Apex Bex Batphone Episode 879: French Fries

So my buddy Apex Bex called me again to join them to bash a nice juicy wormhole.  So I bring a nice shiny Oracle.  We pew pew a few towers, fleet is big enough and towers are poorly enough configured that, hey, it goes fast.  But it could go faster so I turn the Oracle over to some random fleet member who can use the upgrade, and go get a Geddon fit for POS bashing.  We settle back in and continue bashing the POS, debating what to call the Bubble Wrap we are putting on the POS towers, and generally doing the normal wormhole control shenanigans.  I even took some sexy screenies.

PEW PEW

Turns out our opponents were not wasting the time panicking.  They were panicking AND getting on the batphone.  They popped a few of our ships in an initial tussle at the wormhole and we were split, half inside, half outside, and a nasty looking T3/logi gang sitting on the bubbled wormhole.

We hit our own batphone, which turned out to be a pretty decent batphone.  We honestly brought the blob.  It was not nice.

No One Likes The Blob

So we stomped them.  Hard.  It was the schoolyard bully picking on the kid in a wheelchair.  With a club.  The people inside the POS warped at a decent range to get their attention on us and get them moving off the hole, then another 40+ showed up in the highsec local and warped the 3 AU to the WH entrance.  The hostile fleet started moving and our timing was as close to perfect as can be.  Caught between two fires they melted, at first their reps held easily but as soon as our reinforcements landed the rout was on.  Ship after ship popped or staggered back into highsec, bleeding air and fire as our guns blasted again and again, wreaking havoc on those unable to escape.  The only thing that saved any of them was our lack of webs, and some discipline issues with split damage.  We won through a combination of numbers, luck, and timing.

… And you go long!

We managed to prepare ourselves to use tactics that allowed us to pull them away from safety by lulling them with our initial inability to damage them.  Our reinforcements were sufficiently unscouted that, even though our opposition had to know SOMETHING was coming, they were unaware of the extent of it.  Our logistics held up our main ships and then we collapsed the house on them.  The final results were lopsided.  They don’t seem to have posted the few kills they got, so we cannot see their whole fleet but we know it was based around 4 guardians and 9 T3 cruisers, 3 each Loki, Legion, and Proteus.  The wormhole had a bonus to armor ships, so my fleet also had 0 Drakes.  I like that.  We also did lousy damage.  Between T3 resists, increased armor resists, and a signature bonus, my guns may as well have been firing puffballs.  Still we managed to bring enough of them to hit the enemy hard and take out more than a few shinies, and drop some SP from our foes.  Always a nice plus when it comes to T3s.

Fleet command had a few issues.  I’m red to a goodly number of people in that fleet and while I was giving advice, I was nearly primaried a few times due to “overview glitches” and there were a few times the guy directing all the efforts between inside and outside had to be…. guided into tactics that were moderately less suicidal.  While we clearly weren’t in danger of losing the field, we could have ended up trapped too close to the T3s without sufficient logi, burned to a crisp and all the T3s ready to jump out as soon as our reinforcements arrived.  Fortunately some smart pilots and leadership willing to listen avoided that fiasco.  In addition our reinforcements managed to burn down from null FAST, in the right ships and with a leader who could step up and take over in the fight.

Tomorrow I might even have my FRAPS recording edited and ready to go.

I’m using it every time I can

And Here I Thought Today Would be Boring

I log into EvE real quick this morning.  Not expecting to get anything useful done.  I get this:

Report: Starbase in J###### is under attack
From: DED
Sent: 2012.02.02 14:53
Solar System: J######
Moon: J###### ### – Moon #

Huh.  Well crap.  No one online at this hour, so i put together an Anathema and roll out.  I would like to take a moment to thank whoever created corp bookmarks to removing my biggest excuse to ignore wormholes and posses, two of my least favorite things in EvE 😛 you rotten SOB.  I am picturing a horde of nagas or oracles 200km away from the station raining death on it.

I get to the wormhole entry system.  Check local.  No one from the aggressing alliance, but plenty of noob corp potential alts.  Well if you want safe there’s HKO.  I warp to the WH, no time or mass issues, pop in.  No Bubble.

Huh.

Maybe it won’t be a massacre.  Warping to the station and hitting cloak I see on D-scan some ships I know to be empty… the POS… and a harbinger and a corpse… of the person who was reported shooting.

Double Huh.

I land in the shield, no bubbles still… Well then, the Harbinger is being flow by.  Nobody.

Triple Huh.

Oh and a jet can named “Set your POS to shoot neuts jackasses”

Which I do, while setting up a nastygram for the guy who is supposedly running this part of the show.  Also scooping up my free shield roaming pulse harbinger.  I convo the guy, get the story from him (he was extremely polite and I even offered to contract his ship back to him.)

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.  Wormholes are weird.  And not for me.

I'm using it every time I can

STOP! JUST STOP!

Some people need to look around and find out what they are doing before they try doing dumb stuff.

Case in point:  Bad Boys Hard Boys set up a POS tower in a friends wormhole.  FFS people don’t do this kinda shit without talking to the inhabitants.  Some people will let you set up, or help you find a more suitable home.  Some will just blow you up.  It’s nicer when you haven’t set up everything.  So now I’m shooting this abomination:

FFS people, really?

Most of it was never onlined, half the stuff that got onlined didn’t have ammo, and the damage it was doing was so anemic that we stopped caring and had the basis just put on energy transfers since they couldn’t crack the shields of our armor fleet.

Never mind all the ships they lost over the course of the day setting stuff up.  >.<

How could they have avoided this?  www.isktheguide.com maybe?  http://www.fiercewebs.com/arcdragon/EverythingWormhole.pdf is a GREAT guide.  Really you can google “Eve Online Wormhole Guide” and look at the first page.

Let’s see what the “Guide to Everything Wormholes” has to say about Missile batteries.

Missile Batteries. This is to include Cruise, Torpedo and Citadel Torpedoes. They may 
be slow but have massive damage. The problem with these is that when your POS goes 
into reinforced mode they STOP WORKING. This means that at 25% shields your 
enemies can just sit there forever and hit what is left of your defenses for free

Ouch.  They left out the anemic, cruiser level DPS, miserable speed and sig.  Yeah it’s downright terrible.

So we have some really terrible POS setup, ignorance of WH politics, and now I am shooting at a POS that I am fairly sure has no stront.

What about Major Kong?

A Brief History of Corelin Part 5: This Corp Shit Ain’t Easy

Fancy Hats started humble.  Barely a handful of people, mostly noobs, and we didn’t set our sights very high.  We were mostly flipping, with the occasional wardec thrown in.  We recruited mostly from people we shot, our main requirement being that they were willing to put up a fight.  For a while things actually went very well.  We picked our targets carefully and maintained a very nice killboard ratio.  We were quite effective at getting people educated in at least some of the fundamentals and it was clear to us that we were the masters of our game.

Most of our people have at least some real-life friends in the corp, which kept us tight, and helped to motivate us during the slow times.  Still, things weren’t all steak and blowjobs.  At first it was pretty much 3 guys, myself, Diesel, and Eljo.  Diesel was a RL friend, Eljo a random guy we had killed who wanted to learn more.  I may have created a monster there.  Diesel was my roommate at the time which led to much hilarity both in and out of game.  Eljo was good for at least one OMGWTFBBQ kill a week, if not every day.

We quickly recruited a few nooblets and instilled in them the fundamentals of EvE PvP and hunted more and more targets.  Eventually we joined an alliance that seemed to offer us the opportunity to take our game out to nullsec.  This may or may not have been a total disaster, it turns out we weren’t on half the blue lists we needed to be and were in the path of some kind of an invasion.  Our diplo got popped and podded by people who were supposed to be blue to us and when we took it to our alliance leader he basically said “Tough Shit,”

We tried to help them, but their own stupidity doomed them and the high point for us was self-destructing the ships of the alliance leader to prevent them being captured.  It made us a little isk.

Limping back into empire we licked our wounds and decided to start a little smaller.  We joined another alliance, this one was slightly more stable, and far, far more conservative in its desires.  While we wanted to take the long road to nullsec dominions, we also knew that it was a long, long road and that there were no shortcuts.

We established ourselves in a wormhole, and started up our normal shenanigans.  We also invaded some other wormholes and tried for pew pew in them.  We had two events happen here that really soured me on the game for quite a while.  In one event my friend Diesel took some things that were said in one room, that we understood to be a pub room with no super secret squirrel info in it, and mentioned it outside the room.  Now he might have been expected to know that it wasn’t for public release, but still if it was that secret it shouldn’t have been said.

The guy that said it was really pissed because it could potentially have endangered one of his plans (it didn’t) and started some e-peen waving drama, which my friend got involved in and myself and my diplo ended up having to pour oil on troubled waters.

Then some real shit happened.  During a wormhole op my nooblets somehow got it in their head that our allies who were running things were going to turn on them and kill them.  I’m not sure how they got this idea, and frankly it was more than a little ridiculous.  They pulled out of the wormhole taking the scanning alt with them.  My other friends in the alliance managed to escape, but they were righteously pissed.

I tried to smooth things over, I wasn’t in the wormhole when it happened, and I feel that it is a leader’s obligation to try to protect his subordinates from their own mistakes, but they had gone beyond what could be excused or forgiven.  However without them I simply didn’t have the manpower to continue running the corp.  I was the only one regularly logging in and decided it was time to give up the corp for a while and head out to nullsec.

What about Major Kong?

Archon Down Video

So MANY moons ago my old alliance, Disciples of Crom killed an Archon in a WH.  This was my first capital kill, and I managed to be awake enough to record it on FRAPS.  Apex Bex of Herotackle fame mentioned the blog post concerning the kill, and I decided that the video has been sitting unseen by the masses for too long.  So here it is.

Archon Down Video (embedding wasn’t working for me)

I'm using it every time I can

DAS BOOT!

Wormholes are a totally different playstyle of EvE.  Even PvP in Wormholes is utterly different from K-space.  Stalking a target from cloak, trying to keep probes out of range, until you are sure you can get a good fix, then dropping in on the target.  Its closer to U-Boat warfare in WWI than anything else.  Neither side has a way of finding the other accurately that doesn’t involve at least letting them know about your presence.  What you end up with is a game of blind-mans bluff played out over a solar system.

• Gates as they exist in empire don’t exist, and wormholes have a bunch of subtly different rules to keep in mind.
• Much of your strength will be in probe ships unless you have a staging tower.
• Surprise kills.  If you are surprised you are already dead
• Sleepers can totally mess up a fight.  And they will shift targets during a fight so staging an ambush with sleepers on the field can get nasty.
• People with capital ships get REALLY confident in their abilities.  Even when they shouldn’t be.

Thank you wreckhunter.net

So what you end up with is fleets hiding as best they can, ideally cloaked, at least off d-scan maybe even logged off, hunting after other fleets, either catching them in a complex, or defending a tower, or some other asset they can force a fight over.  It can be absolutely nerve-destroying, and it frequently ends with battles going until late in the night, or early AM hours.

http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=9072891

That’s not a good time for US players.

But it’s rewarding, a unique style of combat and for the people that like the cloak-and-dagger element it’s an excellent change of pace.  Just remember, you can go from hunter to hunted VERY fast, so watch your D-Scan and fly dangerous.

I'm using it every time I can

It’s a Trap!

 

He SHOULD know.

POS timers are great.  Nothing in EvE sets a more predictable fight than a POS reinforcement timer.  Everyone knows when the fight will be.  What will be involved.  Its like the opening of a Chess game… if the board was 4 squares wide and all the pieces pawns.  There’s only so many moves you can do.

Recently my alliance has been helping some friends with a wardec that has led to a wormhole siege.  We went through the predictable opening moves, staging tower, reinforce one of their towers, try to lure out the caps.  Due to poor time zone coverage they reinforced our tower while we were asleep.  With a dread.  In a wormhole too small to squeeze caps in.

So we all log on to vent when the timer counts to zero, logged out at safespots.  For a while the hostiles are simply moving ships from one tower to another.  Then the calls start coming “Scorp Navy Issue, Cerb, Phoenix, and two hounds heading to the tower,”  I log in my Curse and align to our tower.  Apparently all of us logging in at once spooked them, for they started bugging out and fast.  Except the Phoenix who was already in siege mode.  No one was in position to get a warpin so I warped to the POS, which was not bubbled, MWD’d over to the Phoenix and started neuting the crap out of it.  For a moment it looks like his cap is going to hold.  Then, as DPS continues to warp in and do damage and he is forced to use his Shield Booster more and more his cap crumbles, and with it, his tank.  From the time I warped in and started neuting to the time he popped was less than ten minutes.

On an entirely personal note:  I hate Citadel Torps due to the massive blinding explosions and hope they all die in embarrassing fashion.  Very useful ship, Nasty damage.  Annoying graphics.

 

I brokded it!

Frankly this was more an execution than a kill.  They came it fat and stupid and were lucky they didn’t lose a lot more.  We know they have two Chimeras in the wormhole, and while we have some interlopers from Purple Helmeted Warriors trying to crowd in, there is much treasure and tears to be had!

http://tfhc.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=9072891

HOLY FLEURKING SCHNIT

[EDIT] Replaced dead link with movie link. [/edit]

So I hop on for my alliances weekly meeting.  Its been a rough week.  We have had a lot of stupid losses, some non-participation by key players, myself included, short tempers, some folks going through some REAL tough times in real life.  Just a Piss-poor week by all accounts.

One of our WH spies reports that our hostiles Archon is on the WH in scram range.  Why do people do this?  Its a bad idea.  The carrier can’t get OUT but the hostiles can… easily.  So we start organizing a fleet.  I start beating the drums with friendlies, no dice.  I call PK, no dice (he wanted to but 30j is a long way for a lone carrier)

We get a fleet together.  Drake, Domi, Rapier, Prot (cloakey hidey fit) Falcon, Rapier, Pilgrim, Jag, Ishtar, Blackbird, Onieros.  I know.  Its awful.  Its terrible.  We went for it.  D-scan showed a damnation, two drakes, a Thorax and some stealth bombers wandering about.

Drake warped onto the bubble they had erected on the WH, called point, in come the stampeding herd.

THERE WAS A FIREFIGHT!!!!

We killed the Thorax, podded him, A drake, a Nighthawk warped in, he went down, a kitsune and a manti were next, then another drake.  We were getting hit by bombs.  Including lockbreakers.  Too bad there were two recons holding points.  Our blackbird went down early, that pilot switched to a pilgrim.  The domi swapped to a Hyperion, the Proteus said fuck that I’ll get in the Domi.

The Archon’s cap was holding, so we started DPSing.  Pretty slow since we couldn’t really hit him with drones.  We noticed he wasn’t repping.  My scanner showed a rep on him.  DPS, DPS, DPS, finally he dips into structure.  No reps.  Scan again.  WTF is he doing?  He hits low structure and BOOM!

http://crom.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=8985666

What.  The.  Fuck.

Guardian warps in.  Literally seconds after the carrier goes down.  He dies in seconds too.

We kill the pods.  Scoop the loot.  Exit the area and get back into Empire.

We needed this.  We needed this BAD.  This is the kind of thing that takes a small alliance and galvanizes it.

Ok I’m going to try to get to sleep.  Video should be up tomorrow.

Thanks to BrenDiesel (reactivate your account PUNK!) for the 2nd picture.  Your google-fu is strong.

Thanks to Apex for manning up and getting point

Thanks to KHoweveritsspelled for coming along with RR.  I know KMs aren’t important to you man but you saved us a couple of times.

Thanks to Aeocas for getting us a warpin and putting up with me stepping all over him.

Thanks to HairlessHarry for replacing his ship and getting back FUCKING FAST

Thanks to Vorg for

Thanks to Alexis for being agile

Thanks to Fuji for DPS

Thanks to Star for DPS

Thanks to M’ing for jams, webs

Additional thanks for everyone, I know I’m rusty as hell at FCing and my commands were far from crisp but we got the job done.