Capitals and Citadels

I've been absorbing everything I can from Eve Vegas and the recent o7 show, and I've been getting really excited.  Despite a pretty crazy couple of weeks I managed to get undocked, in a few fights, and even found some Gauntlets and grabbed a Blood Raider Cerebral Accelerator for my main and for my alt.  But the big news recently has certainly been about Capitals and Citadels.

I think I can sum up my opinion on the recent Capital news pretty succinctly:

 My plan previously had been to make Jakob a near-perfect sub-Battleship pilot.  My missile skills definitely trail my turret and drone skills, but I already had all the sub-BS T1 hull types to V and most of the T2 hulls as well.  Recently I'd moved up and started training the battleship hulls and the large turret systems I didn't already have into the T2 weapon zone.  But capitals are a big step.

There are the skill books whose cost is measured in the 100s of millions, training levels in the double-digits, training plans measured in months, and ship hulls that are measured in the billions.  More than all of that is that this will be a new world of operations for me.  There is research I'll need to do and people I'll need to talk to.  Some is on the prep side: "What level of Jump Drive Operation is really needed for near-home space operations?".  Some of it is operational: "Okay, walk me through decision making on siege cycles."  This is all a different level from moving from a Vexor to a VNI to an Ishtar.

The coming Capital changes will make any immediate discussions of fits irrelevant.  By the time I have the skills to get into a Moros (and the ISK to fit one and afford to lose it) I expect we'll be well into that stage, but I can wait on that.  So why start this training now instead of finishing off "perfection" on the sub-cap level?

Part of that is the new "high-angle batteries" which will make dreads useful for battles in lowsec that don't involve shooting POSs or previously-dropped triage carriers.  For better or worse, we're going to see more dreads in the Gal/Cal warzone I think.  That means that Aideron is going to need more capital pilots.  (As an aside it also means that my HIC training should become more valuable as well.)

The other part is that there are going to be Citadels in the warzone, and that means those Citadels will need killing in the more traditional role of dreadnoughts.  It will probably be a while until POSs are removed from the game, but I expect we'll see Citadels about pretty quickly.  For faction war this particularly means that flipping a system will not dislodge the enemy as much as before.  POSs in the past could continue the fight and provide resupply, but Citadels will mean an organization could continue full-fledged operations from docking and repair to market stocking.