The Frigate Escape Bay Is Coming

Finally! No talk about mining nerfs, closing projects, or red dots. Instead, CCP released news of a potentially fun feature scheduled for the March release: the frigate escape bay. The news article described the feature:

The Frigate Escape Bay is a special bay capable of holding a single, fitted Frigate that will be added to all Battleships. Should the Battleship be destroyed, instead of being ejected in your capsule and left helpless, you will launch immediately back into combat aboard your Frigate!

The Frigate hulls that will be allowed to be stored in the bay are:

• All T1 Frigates
• Assault Frigates
• Electronic Attack Frigates
• Logistics Frigates

This change will shake up the Battleship meta of EVE Online and open up new and exciting tactical options for crafty players to use! It can also give Capsuleers a chance to stay in the fight longer... unless you opt to use your nimble ship to escape from the battlefield and leave your fleetmates to their fate!

Fight or Flight - the choice is yours.

The feature might light up the game. Fleet commanders now had another option to play with if they choose to take out a battleship fleet as opposed to say, a Munin or Eagle fleet. Not only will players not have to fly to a station to reship, but fights will morph as the destruction in a fight increases. Also, for those who still want to reship, travelling in an assault frigate is faster than a pod.

I'm looking at what I might do with the change. Let's say I'm moving battleships around null sec. I could just have an assault frigate set up with rigs I can use to shuttle back and forth to pick up other ships. I'm not sure I'd want to use one when running missions, though. Then again, some NPCs will pod players, so I can see using an assault frigate fit with an Assault Damage Control II and warp core stabilizers to escape those situations after losing a battleship.

CCP is deploying the feature to the Singularity test shard on Monday. I might take a peak, just to see what happens when self-destructing a ship. In those cases, does a player have to self-destruct twice? If I can get all the January Monthly Economic Report analysis done this weekend, I'll have time to play around on Singularity. New fun stuff. Hopefully we'll get more of that presented to us at Fanfest in 6 weeks.