Odyssey: Difference between revisions

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Exploration in Odyssey will change in many different ways. Not only is the whole process of scanning being overhauled, but also the way gameplay in exploration works and looks will differ a lot from what you might be used to.

The Discovery Scanner is basically a new visualisation of the former on-board scanner, with a few additions. Every time you enter a system the Discovery Scanner will start to search for cosmic anomalies and signatures. You will see a scan sweep moving from one side of your screen to the other and further all around the system.

At any time you can hide the Discovery Scanner via the new radial menu for scanning (read more about this in section 9.).

Scanning is becoming a lot quicker and easier ([http://community.eveonline.com/news/dev-blogs/team-super-friends-do-odyssey/ Dev blog source]). Basically, the new discovery scanner will show you all signatures that are available in your current system, but only the very rough location and no signal strength whatsoever. To be able to interact with them you have then to, as you are used to, pinpoint these signatures down to 100% signal strength. This process, however, is changing in the following ways:

[[File:scanwin_orange.jpg|200px|thumb|center|Scan Window: Medium Strength / Idle]]

Signatures and Anomlies are being renamed, to make it more clear what they are. Wormholes and combat sites will now allways show which group they are in, when you discover them (no more Unknown). Also, former Gravimetric and the currently static Ice Belts, will become cosmic anomalies and both be known as Ore Sites.

Also, as reported in [https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=237815 this thread], T3 cruisers are no longer allowed to enter 3/10 and 4/10 DED sites. This change is expected to go live with Odyssey, but has not been confirmed yet.

The way you run data and relic sites is much different from what you might be used to. I will go through this feature in the order of how you will actually interact with it once it's on Tranquility. Note, that the art for the profession containers also got an overhaul, which you can read more about in section 8.4.

[http://youtu.be/gNbGU07GgOo?t=6m22s YouTube video of hacking example]

Decryptors, which you can find through exploration and are used for invention, will be reorganized quite a bit. They will now be put in their own market groups (Amarr, Caldari, Gallente and Minmatar Decryptors), be renamed and also get some additions.

* Optimized Cryptic Augmentation (NEW): Probability -10% / Max. Run +7 / ME +2

Odyssey will introduce a brand new feature and incentive to travel to low sec space. You can now farm special new NPCs for special new tags that can be used to raise sec status, but most importantly can also be traded. This allows for pirates to basically pay other players, so they don't have to spend their own time on the sec status grind, essentially opening up a new market and business branch in the New Eden sandbox.

There's also a dev blog on this topic.

Each of the five pirate factions that populate low sec areas (Angels, Blood Raiders, Guristas, Sanshas and Serpentis) will get 4 new NPCs: the Clone Soldier Trainer, Clone Soldier Recruiter, Clone Soldier Transporter and Clone Soldier Negotiator.

Each of these NPCs will allways drop one of the new tags.

There will be four new tags, one for each of the new NPC types: the Clone Soldier Trainer Tag, Clone Soldier Recruiter Tag, Clone Soldier Transporter Tag and Clone Soldier Negotiator Tag. These tags can be freely traded on the market.

You can use these tags to increase your security status.

There will be a new station service, unique to DED and CONCORD stations in low sec - the security office. There are 45 of these stations and you can highlight them on your ingame starmap (World Map Control -> Star Map -> Stars -> Services -> Security Offices). Using this service will prompt you with a new window. In this window you can drag a slider across a security status bar from -10 to 0. The tags and ISK (there will be an additional ISK fee) cost will adjust according to your current status and the status you dragged the slider to. If you have the required items you can then press the "Exchange Tags" button and your sec status will get updated.

Increasing your sec status above 0 is not possible with these tags.

Currently, CONCORD Standing and Sec Status are the same thing. They will get split in a three step process when the patch goes live, like this:

This will also fix the mechanic of Cycle Ratting, which could be abused to accelerate the rate of sec status gain. This will no longer be possible.

In an effort to balance resource distribution across the universe and make it worthwile in every part of space for pilots to participate in resource gathering professions, Odyssey will bring huge changes to how the base materials of all things in New Eden are to be found and also how important to the manufacturing industry they are. This will affect basically all parts of mining / harvesting, with the exception of gas. In addition, Outposts will see huge buffs on the industry side of things and nullsec anomalies will get tweaked slightly.

There are two dev blogs on this topic, which you can read here and here.

T2 Production will be expanded with two new intermediate materials, four new composites and adjustments to the composition of Microprocessors, Capacitor Units and Reactors. This will make R64 minerals much more important (which is one of the goals). Because of that, 227 existing moons of low and nullsec will be newly seeded with certain types of those minerals. Also, the time required to complete a moon scan will be reduced.

     These T1 blueprints have had their composite requirements replaced mainly with planetary interaction products, and in the case of the Warp disrupt probes, more Stront.

Mineral composition of ores will be changed, so that the rewards will be more fitting to the higher risk of mining in more dangerous space. Also, null sec ores will contain much more low end minerals to help reduce the reliance on imports.

Also, Ore Sites (formerly known as Gravimetric) will now be cosmic anomalies and therefore able to be pinpointed directly by the scan sweep of the new discovery scanner (see section 1.1.).

Ice Harvesting will be made a bit more lucrative and dynamic. Ice Belts will become cosmic anomlies, that respawn allways in the same system four hours after they have been completed. These anomalies will be located in the same solar systems they are currently in, with the exception of some Clear Icicle belts.

     ORE Ive Harvester: 250s cycle time (-250)

In an effort to enhance the experience of building an empire in EVE, the number of installations in outposts will significantly be increased. Please note that the changes to the number of booster slots, that were part of the dev blogs, are not going to be included in the initial Odyssey release, because of technical issues (Source). Therefore, they are also not included in this article.

     Gallente Office Upgrade: 12 (+7), 24 (+17), 36 (+27) Offices

All of the high level (combat) anomalies will have warp disrupting NPCs added to them. Also, sanctums and hubs will see the following tweaks to balance them out more.

     some of the elites in sanctums will be switched out for battlecruisers

Player Owned Structures (POSes) will get some love in Odyssey. These are all changes that should help managing the every day life of POS operators and especially enhance the experience of players and corporations living in wormhole space. Please note that the following list of changes has not been 100% confirmed to be shipped on June 4th. Due to technical difficulties the ancient underlying code provides, some of them might have to be pushed back to a later patch.

If you want to know more about these changes, head over to the according dev blog.

As the Tiericide project moves forward, ship rebalancing in Odyssey focuses on T1 Battleships and Navy Ships, along with the special addition of 4 completely new navy battlecruisers. There will also be a bunch of changes to other ship classes apart from this, mainly minor iterations on previous balance passes.

Heavily connected to the ship tweaks will be the overhaul of associated skill requirements and ship skill progression in general. More info on this can be found in section 7.1.

Build Costs (Source)

     Signature Radius: 330 (+10)

Navy Battleships - Amarr (Source)

     Sensor Strength: 23 Ladar (+.5)

Attack battlecruisers are recieving some tweaks to further bring them in line with ship progression. All four ships will have their mobility, targeting and signature radius slightly nerfed. (Source)

Also, note that the skill requirements for battlecruisers, along with destroyers, will change in Odyssey. You can read more about this in section 7.

Odyssey is introducing a navy variant of each of the four races combat battlecruiser: the Harbinger Navy Issue, Drake Navy Issue, Brutix Navy Issue and Hurricane Fleet Issue. The skill requirements will match the overhauled skill requirements of T1 battlecruisers, which you can read more about in section 7. The only exeption is that you will need the racial battlecruiser skill at level 2 (Source).

     FW Loyalty Point Stores, built ship offer: 100,000 LPs plus 1x built tech1 Battlecruiser plus two Cruiser sized Nexus Chips

As an iteration on recent rebalancing changes of T1 cruisers, in Odyssey there will be some tweaks to this ship class. The support cruisers Augoror, Osprey, Exequror and Scythe will recieve nerfs to their electronics to make them more vulnarable to electronic warfare and further distinguish them from their T2 counterparts. The Omen and Stabber will get buffed. (Source)

     Drones (bandwidth / bay): 25 (+25) / 25 (+25)

Navy Cruisers - Amarr (Source)

     Cargo Capacity: 450 (+75)

As an iteration on recent rebalancing changes of T1 frigates, in Odyssey there will be some, mostly very minor, attribute tweaks to this ship class. (Source)

scanfrigbonus

The Imperial Navy Slicer recieves buffs to fitting, armor, hull, capacitor, targeting and sensor strength, getting slightly cut on shield, though.

     Sensor strength: 10 Ladar (+1)

Ship and subsystem resistance bonuses in comparison to other bonuses were too strong and will get slightly nerfed. (Source)

     Impairor, Punisher, Vengeance, Malice, Malediction, Maller, Sacrilege, Mimir, Vangel, Devoter, Phobos, Prophecy, Absolution, Damnation, Loki, Legion, Proteus, Abaddon, Archon, Aeon.

Along with the enourmous amount of ship changes there will be some tweaks to certain module groups.

X-L Weapons (Source)

     10% increase in explosion radius for all Cruise Missiles

The scan resolution bonus of remote sensor boosters were too strong, instalock gatecamps too easy to set up being one of the main resulting issues. Therefore the bonus will be reduced. However, the bonus to targeting range, that used to be static, will now increase slightly according to module meta level.

     'Entrepreneur' Remote Sensor Booster I: 33% scan resoultion (-7.5) / 40.5% targeting range

The bonuses to falloff and optimal range that tracking enhancers provide in addition to their tracking bonus were too strong and caused wide reaching balance issue, like overly increaded shield tank usage. Therefore these bonuses will be lowered by 1/3.

     Tobias' Modified Tracking Enhancer: 24% falloff (-12) / 18 12% optimal range (-6)

The group of small navy cap boosters will get some new additions, so now there will be a navy version for each size. Some of the existing ones will increase in cost. (Source)

     Navy Cap Booster 150: 375 LP (+125) and 375k ISK (+125k)

There will be some changes to scanning and exploration related modules and items. (Source)

     There are a three new mid slot modules in the new group "Scanning Upgrades". They are the "Scan Acquisition Array", the "Scan Pinpointing Array" and the "Scan Rangefinding Array".

Capital ships will now get their own rig size. A few facts on these (Source):

     skill requirements will match those of other rigs

There are quite a few changes to the skill system ahead, with especially ship requirements getting shaken up quite a bit. But we will also see tweaks to the Astrometics skills, clone costs and the opportunity to use the new Dual Character Training feature.

The skills you will need to fly specific ships will change for a large number of them in Odyssey. The details were announced a long time in advance to help pilots prepare in this dev blog, which I strongly suggest you to read if you haven't done so yet. Despite quite some skill requirements switching around, the overall skilltime for invidiual ships is roughly staying the same in nearly all cases.

     All the other vessels not listed here (shuttles, frigates, Interceptors, Assault Ships, Covert Ops, Logistics, Strategic Cruisers, Black Ops, Marauders, Pirate Frigates, Pirate Cruisers, Pirate Battleships, Pirate Supercarrier, Transport Ships, Jump Freighters, Mining Frigate, Ore Industrial, Exhumers) are not directly affected by the skill modifications, although this may create prerequisite changes in nested requirements. For instance, Marauders require Battleship at 5, whose own requirements are changing.

With scanning being the core activity in EVE that it is now, and the additional focus on exploration in general, coming with Odyssey, there will be some changes to the Astrometics skill set. The big difference is, that scanning will be much more accessible to low skill point characters.

     Also: Reduced the per level modifier for Astrometrics Rangefinding, Astrometrics Acquisition and Astrometrics pinpointing by half.

The costs of setting up a medical clone will be lowered by 30% across the board, to change how this affects player behavior. (Source)

clonecost thumb

Odyssey will offer a new option, that mainly will help people train alt characters, with a specific purpose and a limited amount of SP needed, on the same account and without the need to stop the skill queue of their main character.

Read more about this feature in the according devblog.

With Odyssey the art of certain areas of the game will see some serious facelift. Along with some love for the Apocalypse hull and the containers of mini-profession sites, CCP started a war against loading bars and outdated transition effects.

In addition to all the changes I will list below, there is a general change that will make your camera automatically rotate towards any item selected.

Stargates are getting a graphical overhaul, most notably a nice new "energy field" effect that spans in between the actual jump zone, and a lot more blinking lights.

In an effort to remove the number of loading bars within the game and improve immersion, Odyssey will introduce a spectacular new jump effect. When you initiate jump, the camera will turn to a certain angle towards the stargate. You will then see an animation of flying through a "jump tunnel", on the end of which you can already see the nebula of the destination system. Data will load during this animation and after that is done, you exit the jump tunnel and the camera will seamlessly return to be controlable again.

The undock button has moved from the neocom to the station services window, right below the station corporation logo and next to an also new button for entering / leaving the captain's quarter.

stationbuttons thumb

The transition from ship to pod when your ship explodes and also the whole visualization of getting podded will get revamped. (Source)

When your pod dies, the camera will zoom in through the explosion focusing your dead clone's body. On the bottom left of your screen will be a few lines of information on the clone transfer process. When your client is ready, you will then just switch to the station your clone is set to.

Along with all the other changes to the exploration mini professions, which you can read more about in section 1., there will be new art for containers of data (former radar / hacking) as well as relic (former magnetometric / archeology) sites.

Relic Site Container

The Apocalypse and all variants of it recieve a model overhaul. It's basically getting a bit beafier and is looking simply fantastic.

Additionally, EoM Deathlord NPCs, who are using the same model, will also be affected by this. You can find screenshots of them here and here, captured by player Funzinnu BT.

The Daredevil will get a new, more Serpentis like texture.

daredevil thumb

Blueprint icons will look a lot more shiny after Odyssey, thanks to an improvement to the tools used for icon creation. (Source)

bpicons thumb

The new trailer, that was released on Fanfest, EVE Online: Origins, will be the new intro video played ingame upon your first login. It explains the basic backstory of EVE.

In an effort to move away from everything being accessed through multilevel right click drop down menus with 20+ entries, Team Pony Express digged up the old radial menu and gave it a huge overhaul - graphically as well as functionally.

scanradial

This is a compilation of minor changes, that have not been covered in the previous sections.