<Kaeda> CCP want us to only brawl it seems!
In this day and age, it's an assessment that's pretty hard to disagree with; there aren't that many ways to kite inside 150 kilometers in the current meta. If someone brings a lot of interceptors in a response fleet, you're probably going to get caught, and you're probably going to die. If the other guy brings neutralizers, you can't stick around without becoming cap dead. If anyone brings an overheating tech 1 cruiser, you're probably going to get slingshotted and hard tackled. As soon as the Ishtars show up, you'd better leave, or sentry drones are going to turn your ship into a jagged pile of scrap. If you're in a fast ship, there's no such thing as "out of sentry range."
The metagame is an always evolving thing, but the small group's comeuppance to superior numbers, the ease of coordinating a smaller force when you need to escape, has been eroding especially hard as of late. After the various changes to cruisers and battlecruisers, it stopped being practical or cost effective to fly a roaming gang of Hurricanes or Drakes, while none of the other battlecruisers had a comparably respectable mix of solid damage projection, health, and maneuverability to begin with. Then came the Battleship revision, which dramatically increased the cost of fielding the ships, and put long ranged energy neutralizers into every battleship fleet's tool-chest. The addition of Microjumpdrives made hard scrambling an absolute necessity for keeping any battleship pinned down, forcing engagements to be ever closer. Then came the warp drive changes, which, combined with the bubble immunity and enormous warp acceleration and deceleration capabilities of interceptors, crippled the relative mobility of any ship bigger than a blowfly.
In a lot of respects, I think this sucks.
Some of my favorite memories in Eve were the flights of opportunity between battleships, battlecruisers, and kiting fights against numerically superior adversaries where your wits and your carefully executed warps were the tightrope between victory and disaster. All of these changes have made the game even more sensitive to superior numbers, and has generally served to kick anyone who can't bring a comparable number of ships to the fight in the face. ISK, pilot skill, and skill points can't buy your way out of hard tackle if you don't have enough pilots for a good mix of support and damage boats, and nothing larger than a cruiser has a chance of disengaging if you're facing a superior force without three system's advanced notice. When walking into another alliance's home field advantage, when just about every group has access to a Titan, insurmountable ambush can happen with alarming regularity.
The classic response is to adapt or die, and as always, that's what will happen. Still, do the margins need to be this tight?
