The fighting spirit

This (trying very hard not to be ranting) post was mainly inspired by a comment on my (mostly ranting) post here.

Here is the comment in question but feel free to read the entire discussion on the original post:

First of, the proviblock only lost d-g because of grid lag, -A- took the field first, and due to the unfortunate issues introduced in dominion, it appears that whoever takes the grid first wins.
Your corp then proceded to rub it in by bumping out pilots out of a POS bubbles using passwords they got their hands on by placing spies within CVA, underhand tactic that the Provibloc would never use.
The people of Providence have a loyalty that -A- players don’t have. You sound like a glory supporter, jumping to whichever corp you feel you will win with, maybe you should think about trying to stick it out with an underdog alliance and try and put up the best fight you can facing overwhelming odds.
What I understand the least about -A- is that they completely missed the oppertunity to take advantage of the fall of goonswarm. Delve region is worth so much more than Providence, yet you decide to fight for pointless little systems and make life difficult for an easier opponant when you could have push full force into delve and taken over that region. Instead you let it fall to IT Alliance, who I believe will want to come for your blood in the not-too-distant future.
Yeah you can bully the proviblock, but think about it in the long term, its going to be much better to clear out, leave them too it, and concentrate on bigger enemies. Even if you push them out, -A- will fall eventually, and you wont stick with them, you’ll jump into the next strongest corp that will let you in… Loyalty is more important than brute strength.

Yes, I admit that I am an alliance grunt, I have no knowledge of what either CVA or -A-/U’K have in store for the future, so perhaps I’m missing quite a lot somewhere. Perhaps providence has some epic smackdown planned. I’d also like to admit that I feel no ill will whatsoever, I am not bitterly ranting like Helicity Bson did in the epic post about carebears far from it.

I’d just like to address a couple of issues, the first of which is that I have switched alliances to be part of the winning team. In doing so I also hope to demonstrate that despite being an alliance grunt, I know something about defence in both pre and post dominion.

First of all: I did not leave Mostly Harmless (part of the Northern coalition) solely due to the fact that they were on the back foot. In fact, from the moment I entered nullsec until when I left in early January I have only been fighting defensive wars.

We fought against Tri, although that was before I started this blog

We fought against Evoke continuously, holding on, sometimes with the rest of the Northern Coalition, often by ourselves to the critical stations in Cloud ring. When they got the advantage and held our station systems, we fought back.

We fought against Sons of Tangra by ourselves, as they struck into our critical high-end moon systems and staged their entire capital fleet just outside our home region. We won because we counter attacked and they made mistakes. We did not stop harassing them on their home turf. Heck – we reinforced their R64 moons by deep incursions in frikking stealth bombers. We camped their jump bridges, we brought as many people we could to the fight.

We fought against Pandemic Legion who were hell bent on reclaiming all our R64′s just before dominion hit. They presented so much of a threat that we ended up losing the entire region of cloud ring to Evoke while we were defending our home systems. But still we made an effort to harass Evoke and yes, we got wiped out often also but we gave as much as we got. yes, ok, sometimes the northern coalition managed capital blobs. but when the NC weren’t backing us and we faced superior forces in a cyno jammed system we got into stealth bombers and executed coordinated attacks on their RR battleship fleet and made sure that we at least had sub capital fights rather than loosing a system without a fight at all.

Again, we tried to fight off evoke. Here we were fighting a war on both fronts. Pandemic Legion in the heart of our systems in Pure Blind and Evoke making a very good effort to take over cloud ring. We made some very bad mistakes and lost a lot of ships, but immediately afterwards got back into stealth bombers and executed coordinated attacks on PL’s battleship fleets. (the more perceptive here may note the recurring “get in frikking stealth bombers” theme here). Even after the entire Northern coalition tried to force Evoke out, but after some initial success we had to pull back, leaving Cloud Ring to the hostiles.

And again Triumverate came, and we fought against them but also didn’t let evoke take cloud ring without a fight. I didn’t write about the battles where evoke came and destroyed our r64′s in cloud ring because they had more in fleet. I didn’t write about the hours spent sitting staring at a system being totally ripped apart by hostiles because screenshot opportunities were hard to come by. Nor do I write blog posts about the hours spent sitting in a covert ops ship trying to find out where the hostile jump bridges are or which pos’s have Capital ship construction facilities, or where the enemy stages from because that is seriously boring stuff. I write about epic battles, whether we win or loose or even when the battles don’t happen but we made an effort. At one point it was so bad that we were told to move to an NPC station because we didn’t think we could hold Pure Blind. We also had our main staging system attacked, and destroyed prior to which I spent hours ferrying alliance assets out to a rear staging point. And a week of logging off in the ever decreasing number of pos’s in system.

As for the few fights I have had in providence. I have to say, I’ve only been here 2 weeks, I don’t know the history behind -A- and Proviblock, so I have no grudge or any emotion about this. The fight in D-G was great – and I don’t mean great in the fact that we won completely and utterly, I mean great in the fact that Providence actually tried to win. In fact, if I would say that the fight wasn’t satisfying at all. Read this post: Turkey Shoot and you’ll see my views on one fleet wholesale slaughtering another fleet. You’ll see that it is not enjoyable, I would much rather have my ship destroyed and me be podded ten times over if it meant we could have a good bit of a fight.

The reason why I am disappointed with CVA is that there is no resistance, there is no counter attack, you’re not deploying SBU’s in GE-, you’re not harassing our jump bridge network. Did you know that if you incapacitate a jump bridge or pos-based cyno generator, we have to rep it up or kill it entirely before we can online another one? Do you know how freaking long that takes? You can do that with a smallish battleship fleet and therefore prevent reinforcements coming to the front lines and/or divert valuable assets away in order to fix the logistics network. Put together a fleet of 40 or so stealth bombers, find a valuable POS of ours that has only large guns on it and reinforce it or kill cyno generators! If the tower starts to target you, cloak up! make it a war of attrition, leave alts cloaked up in our carebear systems and our staging station systems. harrass our undock points, camp our jump bridges! Don’t just sit there whining about grid lag on a battle that happened half a month ago. Do something!

As for the station loss itself: With the new Sov mechanics, you have 5 days or so, and two major battles with which to reset the attack. Control the system yourselves and the enemies won’t be able to gain it back without a lot of effort. That goes for both sides, attacking or defending In case you didn’t notice, a combined force of -A- and IT alliance was pushed back by goonswarm when we (I wasn’t here at the time) tried to take 49U from them. You’ll notice that goonswarm, despite being at a timezone disadvantage managed to prevail against a superior force. Don’t tell me it’s impossible for CVA to at least try the same, yet over those 5 days sieging 9UY there was no concerted effort to take back the system. there was the occasional freighter breakout fleets and the occasional solo stealth bomber (solo stealth bombers won’t do much at all, get in a group and coordinate your targets and warpings) but that was it. As I have said, I don’t know the reasons high up in CVA for this, but I’m under the impression that it was a major psychological blow to all providence holders, and indeed it was intended to be. -A- doesn’t want that system! we just wanted the psychological blow that it would deliver and we succeeded in that.

Finally, I’d like to state the obvious: holding nullsec requires fighting. If you’re not capable of fighting, then you need to be good friends with an alliance who is. That is the way of it. it’s not “unfair” it’s not “bullying” I don’t even understand what you mean by that…. it’s just the game mechanics. you’re in 0.0 you are not going to get a free ride. I do understand that there are a lot of people in providence itching for a fight. It remains a leadership problem then if you don’t get what you want.

Perhaps it’s not relevant now, U’K have 9UY and are NRDS therefore with the exception of D-G, the holders of Providence region are still NRDS. -A- is withdrawing from the offensive for the short term. perhaps this is the politics that I’ve been missing, perhaps this was intended by CVA.

Still, CVA would do well to heed what confucius said. A quote that I have in my Bio:

The superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that danger may come. When in a state of security he does not forget the possibility of ruin. When all is orderly, he does not forget that disorder may come. Thus his person is not endangered, and his States and all their clans are preserved. – Confucius (circa 551-479 BC)

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not trying to twist the knife, I’m trying to exhort you to take control yourselves!

oooh, and again finally: I’d like to sincerely thank the CVA and proviholder members who have posted on this blog – I appreciate being corrected on things like the relationship with goons and the fact that I’m missing political goings on that are over my grunt-like position in the alliance. I never got that honest feedback when I was in the NC. Being able to have an open dialogue with your enemies is certainly refreshing. I will approve any comments posted on this blog usually within 12 hrs at the latest (I usually post at night and I need my sleepy time) so please be patient if it doesn’t appear immediatly.

Mostly Harmless Home System fighting

It was pointed out to me in the comments of my previous blog post that I haven’t posted in a week! Normally I have a backlog of things to say and screenshots to post, but not this time.

Over the past week it’s been fairly hectic in real life – Christmas parties, friends over for dinner etc. and time in eve has been severely limited.

News from the North is that Triumverate, White Noise, circle of two, the Initiative and Evoke have managed to take the station system in pure blind that used to be owned by The Council. As my previous post indicated, they simply had the numbers in the system before we could get there.

Now they have turned their attention to Mostly Harmless’s staging system of P-2TTL and over this past week have reinforced and destroyed the infrastructure hub, reinforced every pos we had operating in the system and reinforced the station itself.

All the the Northern Coalition alliances are now in full CTA mode and the station was saved. We are now affectionatly calling ourselves Voltron.

My first significant time online since the last post was Monday night where the majority of the time was spent sitting in my Megathron (now named Mr Pewalot due to his t2 rails) listening to intel updates on the superior numbered red-fleet and taking nice screenshots of passing fleet members:

It’s interesting to note that the exploit whereby infrastructure hubs can be attacked when there are an inadequate number of sovereignty blockers in the system is still there at this time. The hostiles started shooting the infrastructure hub in p-2 without dropping any blockers on any of the gates.

heard on teamspeak:

“they’re forgetting to pretend it’s invulnerable”
“hmm – petition them”

Triumverate have been known to use exploits and low tactics in the past. we’ve had to get used to setting our ships to keep the pos towers at range rather than sitting within the shields due to Tri spies knowing the forcefield password and warping in, bumping our ships out of the pos. It’s things like this that make me have absolutely no respect for these guys. Pandemic Legion? absolutely – very fun to fight against, gracious in both victory and defeat. Evoke? also the same – persistant bastards but always respectful and fun to fight. Triumverate? assholes, masters of local smack talk second only to Maru Ka’ge, will use any and every advantage they can get including exploits and things that rest in the grey area such as meta-gaming.

Sorry – that’s the end of my rant.

My first view of a leviathan

On this occasion we were outnumbered about 2:1 but we harassed them throughout the night, mostly with us in bombers, but with the threat of our battleship fleet not far behind it. Our titan carried about 10-15 fitted bombers in its ship maintenance bay and some of us were able to swap out to bombers and got quite a good lot of kills in one go. unfortunately there were no manticores by the time I arrived at the titan and didn’t get on any of those kills . killboard link here: http://kb.eve-42.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=113997

The situation in this system is particularly delicate – there are only 5 moons. we control 3 of them, they control 2. they are gradually killing and replacing our towers and if it turns out that we have no safe pos’s left, there will be no way we can effectively hold this system.

Dark Blood Faction POS’s look mean

I’ll keep you updated as best I can, but I’m also going away to Scotland for Christmas, so I can’t guarantee anything I have tomorrow off work however and I’ll still be fighting into the wee hours of the morning, just won’t be coherent enough to post.

edit: actually, about 45 mins after I posted this we got into a very poorly executed battleship slugfest… and once again I was primaried pretty quickly….

anyway – here’s our post-dominion sniping fleet megathrons: http://kb.eve-42.com/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=114153

Yes, what you see there is my ship going down in flames with two navy megathrons in the background.

Northern Coalition Pwns a Stargate

It may take a lot to wake it from its slumber, but once its war machine has been activated the Northern Coalition is a giant lumbering mass of pain and hurt to those who oppose it. Drawing on the wealth of seven nullsec regions, the sheer quantity of hardware commanded is phenominal. The NC Fleet truly is a mighty thing to behold, awe-inspiring in its fury and sheer brute strength

Or, at least it would be…. if you could log into the system to see it.

—-

The Operation had been scheduled for quite a while. The Anti-Northern Coalition Coalition headed by Triumverate Alliance had penetrated deep into The Council Alliance’s space and had reinforced an Infrastructure hub in JC-YX8. The Northern Coalition High Commission made the decision that we would defend the council’s space. This was going to be a massive operation and an even more massive fight as Triumverate was expected to bring heavy numbers to deal with the NC’s fleet.

As usual, Mostly Harmless formed up on our trusty Titan (who hasn’t been seen doomsdaying blue fleets since dominion) and prepared to enter the fray. Triumverate and allies were already in the target system of JC- locking it down. We were on the back foot but we had superior numbers.

Once again – I have to say – the Fleet interface is very good – forming up an inter-alliance fleet is very easy now. it used to be that if you were not in the same alliance as the boss you’d have to be manually invited by squad leaders. But now you can just join the fleet based on standings.

Also, the fleet composition eliminates the “everyone who’s in a battleship x up so we can get an idea of numbers”:

After a 30 minute wait while the alliance leaders coordinated with the rest of the NC, we cynoed into a system 4 jumps away from the target and went gate-by-gate to EL8-4Q and waited for the rest of the NC to arrive.

We warped to the JC- Stargate at 100 and locked it down with our support fleet and a smeg-load of bubbles. Local grew to 300+, mostly blue

Then within 10 minutes the rest of the NC arrived in long range battleship fleets and warped into 200km+ sniping positions around the gate, bringing the local count to a maximum of 763 (a personal record). Since dominon, most of our battleship fittings have been ultra-long-range sniper glass-cannons. MH for instance mandate that each battleship pilot carries frentix boosters (they increase weapon optimal range) in our cargo holds so we can easily engage at 200km and above and have no reduction in damage. This range has the added advantage of being far enough away that we can warp to the target if need be.

The 700 pilot Northern Coalition Grid of death surrounding the JC- gate.

Owing to the fact that our people in the JC- system said there were 600+ in local there, we hung back deciding what to do. CCP had reinforced JC-, but not any surrounding systems, and despite their reinforcing the critical hub, we knew that there was no way we could jump in 700+ battleships into a system with one gate and not have it be a complete turkey shoot for the other side as we loaded the system.

It was with regret that the operation was called off. The new Dominion warfare tactic in the north: Get 600+ in system before the opposing fleet can, and they won’t be able to jump in. we should have gotten in there first and locked it down hours before, but we didn’t.

Instead, in their infinite wisdom, the fleet commanders fleet warped every single ship to the same gate so we could jump home.

The mangled mess you see below is the result. There’s a stargate in there somewhere, I’m sure of it:

Followed shortly by everyone hitting the jump button at the same time:

[ 2009.12.13 21:20:30 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:30 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:30 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:30 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:30 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:31 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.
[ 2009.12.13 21:20:31 ] (notify) Session change already in progress.

Followed shortly by 700 eve clients exploding and the EL8- system going down completely.

[ 2009.12.13 21:26:30 ] (info) Your character is located within EL8-4Q, which is currently loading. Please try again in a moment.

When we finally logged on – we found all of eve were receiving traffic advisories. some in completely different regions of space – it must be they put solar systems on opposite sides of the galaxy on the same server node for efficiency..

[ 2009.12.13 21:30:44 ] (notify) Traffic Advisory: Officials have closed the stargates and undocking ramps due to heavy congestion (in the 3V8-LJ system in the G8-D09 constellation). Travellers are advised to seek alternate routes.

Yes! We totally pwned that server! yeah we rock!.

Anyway, so I said that I’d get you some battle reports, but unfortunately, that’s going to have to wait until we actually have a battle.

note: I had turned my graphics settings way down to avoid as much lag as possible so you may find if you click on those shots they aren’t as high quality as they could have been.

News from the North

Sorry for the wall of text, just a bit of a brain-dump about what’s been happening recently.

Well, in case you’ve been hiding under a rock, dominion is here and it has been a big week. Rumours that have been floating around over the past few months over who will become part of which major faction in nullsec in the North have mostly resolved themselves.

Triumverate and friends are laying into the Northern coalition.
Evoke are continuing their steady encroaching into Cloud ring.
IT are on the brink of causing Pandemic Legion and Sons of Tangra to fail, goonswarm are simultaneously aiding and killing pandemic legion depending on what source you read… I really don’t care enough to find out for sure however….

On that last note: looking at the battle reports lying around, it seems that IT alliance are very easily able to field 150+ ship fleets during the weekdays and 400+ ship fleets on the weekends. This is one (albeit very large) alliance. In my experience the Northern coalition has no trouble banding together and bringing 400+ ships when it really matters, but we are multiple alliances and response fleets are slow to form. I am very interested in how the new warfare system will aid/hinder Northern Coalition defence.

Critical infrastructure upgrades which have been added in the Dominion patch such as the Infrastructure hub itself and some specific system upgrades etc cannot be moved by anything except a standard freighter (jump freighters don’t have large enough cargo holds). This has lead to 27+ freighters lost already, 10 of those belonging to Razor alliance lost to Triumverate, 17 to solar fleet lost to Atlas. As this is the only weekend in the 7 day grace period that CCP has given nullsec alliances to get their affairs in order, I predict many more freighter losses before Monday as EVERY alliance that wishes to maintain their jump bridge network will need to ship and anchor the new infrastructure by Monday.

On the home-front for me, Mostly Harmless were last night given the order to move into 5ZXX, an NPC system in Pure Blind. This is where Triumverate/Circle of two/WN etc have been basing out of. The idea is to force them out of this station. The war that we had a couple of months ago with PL was made more difficult by the fact that they were based out of X-70, an NPC system with three stations. We couldn’t stop them from docking. The difference with Tri and Co2 et al. is that they are actually looking to try to gain a foothold in Pure Blind/Fade rather than just looking for good pew like PL were. In order to prevent this, we need to live in their face.

To that end, last night I loaded up my Occator (which I had predicted would come in very handy post-dominion) and managed to fit every bit of ammunition and spare modules I had in our previous base of p-2 including one repackaged Stealth bomber and a basilisk logistics ship and fittings into my Occator and move them at once. I’m really really glad I bought it now, just that one trip has almost made the entire thing worth it.

I still have ships to move, (2x covert ops, 1x stealth bomber 2x onyx, 1 tengu, 1 viator) but they’ll come soon.

In other news, there seems to be a bug with the API that is not reporting any modules on ships in killmails, it’s making it very difficult for our alliance replacement program to determine who was using the proper fits when it looks like our entire fleet went out without weapons or fittings…..

Oh also in other news: after a bit of drama not-paying Mercenary fees to Noir and then getting their backsides handed to them in order to extract payment, Maru Ka’ge hasn’t been seen smacking on COAD anymore despite having gained four nullsec systems of their own one or two jumps out from their NPC system home. What they’re intending to do with said systems and whether they think they’re going to be able to transport I-hubs through 5-6 high-traffic Northern-coalition held systems is still unknown… which brings me to a bit of a rant:

If the intention of Dominion was supposed to be to open up nullsec for alliances that are not part of the current power blocks….. why the hell did they make essential infrastructure take standard freighters to move! How is this making it easier to get into nullsec if you have to move a frigging freighter, nay, multiple freighters… through an empire->low/nullsec gate.

Anyway… on Monday, the fighting begins in earnest as the Sovereignty Blockade Units are seeded onto the market and the territorial wars can recommence.