significantly reduce the raw armor hitpoints on the ship, giving the pilot and allied logistics less time to react to a target switch. That would be suboptimal.
  • We could also remove one of the Energized Adaptive Nano Membranes. But that leaves us with very low resists for thermal/kinetic damage.
  • How about that explosive membrane? If we remove that, our explosive resist drops from 72.7% to 55.1% and our overall EHP from 142k to 128k. Not ideal.

What if, though, we remove a Trimark armor rig, and fit an anti-explosve pump instead? Then we can pull the explosive membrane out, and put a Gyrostablizer in its place.

Fittingship8.png

This takes the DPS from 807 to 944 combined, an increase of 17%. However, our tank has dropped a bit, to 122k EHP from 142k, a 14% drop. We could argue that our resists are much closer together now, and the high explosive resist would really not have helped us much in the previous iteration. We did lose some buffer by making this change, though, as we had to replace a Trimark. Overall, this is probably a now a fit with a more even balance between DPS output and tank. In practice, a theorycrafter might have a more specific goal than "brawling armor fleet Tempest", which might condition their decision over this tweak.

Conclusion

Did we achieve what we set out to do? We made a perfectly capable armor fleet brawling Tempest. Someone else could come up with a slightly different fit, but that's the joy of EVE. Nothing is ever 100% correct, and someone flying our example fit here would sooner or later run into a situation in which they would want the extra buffer rather than the balance of DPS and buffer. Whether they would run into that situation often enough to justify changing the fit is a different question, which circles us back to the importance of the fit's initial goal.

Why no more expensive faction or deadspace mods on this fit? There are certainly faction and deadspace modules which could go into this fit. Take the fit below as a good example. It's not overly pricey, and the extra expense isn't wasted. For 60 million more ISK, we gain some good resists and 8k more EHP.

Fittingship9.png

Is this a good exchange? It depends on the resources of the alliance and pilots involved. For a Tech 1 battleship hull, players don't normally go all-in on expensive modules. Faction battleships and Tech 2 battleships, on the other hand, often do receive more "bling". Many pilots who wouldn't put A-Type deadspace modules on a Tempest absolutely would put them on a Machariel.

As a rough guide, if you're spending around the same on mods as you are on the hull, you're in the right ballpark. If that number starts creeping up, you just need to make sure you know what you are doing, and that the expense fits the pilots and purpose for which you're fitting the ship.

See Also

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