Improving your chances of locking someone out with ECM

eve-online

SO I'm in a corp with a bunch of miners, and we've just been war decced by a one-man corp. Most of our skills are focused on the industry and mining side of things, with not a lot of attention paid to the combat side. Since we're all a bunch of rather low-sp players, my first thought was to use ECM to give us an advantage, but I'm having a little trouble understanding how it works. I get that it's based on chance, based on your ECM strength and the sensor strength of your target, but does it stack? Meaning, do our chances of locking a guy out improve if we can get multiple people to jam a target with multiple racial jammers or multispec?

Best Answer

The first important point to think about when bringing ECM is how you will prevent the enemy from killing your ECM. ECM ships have low tank and can take out multiple enemy ships, they are almost always the first ships to be called primary. You have two options to keep your ECM alive:

  • Keep them out of range of the enemy, a Blackbird can jam at 100km
  • Bring enough ECM to jam all enemy ships most of the time

The chance to jam with one jammer is jam strength/sensor strength, so if your jam strength is higher than the enemy sensor strength you will effectively perma-jam the enemy. If it is lower, you will only have a certain percentage chance to jam. Examples:

  • A Blackbird with jam strength of 8 with racial jammers (depends on fitting and skills) against
    • A Rifter with 8: 100% jam chance
    • A Hurricane with 16: 50% jam chance

If you have a below-100% chance to jam, you can use multiple modules (on the same ship or on other ECM ships) to increase the chance to jam. The chance to jam follows the following formula for multiple jammers:

jam chance = 1 - (1 - jam strength / sensor strength)^n

So if you try to jam the hurricane with 2 jammers you get a 75% chance of at least one jam succeding, and 88% chance for 3 jammers.

You can also overheat your jammers to increase the chance to jam for a short time if you have the thermodynamics skill. You should also pretty much always use racial jammers, they are far better than multispectrals. You need to either guess which ships the enemy brings or get some intel before the fight to chose the appropriate jammers.