The long awaited, anticipated, feared, speculated over, and otherwise examined Citadel expansion arrives on the Tranquility server today. Seriously, we’ve been all over this since EVE Vegas last year.
Now Available
Citadels, the new structures in New Eden are here and will likely change the game in unexpected ways. There are four citadel types:
- Astrahus (Medium)
- Fortizar (Large)
- Keepstar (Extra Large)
- Upwell Palatine Keepstar (Extra Large, Extra Special, one per New Eden)
And there are all sorts of details that players will need to sort out as time goes along.
- Deployment and unanchoring
- Vulnerability
- Fitting
- Asset Safety
- Ship Tethering
- Access Lists
- Profiles
- Citadel Management (Structure Browser and Fuel)
- Service Modules
For me, one of the more interesting items is how players will attack citadels. In what I can only see as something of a rebuke of Fozzie Sov, players will actually shoot things rather than fly around them in circles running an entosis link module. To my mind, shooting something is always the best option. CCP has tried to give us a feel for shooting them in its cinematic trailer.
So a huge change there, with CCP relenting somewhat at the last minute on the whole tax thing meant to drive people to use citadels. I expect the unexpected and for comedy to ensue.
And, if that were not enough, there are a range of capital ship changes going in today as well. Starting off there is the introduction of the Force Auxiliary capitals, already commonly called “Fax Machines.”
Fax Machines are all Vertical
They come in four flavors, one for each major NPC faction, and replace the triage role that carriers used to perform. They are:
- Apostle (Amarr)
- Minokawa (Caldari)
- Lif (Minmatar)
- Ninazu (Gallente)
Carriers and super carriers will no longer use drones, but will restricted to fighters. Fighters themselves will have new functionality and controls. A lot of things will transform with the expansion drop, triage carriers into fax machines, old fighters into new, and drones into some location you may not have considered. The transition is covered in a forum post.
I have a carrier that will still be a carrier after the update and which will be pretty empty since all the drones will get dumped out and I never bought any fighters for it. But, then, I have only ever used it to haul around subcaps.
In addition, dreadnoughts are getting rebalanced in order to turn them into the gun platforms they ought to be. Titans are getting a rebalance and new doomsday weapons. Carriers are getting a rebalance too, and so are supercarriers. There are also pirate faction capital ships and capital level escalations for anomalies and new anti-sub cap weapons for capitals and the removal of ewar immunity for supers.
And then there is the usual round of fixes and updates and changes to various aspects of the game, most of which (but never all) are summed in the patch notes and on the updates page.
There are enough things going on with this expansion that if it were the old days I would have started training a long skill. Even CCP is running long on just the deployment.
But, since my skill queue already goes out past 500 days right now, I am not so worried about that. Still, I suspect there will be issues and some patches coming pretty quickly given the scale of things.
Wait, there it is, the announcement… the expansion is live and the server is up… for now.
But even if the server goes down we will at least have a new theme song to listen to.
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