EVE: Equinox - Ship Emphasis

EVE Online's Equinox expansion, set to launch on 11 June 2024, is the game's fourth full expansion since the return of the content format in November 2022. The patch notes are fairly extensive and dense. I find reading lengthy patch notes rather boring, so I also like to go to other sources for information. For both the Viridian and Havoc expansions I wrote a series of posts based on the patch notes with other information added to hopefully make absorbing all the information less painful. This eleventh post in the series for Equinox will cover a topic the developers call ship emphasis.

What is ship emphasis? In a dev blog two weeks ago, the subject was labeled "Next level hangar management." The expansion website perhaps had the best description.

Ship progression and UX improvements: Experience the thrill of unlocking a new ship with immediate notifications and get clear understanding on ship roles and prerequisites with the redesigned skill requirement panel. Elevate your initial interaction with new vessels with informative new ship cards and enhanced UX for boarding and naming ships.

Overall, the topic includes a lot of quality-of-life changes.

SHIP EMPHASIS

We want to make interacting with and progressing through ships in New Eden more digestible and inspiring. To that end we have implemented a variety of improvements for Equinox:

• Assemble and Board action: The new default action when double-clicking on a packaged ship, which makes taking your new ship out for a spin just a bit easier.
  
  
• Ship Unlock notifications: A new section in the Ship Tree shows off the ships you’ve recently managed to unlock, with badges indicating new entries until they are viewed.
  
  
• Default Ship Naming: The rename ship popup now appears when assembling a ship, and default names are restructured to show the ship type name first.
  
  
• Ship Card view: A new inventory view that displays the ship group, characteristics, and type name of your ships more clearly.
  
  
• Skill Requirement Panel: Allows players to add skills to the queue, create skill plans, allocate skill points, and buy missing skillbooks. The component appears in the Fitting Window, Show Info, Ship Tree and Hangar views.

Seeing the ship tree updated to include The Society of Conscious Thought and CONCORD is welcome. SoCT ships are only handed out by CCP for celebrations and acquiring CONCORD is done through participating in Project Discovery. Including all ships in the game are probably more important for new players than veterans.

Ship Tree

• Added pages for the Society of Conscious Thought and CONCORD ship lines to the Ship Tree.
  
• Faction logos shown within the Ship Tree have been updated.

Finally, the developers put in changes to a subject I have had trouble with over the years.

Overhauled Ship Restrictions Windows

We want to make it more digestible for players before they head out to space what type of restrictions are on dungeons.

• Ships are now sorted into collapsable sections by their group.
• Ship icons are now shown alongside ships' names.
• Ship entries can now be interacted with (e.g. right-click to open the Information window or Market details).
• Only ships within the Ship Tree will be listed.
• Added an option to search for a specific ship from those listed.
• Added a filter option to show only ships that the current character can fly.
• Added an option to show restricted ships but highlight them as unusable.
• A Ship Restrictions warning will now appear in the Info Panel objectives of relevant sites or missions tracked via AIR Opportunities:
• Double-clicking this warning will open the Ship Restrictions window.
• The warning will appear when en-route to a site or when within a site’s lobby area.