Friday, January 17, 2014

Ewarball, an EVE Online minigame

As a wormhole dweller, some days are a bit dull.
One day there is plenty of stuff to do, other days you sit around or go out to PVP as an alternative.

Now our biggest problem was that some of our members for sure needed some PVP training and besides of that, get familiar with all the kinds of electronic warfare that EVE has to offer.

To get this going, our director and me thought out a little game that would be a lot of fun during moments of downtime and also teach us a lot about electronic warfare. We called it ewarball.

For ewarball you will need to setup a 200x300x200 arena with at least 8 cans, a bookmark on each sides start position and a bookmark in the center:

Ewarball PVP arena setup

The next thing you will need is a bunch of T1 frigates (you can off course also take another class of ships but I find frigates the most interesting since everyone can fly them and they are fast enough to keep the game going).

Now for those frigates we have the following fitting rules:
 - Anything that can do damage in any way is not allowed
 - Only ewar drones are allowed
 - Tank is not required
 - Every team should have at least one ship with a tractor beam

This limits both teams to only use electronic warfare to counter each other. Think about modules like scramblers, disruptors, webifiers, neutralizers, nosferatu's, sensor dampers, ECM modules (Griffin!), etc...
Offcourse you can allways decide to host a session where for example no ECM is allowed to make stuff more interesting. Also each team should think about their resistance to the other teams attack. Think about ECCM, remote ECCM, cap boosters, spider-'tanking' remote ECCM, sensor boosters, etc...

Each team starts at one of the start locations and in the center of the arena, a can (the 'ball') is jettisoned that contains one item that is to big for a frigates cargo bay (for example a POS mod, guns are cheap and big).

At the start of a round each team races to get within tractor beam range of the can and has to drag it to its own base (side of the arena). At each teams start location, someone should be present to count the score for the team. As soon as the can is within 5km of this person, they score a point, both teams return to their base, the can is replaced and the round starts over. Off course the trick here of the team that is tractoring the can is to keep the other team away and the other teams task is to disable the active tractor beam to capture the can for themselves, for example by using ECM, sensor dampers, neuts, etc...

If you want, you can allow people to refit in between rounds (or every X rounds) to better counter the enemy team.

For border violations we have been thinking about having a few falcons on standby that will ECM the shit out of anyone leaving the arena, rendering them useless.

While being a fun game, this will also teach your members a shitload about ewar and ship hull bonusses in general, thus making them more usefull in battle! Off course it is easy to think out hundreds of variations of this game and other uses of the arena.

Please let me know if you have any ideas about variations on this game!

8 comments:

  1. This is awesome! I'm totally going to try and use this as a training method for my students in game! Hope you don't mind if I steal it?

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    1. Hey! No problem at all, feel free to adapt and change it where you need, I cant wait for other peoples variations!

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  2. We did this once in my old corp and it was super fun.
    An alternative version is to race industrials and see who can keep their opponents industrial webbed and too neuted to MWD.
    Every version we tried with guns just turned into a brawl, which is its own kind of fun but not really the idea.

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    1. Yea I found out we werent the first to think of this and there are lots of possible variations, almost all equally fun :)

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  3. Holy shit, this is soo brilliant! I would love to play this game!

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  4. Did couple of matches of this during my E-UNI years, it is lot of fun!

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