Back to normal RvB and answers to Azuals scenarios

The E-Uni war is over. When we put their POS into reinforced they decided they didn’t want to play with us anymore. It is understandable though a little sad because I would have liked a last great fight when the POS comes out of reinforced. In addition to that we missed out on a fight when the E-Uni fleet decided to help chribba in the defense of his nullsec system. So we started to bash the POS which wasn’t very exciting but the comms made it at least funny.

So we are more or less back to normal RvB at the moment. We still have a single war target hanging around our systems in a cloaked Loki but I for myself decided to ignore and don’t give him any attention. We had several pretty good fights again. I think I nearly fc’d every single time I was online yesterday mostly because no one competent was around. Some things went good some went bad. I got ourselves ridiculously slaughtered in Vellaine when I chose to engage an obvious bait maller just to give the blue fleet, that outgunned us seriously, the chance to jump into us. At least we got a Cerberus kill. This was a classic example for not to rely on 15 minutes old intel in RvB. There is always the possibility to upship for the enemy. To be fair the blues told us pretty quickly to downship after this engagement and they held their word.

Something that did went well was the catch of a sniping Rupture later on. At this time the blues weren’t really organized and we were hanging around their HQ in Autaris. I decided to move the fleet back to the Akonoinen gate to give them a chance to organise. The Rupture pilot decided to try his luck in sniping our frigates from around 70km of the gate. The spot he was using was pretty much in line with the sun. So I decided to have some tacklers bounce of the sun and back to the gate in ranges from 50km-100km, while warping the fleet to a tactical. It all came together when the Rupture warped back in, point was established the fleet warped to primary tackler and we brought him down rather quick.

Other things went good and bad this day but those two were the most remarkable in my opinion.

On another topic Azual recently published an article about threat assesment that is really worth a read. In this article he gave 4 scenarios on which he wants to hear people’s primary list. So I will give a rather lengthy reply to this. The short version can be found in the comments on Azuals blog.

Example 1

You: 10 mixed t1 cruisers with frig support
Opponent: 3 drakes, 3 caracals, 1 raven, 1 blackbird

This is a rather tricky scenarion in my opinion. You are facing a lower on numbers opponent that seriously outguns and has a rather nasty ECM support that you want to get rid of. I will just assume now that we have no blackbird on our own to counter jam their blackbird. Considering the foes I would say the Raven is except for his drones not that frightening at all. Though support from target painter either of his own or from the drakes might make him more of a threat. The Drakes are mostly a threat to our cruisers. Heavy missiles can hit those still quite good and they are a pain to kill. Their anti-frigate support is obviously the Caracals most likely they will be AML fit and chew through our cruisers pretty fast.

Okay to sum it up I would start with the caracals to hold our fast tacklers alive. While at the same time really fast frigates should burn for the blackbird with all drones assigned to them. If they can kill him before he warps off fine if not he is at least of the field. When the Caracals are done it all comes down to how many we have still breaking the tanks of Drakes in T1 cruisers takes time and in the meantime we will be shot at. So I would say as long as we have at least 6 cruisers left on field and some frigs we will go for the drakes. If there is less left call for a bail.

Example 2

You: 20 t2 frigates (mixed assault ships and inties)
Opponent: 3 zealots, 1 curse, 2 purifiers, 1 abaddon, 1 heretic

This scenario all comes down to what you can kill fast. Assault ships do pack quite a punch so it should be possible to even wear down the Abaddon in time. So my approach to this would be  to get dps of the field as fast as possible. The bombs of the purifiers are only a real threat to  frigates if they have a MWD running. Exception of this being Interceptors with a high Interceptor skill. One word on the curse. It surely is a threatening ship but in this scenario I would say his neuting capabilities are overwhelmed he might be able to neut 2-3 ships. Which is annoying but I think we can take this blow and still have the upper hand.

My list of primaries would then be. Assault ships  start with the heretic while Interceptors spread points and especially get a lock at the purifiers as soon as they decloak. Once the heretic is done move on the to the purifiers, everybody should just shoot the one closest considering how paper thin they are there is no point in primary them they should explode pretty fast. Actually most probably the inties already finished them. Next target would be the Curse. It will probably try to burn but if there are more than 3 interceptors left he won’t have any luck with it. After that it is time to get the Zealots and finally the Abbadon. This is under the assumption that both parties are pretty close in the beginning. If they aren’T things will get nasty as the Zealots and the Abaddon will start sniping the frigs and probably killing a bunch of in the approach while the bomber will throw bombs in your approach.

Example 3

You: 3 mid-range battleships (e.g. pulse abaddons or AC tempests), 1 arazu (point and damps)
Opponent: 4 hurricanes, 1 broadsword, 2 jaguars, 1 stiletto, 2 scimitars

I don’t have much experience with these ships so I will just say a general idea.

Damp one of the scimis to hell and back will pointing and shooting the other. Hope is that the 2nd scimi won’t be able to rep his mate so that he will explode pretty fast. Then move on to the next Scimitar while switching damps on the broadsword. During this move away from the enemy as we want to use our superior range. Use drones on the stiletto first and then on the jaguars. With the scimis down it is time to take out the broadsword followed by the canes and what ever is left on field.

Example 4

You: 5 kiting battlecruisers
Opponent: 2 megathrons, 2 vexors, 2 brutix, 2 enyos

The Megas probably won’t be able to keep up with our speed so we can ignore them for now, The first to close up will be the enyos so if we have neuts we will use them on them and kill them. The next targets will be the Brutixes followed by the vexors and finally the megas. It will be tricky to get point on these ships without loosing too much range and transversal on the megathrons but I think it can be done.

Okay this has been a rather wall of text but I hope you don’t mind 🙂

Fly dangerous and die in a horrible fire.

5 Comments
by David on September 26, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Uncategorized

Posted by David on September 26, 2011

https://aspiringfc.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/back-to-normal-rvb-and-answers-to-azuals-scenarios/

How not to catch a war target playing station games

In addition to the war with E-Uni the Red Federation is currently at war with an alliance called Pinked. These guys declared war on us some time ago failed horribly and retracted their war dec. So far so usual. Recently though a member of the Reds was kicked for knowingly breaking our rules by flying his faction fitted Machariel to Blue HQ and killing T1 frigs. Obviously he was very butthurt by his kick so he joined this fail alliance and paid them to renew their war against us. Funny kills were had by us like this one for example. During that time the former RvB member has been in and around Hageken trying to kill stuff mostly in a cynabal. Most of us were spread out through all of HiSec hunting E-Uni members so we pretty much didn’t care about him.

Thursday evening though when the roaming was pretty much over and I had returned in RvB space I noted some guys in corp chat mentioning he was on our hq in his machariel playing docking games. They tried organising some sort of trap via corp chat which is difficult to say the least. So I invited those guys into what has formerly been our roam fleet and thought about a way to get this Macharial to agress  while being able to establish a point on it.

The plan was to move a sizable BC gang out of the system and let them hold in Akonoinen at the gate to Hageken. In the meantime a drake should draw aggression from the Machariel. Then our fast tackle should undock point it and tell the BCs to jump in to finish it of. This was actually a rather simple trap but I believed one that could work. Considering our war with E-Uni he might have thought that our BCs were heading there engaging them.

It started out quite well our drake drew aggression and we had our tackler undock. The BCs jumped in and warped to station but as we arrived the Machariel was gone . The point wasn’t established. So there was no juicy kill for us which is always sad. The reasons why it didn’t work were pretty obvious and some stupid mistkaes on my part. First thing was our tackler wasn’t on comms I should have definitely assigned someone who was on comms with a working mic because coordinating stuff via chat is always a mess.  Second I shouldn’t have our tackler undock instead I should have ordered him to a safespot out of dscan range so he could warp in on top of the enemy. By letting him undock first the mach had much too much time to warp away.

Lessons learned and the next time I will try something like this I won’t repeat my mistakes. Later on I lost my Hookbill to his Cynabal because I overshot the gate while reapproaching it. I know most people will consider this Hookbill a failfit but it was flying it while it lasted.

So long fly dangerous and die in  a horrible fire.

2 Comments
by David on September 24, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in 3rd party Faildecs, Uncategorized

Posted by David on September 24, 2011

https://aspiringfc.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/how-not-to-catch-a-war-target-playing-station-games/

First entry first bigger fleet fight commanded

As a lot of people will already know Eve University has dropped their WSOP for a month and in doing so declared war on both RvB corps. Knowing that we would travel all the 20+ jumps from Autaris/Hageken to Aldrat just to get an awesome fight. We are obviously very predictable because that is exactly what we did as soon as the war went live. The first major battle ensued shortly after that. You can have a good readup on it here

http://throughnewbeyes.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/rvb-v-eve-uni-purple-fleet-scores-the-first-victory/

On Tuesday though E-Uni decided that it was time to leave Aldrat and come to Hek with a fleet that was around 50 people strong containing a mix of ships ranging from frigates to battleships. Though there was less ECM on the field then you would expect. As Mangala and Tgl both didn’t want to take the fleet I thought I’ll give it a try. We assembled in Hek and stayed docked until everybody was who wanted to join was in Hek and had a ship fitted ready to roll out.  Though we didn’t get on par with E-Uni considering the numbers we had slightly more big ships and I was confident that our better pilots would lead us to victory.

The moment we undocked the enemy began retreating to Aldrat. We chased them but it became obvious that we wouldn’t be able to catch them before they reach their HQ-system. I didn’t really like the idea of fighting in their home because they would be able to reship much to fast for my liking. So we decided to make a stay in Eygfe and wait for the unistas to come out and play. We were sitting there for a some time when our scouts told us that the E-Uni fleet had retreated to their pos and was waiting to get their numbers up. Not that they already outnumbered us I guess they were waiting to outnumber us at least 3:1 before engaging.

So I followed a proposal someone in fleet made, sorry really can’t remember who it was, and ordered the fleet to reapproach the Eygfe/Aldrat gate and get ready to jump through. Intel indicated that the enemy was still sitting unaligned at their pos so we jumped through, and warped to their undock. Considering our primary goal would have been to keep the fleet alive and inflict as much damage as possible on them this wasn’t  a very bright move. They could have easily undocked a smaller fleet that kept us occupied and warp there main fleet in at range. Crushing us in between. But we weren’t there to do serious spaceship business we were there to get a fight out of them.

Given their tactical advantage they still were sitting at their pos doing nothing but slowly growing in numbers as reinforcement kept trickling thourgh the Eygfe gate. After like 10 minutes I decided to elave the undock and go to the gate. We were sitting at the gate for some minutes when we got the message that the fleet at their pos was preparing to move towards us. At this moment someone on voice called a big Uni blob undocking and after some seconds of thinking about it I made the call to warp to a fleet member at a safespot. I guess there were quite a fes things I did wrong on that. First waiting for a few seconds before making a decision. This always a bad idea as a FC. People wait for orders and if they get the impression you have no idea what to do they become concerned themselves. Second the undocking blob wasn’t as big as I believed and we were probably in a position to take them on. I should have called at least for guess on their size before ordering to retreat. Now somtehing interesting happened instead of staying at the gate we left they jumped through to Eygfe hoping to lock us in. This time I didn’t hesitate and ordered us back on the gate locking them out of their home system. So we established camp again.

There were now around 40 of us at the gate denieing the unistatas entry into their home system. The enemy fleet was around 70-80 at that moment with quite some ECM, which we lacked, and at least on par with us considering firepower. Some of our fast tacklers were still on their HQ trying to catch reinforcements on their way to the main fleet. They did admirably catching a TEngu, http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=10676017 , among others. On the other hand this gatecamp was turning into a mexican standoff. Neither side willing to jump into the other. The problem was that their fleet was growing much faster than ours.  We looked at numbers of 80 to 50 after we stayed there for about an hour. So we gave them some room and left the gate. Because the earlier we would get a fight the better our chances were especially as people ngot bored sitting at the gate doing nothing.

Still the unistas showed no incentive to move anywhere, and voices in our fleet were raised we should jump into them and die in a horrible fire and that is exactly what I decided to do. We are RvB after all we were there for fighting not sitting at a gate for hours. So I gave the call to jump in and hold cloak until a primary has been announced. Holy shit there were a lot of red blinking guys on the other side. So I started calling targets. I was jammed for quite some time during the fight so my target calling might have been bad but nevertheless I think we did pretty good considering we were outnumbered outgunned and outecmed at that point. I stayed on the field for quite some time which is one of the advantages flying a Drake. The whole battle report can be found here

http://redfed.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=10676415

It might not show all the kills because we had some guys from other corporations with us and some kills might not be from this fight due to Eve-Kill.

After the battle I was really exhausted. Commanding a fleet that size is stressful but I think I really learned a lot during this fight. My target calling is still a bit slow and I tend not to repeat my calls often enough. I’m pretty happy this wasn’t an all to serious fleet so it wasn’t to hard of a blow being driven of field. I must thank all the guys that supported me doing this you are great and your help is very much appreciated. This is really new to me but it is definitely fun 🙂

I’m a bot sorry that I have no screenshots or Fraps video form the fight but hey a wall of text is fun too.

Fly dangerous everybody and remember to die in a horrible fire.

2 Comments
by David on September 22, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Battle Reports

Posted by David on September 22, 2011

https://aspiringfc.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/hello-world/

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