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.

We broke the node

But got a really funky screenshot. 750 + trying to jump into a system at once….. didn’t I promise you bigger fights?

http://www.eveonline.com/iNgameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1232395

battle report coming soon

Infrastructure Hub

An Infrastructure hub in 0.0 by starlight

believe it or not, there is actually a frigate in that shot but you wouldn’t be able to tell, these things are freaking huge… nearly as large as some actual outposts. no wonder they take a freighter to move into place.

I have succumbed…

For a long time now I have adamantly refused to get a second account, but I folded yesterday after hearing the corporation leaders on the weekend call for anyone who could assist in freightering the large bits of infrastructure upgrades required for post-dominion to nullsec.

yes, my main is about 30 mins away from flying a freighter should I bother to buy the skill, but I’m not going to be moving him through empire, which has no intel channels and where I can be blown away by some privateer scum sitting on the gates.

And so I have recruited an empire-hauler alt, she is about 30 days away from flying a freighter/blockade runner/etc. I’m going to skill her up in these things and possibly frigate V with cloaks so she can scout. then decide whether I just want her to be transferred to my main account or if I want to keep paying monthly for this luxury.

anyway – here she is:

Loving the new fleet interface

Just thought I’d post this – everyone’s mentioned the nice fleet finder interface but thought I’d point out this cool feature:

how cool is this? if your subordinates are in space you can tell what ship they’re using and you can tell where everyone is in fleet and their leadership skills (fleet-wing-leadership).

very nice.

oh and on friday night I got drunk and bought myself a Dramiel

814m/s without ab or mwd, only overdrives and rigs
6,474 m/s with mwd on and cap stable *drool*

haven’t tried overloading yet.

on another note I randomly warped from a station today and managed to be in warp with a Machariel. thought it was a cool shot to show anyway.

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.

Dominion has arrived!

In the north: Evoke have taken all the station systems in Cloud ring and have allied themselves with Triumverate. IT alliance are looking very strong to take out Pandemic Legion and Sons of Tangra, and listening in on a conversation between some directors, it seems that the politics will be quite interesting over the coming months. Not everything is as it seems 🙂

Whatever happens, evemonkey makes a pledge: This patch, the battles will be bigger, the screenshots shinier, the hostile tears wetter!

Second Titan Conga line ever?

Just thought I’d point out a post over at Prometheus09’s blog here: http://prometheus09.com/2009/12/01/titan-shenanigans/

I believe this is the second time there’s been a titan conga line of this size in eve, but last time it was camping a station in delve with good reason, this time it was camping a frigging gate just for kicks…..