Bolstered Bulkheads – Reverting the Surgical Strike

Ok this is worth the hype. After historically being wrong about the true impact of Surgical Strike two years ago, we find ourselves back on the upswing. The latest dev blog by CCP, The Road to Fanfest, details a bounty of awesome updates including a partial reversion of Surgical Strike known as Bolstered Bulkheads. In case you weren’t around back then, Surgical Strike massively reduced resists and increased the power of close-range ammo, significantly altering the PvP and PvE landscape.

There’s loads more to get excited about in there so read on and we’ll dive into all the juicy details! My code blocks at the top of each section serve as quick summaries so skim through those if that’s all you need.

---

Bolstered Bulkheads

*Bolstered Bulkheads Summary*

- All Battleships will recieve the following role bonuses.
Hitpoints of armour plates increased by 50%
Hitpoints of shield extenders increased by 100%

- Large Micro Jump Drives will have their fitting substantially reduced.

- Resistance modules will have half their old resistances returned.
Example: Multispectrum Shield Hardeners should go from 26% to 29.25% resists.

This is the big news that I’ve been waiting for for so, so long. While the original Surgical Strike patch shook up the meta, much of the content I engaged in personally headed towards fast kills and DPS beating all else. With these buffs to resistance modules, we should see ships becoming a little tankier, a little less prone to being alpha’d, and a little more capable of surviving the Nighthawk menace.

Note that back during Surgical Strike, rigs, Damage Controls, and Reactive Armour Hardeners were not affected by the nerf. I would expect that these also do not see a change this time. Here are a few examples of the changes to come to PvP. Use the sliders to see the before and after!

If you aren’t too familiar with the way resists work, these small percentage increases will be quite significant indeed. With a Muninn, for example, it can currently receive about 1586 EHP/s under one B-type Scimitar with links running. This 1-2% boost will improve the reps up to 1681 EHP/s, an increase of about 6% in repping power! And this is just a ship with a single T2 multispectral hardener.

We’re going to see changes like this across the board and they’ll only be more pronounced on ships that rely heavily upon having high resists to tank rather than an Assault Damage Control. The more interesting portion of the update, however, will be the 50% plate HP and 100% shield extender HP bonuses to ALL battleships in the game. This is huge.

For a Bhaalgorn we could see a cheap fit with amulets jumping from 342k to 439k EHP! T2 rigs and a bit more bling will push that over half a million EHP. Tournament-fit Scorpion Navy Issues, on the other hand, will jump from 278k to 417k EHP and that’s with two spare non-tank mids! The potential here is great and really opens up the potential for battleships to become the incredible powerhouses they should be.

Is there potential for oppressively powerful ships here? Probably, the Rattlesnake will now reach above 4.19k EHP/s without links, nirvanas, and with a relatively cheap fit. I welcome the change anyway and look forward to using my buffer marauders even more than before! Here’s a couple more examples of some ships that will benefit from the changes:

As I did last time, here is another table with a healthy selection of shield and armour modules and how their resists have changed over time. These are the values I used to create the images above and they are based on my maths, not the final decision of CCP.

Module Name	OLD Resists	Surgical Strike	Bolstered Bulkheads
Multispectrum Shield Hardener II	32.5%	26%	29.25%
Pithum C-Type Multispectrum Shield Hardener	40.6%	32.5%	36.5%
EM Shield Hardener II	55%	44%	49.5%
Pith X-Type EM Shield Hardener	64%	51.2%	57.6%
EM Shield Amplifier II	37.5%	30%	33.75%
Pithum A-Type EM Shield Amplifier	45.1%	36.08%	40.6%
Multispectrum Energized Membrane II	20%	16%	18%
Imperial Navy Multispectrum Energized Membrane	22.5%	18%	20.25%
Centum C-Type Multispectrum Energized Membrane	24.4%	19.52%	22%
Centii A-Type Multispectrum Coating	23.7%	18.96%	21.3%
Centii A-Type EM Coating	35.3%	28.24%	31.8%

---

Structural Updates

*General Updates Summary*

- Some "core mechanics" of structures and their modules will be coming in April

- The Rorqual will receive an Industrial Jump Portal Generator and will gain conduit jump capabilities

- CRAB Beacon LP cost reduction and Rogue Drone Infestation Data drop amount increase

- Graphical shader update to improve reflections greatly.

- Player Owned Customs Office GANTRIES (POCOs) will drop their EHP from 10 million EHP to 0.5 million EHP (A 95% reduction)
- It will become a suspect offence to shoot a POCO GANTRY rather than a criminal one

- Further updates to the New Player Experience with a new mysterious mining adventure

- Capital changes are being looked at

Alright so there is less raw information in this section of the article, but there are some quality updates there nonetheless. The headline feature I am considering here is the fact that structure updates are coming! This is incredible news for many more reasons than I can confine to a section in this article. I do not know the full extent of the changes here but I’ll leave that speculation to the, uh, bright minds on Reddit.

With the Rorqual receiving an Industrial Jump Portal Generator and the CRAB getting more loot and a reduced LP cost we are also starting to see some more quality of life updates. The Rorqual jump feature is current a work in progress but it will likely allow conduit jumping with subcaps only (such as Exhumers). While these changes won’t impact me directly, I can see players who utilise those systems being happy with their updates

Next up is what looks to be a major update to the graphics of EVE – Reflecting Space. This update will improve the shaders of EVE such that textures will now pick up on explosions and such nearby. Here are a couple of videos so you can get a taste of what is to come!

Player Owned Customs Offices HP will be dropping by a massive 95% down to 500k. If you’ve ever sat in a new wormhole or similar and spent hours grinding through these giant space buildings then you know how annoying that original 10 million would be. This is part of an Orbital Warzone update and it’s a quality of life update for sure. I, for one, might attack people’s POCOs occasionally to get a fight since it’s no longer an empty threat if I don’t sit there for literal hours!

I wrote the above thinking it was a change to POCOs when it is a change to the gantry. This change barely makes a difference now. Oops

There are further New Player Experience changes incoming with something of a mining mystery adventure. We don’t know a huge amount about this at the moment, but if the experience is anything like the current NPE then it should be a nice little morsel for new players. I will say that I don’t think direct MSQ style changes to the NPE are the way to get new players, but at least we are making the experience less about dropping players onto a spreadsheet in space.

Lastly, in addition to these changes, there were changes commented on regarding the current prices of capitals. CCP Rattati is looking to make this something of a targeted asymmetrical change. Put simply, it’s not like every single capital is going to change. This is because the industry changes introduced components that will allow specific ships and classes of ships to be adjusted more easily without breaking the prices of everything… again.

---

Together We Compress

*Together We Compress Summary*

- The Rorqual and Orca will be able to compress asteroid, ice, moon, and gas mats

- The Porpoise will provide compression for gas and asteroid ore

- Compression will be lossless

- Compression will be instant and usable as a service from ~200km away

- Jetcans increasing in size by 100%

If you’ve read my blog before you know that I’m no industrialist. I don’t know how much these changes will impact players and I can only really speculate. On the surface, however, we are looking at in-space compression being reintroduced for all mining fleets should they choose to use it. One of the major quality of life changes is that, compared to its original iteration, you can access your friendly Rorqual, Orca, or Porpoise from around 200km away with good skills!

This compression will also be instant and is going to be a service that you’ll want to bring along in the same way that you would use mining links. It really cements Industrial Command Ships into that support role in more ways than one and it sounds great on the surface. Note that decompression will still be lossy, including gas decompression. There will, however, be ways to optimise your material decompression to make your mining experience much smoother and more efficient.

Beyond the compression and industry updates here, there are additional comments about the road to Fanfest and what we should expect for the release pace going forwards. Put simply, quadrants will no longer be the release cadence. By pivoting to a slightly longer and more freeform format, CCP will be able to publish updates of a bigger scope than before.

Some (not all) of these changes are coming to SISI on Thursday so look forward to that, it’s gonna be good!