Eve Online - Fly and Die with F13's own Bat Country In Eve Online [recruitment]

[Surlyboi]

Meh, I had goonfleet access for about a week, and then they redid the servers and I was SOL.

[Thrawn]

This game looks fun, I put in an application to Bat Country. 

[Endie]

Welcome back.

[Endie]

We've been working on small gang stuff with some guys we picked up a few months ago.  It has now reached the point that we took 19 Bat Country (plus Courthouse, an alliance diplo) to IRC space on Sunday because we knew they'd form up a big gang to fight us.  Most people were in hurricanes but we had support from two sabres, three scimitars for logistic support, a lachesis (me in the only non-minmatar ship) to hold long points, a huginn to web tackle, an inty and a command ship (comstr) for tackle bonuses.

We fucked around for an hour trailing our coats and shouting in local in order to get them to form up, and were astonished when we discovered that they had formed up a 90-man fleet to deal with us.  It had more drakes than we had ships; it had more canes than we had ships; it had battleships and faction ships and various scouts dotted about watching us.

We fought them for over an hour, moving spot about 20-30 times as their shit-hot on-grid prober warped their massive fleet onto us again and again, but Halo is an ace small-gang FC and they just couldn't grab us.

Eventually, we began to lose DPS and decided it was time to leave.  They chased us through gates, and each time we would burn off and kite them for as long as possible in order to kill their tacklers before moving on, while our remaining sabre dropped bubbles off each gate to snag them and give us time to make range for the next skirmish.  The final gate was so close that Comstr had to burn out his microwarpdrive in order to escape, while I only just got out with less than a second to spare.  At that point, we were totally vulnerable, with our most expensive ship capable of only 20% of its top speed, and the next two gates surrounded by a dozen or so warp interdiction bubbles that we could not have escaped.  But we'd inflicted yet more kills on them, and IRC just gave up and began to burn back to their home system, tales between their legs.

We lost two people to disconnects and one to his kid giving him a present just as we had to move again, while others got killed in unlucky tackles or foolish solo manuevres.  But when we added up the butcher's bill we had killed about twice as many of them as they did of us, and we did so outnumbered by almost five to one:

We killed:

Federation Navy Comet, 2xSabre, Pilgrim, Harbinger, Kestrel, Caracal Navy Issue, 4xDrake, Jaguar, Flycatcher, Vagabond, 2xStiletto, Merlin, Kitsune, Hurricane, Malediction, Dramiel, Heretic, Breacher, Wolf, 11xPods

We lost:

8xHurricane, 2xScimitar, 2xSabre

tl;dr we are pretty fucking hot at small gang warfare these days

[Lantyssa]

Sounds fun.

I'm getting to the point I'm almost ready to do PvP (yeah, I'm slow, I know).  My PvE corp is seeing a distinct lack of people of late.  Considering moving to a FW group with one of my corp mates, or maybe even take Ky out to BC space, if things don't pick up soon.

Ail is still out there, but a Rifter without many skills is a bit more limited.

[Endie]

Our 60-day training plan for newbies has them in fleet fights on the second day.

Admittedly, one guy last week skipped to the fights on day one but forgot to fit any guns.  That'll teach the impetuous scallywag.

[tgr]

rifter, MWD, nano, warp disrupt. what need does one have of guns?

[Lantyssa]

Yeah, I need to get in on the training program.  I've got the basics down from PvE, but learning the finer points of PvP would be helpful.

It doesn't matter if they're completely useless, hearing that rata-tat-tat is comforting to a guy flying a tiny ship.

[Der Helm]

tl;dr we are pretty fucking hot at small gang warfare these days

You have to do this right as I find and offer for 7 free days in my mailbox, haven't you ?  

[Morat20]

Curious how that fight played out, money wise. :)

I always like to see the cash totals, mostly because I can't ever remember what ships are what.

[Comstar]

Yeah, I need to get in on the training program.  I've got the basics down from PvE, but learning the finer points of PvP would be helpful.

It doesn't matter if they're completely useless, hearing that rata-tat-tat is comforting to a guy flying a tiny ship.

I hate to say it, because I hated to be told the same thing...but the only way to learn is experience it. Example, when I (the worst and most newbee FC in Goonspace) ran an op yesterday because I love the idea of camping the EC- gate forever:

And sorry to the newbee Rifters who died for my sins of overconfidence, and not checking to see if PL was in local first. I wish some of the Rifter pilots had been able to reship, I missed having them in EC-.

No apologies needed. I saw the reds on the overview, didn't recognise them as being bombers, and sat there like a dumbass until I got blown up. It was a learning experience. Thanks to pmchem(?) I was able to make it down there with the reinforcement fleet, and I'd learned enough to *warp the fuck out* when they dropped bombers on us at the Onyx gank. Thanks a bunch for running the op (Menrith Hadel here, btw).

A Rifter will NEVER be useless on a Goonswarm op. Hell, we had a Rifter on an Incursion op yesterday to take down a Sansha Mothership! (He died, but he still made a lot of money doing it). The only op you can't really go on is a TopGoon Stealth Bomber hot drop Xwing-style Hit'n'Fade attack, but you can ignore them (only a few people do them). After I lost half our Rifter pilots to a PL Stealth Bomber hot drop on us, we got to the target system with only 3 Rifters, and I wished throughout the op I hadn't lost those Rifters - I really needed them to watch the gates (including the EC- Torrinos's gate, one of the most traveled Nullsec/Highsec gates in Eve). On the way home, and PL saw our tacklers coming to their bait ship, they dropped their Stealth Bombers on the Rifters...allowing our Battlecruiser's to kill a target worth 100 times as much as the loss of the Rifter's earlier.

Come join us in a Rifter- you won't lose anything except your recloaning costs, and the corp/alliance will give you enough money to cover THAT without a problem. If you can probe, you can probe down sites in Deklein, sell the location to someone who wants to run them in their Drake/Tengu/Supercarrier and you get 50% of the profits. Probably more isk/hour than ratting or salvaging, and your ships still cheap to lose.

Don't fly what you can't afford to lose, gain the experience by doing it, and YOU might be that hero tackler who was there, as CCP would say. It was a tackler (Hrin) in an Interceptor who found Shrike and changed the course of the 1st Great War by just being there.


Come to think of it, we were flying a Hurricane Whelpfleet when it got dropped by the PL bombers. So Star Destroyers vs Bwings, and the guys in the Rifters are our TIE fighter pilots. Tie Fighter was always a better game than the original Xwing (though Xwing Alliance was a good ending to the series).

[Morat20]

The phrase "TopGoon Stealth Bomber hot drop Xwing-style Hit'n'Fade attack" hit about every "Wee! Internet Spaceships!" button I had.

[Lantyssa]

I didn't mean the Rifter was useless.  I meant the guns on a Rifter.

And I was generalizing about taking on huge targets.  They can put out a nice bit of damage, and their tackling is of course extremely useful.  Even though Ky's skilled enough to be in a battleship now (Thanks Surly!), I still pull my Rifter out and go hit up L2 missions.  Getting a Jaguar is pretty high on my priority list, too.

Ailuria is in BC, I just haven't done much with her.  Costs I'm not worried about.  Y'all set me up.

[Numtini]

When you're in a rifter and get a point on something and 300 people open fire on it, "nothing... will ever be the same."

[Endie]

Curious how that fight played out, money wise. :)

I always like to see the cash totals, mostly because I can't ever remember what ships are what.

In the system with the longest, biggest fight we ended up with almost precisely the same value of kills as losses, but at 20 vs 82 on the battle report, plus their logis, scouts et al, that is still a stellar report.

When you add in the rest of the kills from the neighbouring systems as we kited and ganked folks while moving around we came out well ahead.

[Endie]

I was interested, so I manually added up the various system totals, and came to:

Kills:      1,333,334,000 ISK
Losses:     663,275,000 ISK

So about 66% efficiency at greater than 4:1 odds in well over an hour on grid, you K/D whore.

[tgr]

That's pretty fucking impressive any way you cut it.

[amiable]

A few quick questions, I got the 7-day renewal notice and the wife and I quit WoW so my MMORPG time is free now until SWTOR starts.  I fondly remember sitting in PR- for a month listening to Goons read the count of Monte Cristo and recite Remedial slash fiction.

1.  The last time I logged in we were in Delve, and most of my stuff is there.    How much has the game changed since then?

2.  I heard they got rid of learning skills.  I had all my advanced up to 4 and some up 5, are all those skill points gone forever now?  (I think my character was up to like 26 million SP, Ammarr focused).  Will I get to reallocate these skill points?

3.  I like interceptors and smaller ships, is there small fleet stuff going on in EST?  When I left it was pretty much bring a fleet BS or GTFO.

4.  How long would it take to train up to get into the "stealth fleet"?  Is that something really viable for someone coming back who is probably as bad as a newbie? (If it turns out I can reallocate SP).

5.  Are you still even recruiting/interested in having folks come back?

[Surlyboi]

You get the skill points back to reassign to whatever you want. So if you had that much assigned to learning, you'll pretty much be able to buy the skills to handle some of the stealth shit.

If your stuff is still in Delve and you need some re-establishment cash, let me know.

As for the Goon recruiting stuff, I'll leave that to the recruiters.

[Comstar]

1.  The last time I logged in we were in Delve, and most of my stuff is there.    How much has the game changed since then?

2.  I heard they got rid of learning skills.  I had all my advanced up to 4 and some up 5, are all those skill points gone forever now?  (I think my character was up to like 26 million SP, Ammarr focused).  Will I get to reallocate these skill points?

3.  I like interceptors and smaller ships, is there small fleet stuff going on in EST?  When I left it was pretty much bring a fleet BS or GTFO.

4.  How long would it take to train up to get into the "stealth fleet"?  Is that something really viable for someone coming back who is probably as bad as a newbie? (If it turns out I can reallocate SP).

5.  Are you still even recruiting/interested in having folks come back?

1- Delve is a thunder dome of a dozen different alliances, most of whom are unfriendly. If you petition a stuck request, a GM will move ONE ship with your pilot and everything you can fit in it to empire. We live up in the North West now, in Deklien, though if you can get to Fountion, it's friendly space from there (YMMV), inhabited by TEST- our best friends from Reddit (the website and community).  Goonswarm is now called Goonswarm Federation.  Bob is Dead. Kenny and Barbie are long gone. The new evil empire is the NCDOT, PL and the Drone Region Russian's. Supercaps often win the day, but winter is coming, and we have a sub-cap Hurricane fleet that makes them run in terror. We very rarely use Capital ships in full scale combat- the fleet is either Alphastriking Maelstroms with attendant subcap support ships or Hurricanes with attendant subcap support ships (mostly Minmater is must be said. There are a couple of Amarr and Caldari ships used).

2- You got refunded the points. DON'T SPEND THEM YET. You probably have enough to immediately be able to fly a Tech II Alphastrike Maelstorm for the fleet, or any other subcap you want. Keep them till you decide what to do- you could get Recon V or Logistics V or Dictor V or a lot of other things, but think about it first.You also got some points from the PvE social skills that got collapsed down. 

3- Small fleets best fleets - see Endie's combat report above, the corp is running fleets once or twice a week. Also, we now own the EC- gate, meaning there is a gate camp in system of small ships 23/7 if that's what your interested in. Topgoon - a squad of Goonswarm Federation also regularly runs Stealth Bomber hot drops and other sub-cap gangs. And if you want money and can fly (Armour) HAC's, there is a Incursion fleet that runs around 0.0 doing small-fleet subcap PvE/PvP (by killing the other PvE fleets trying to run the same raid).

4- You can probably fly one if you spend all your points - you need the Frigate V (ideally a Hound, but any bomber will do), and the ability to use a covert-op cloak, which needs Electronics V.  Otherwise you need Cruiser V and more support skills. Stealth bombers are also used as main fleet scouts, though they would prefer you bring a Maelstrom, bring anything. See Rifters, for the use of. With the changes in Jump Bridges ONLY allowing one bridge per system, it's also common for a squadron of Stealth Bombers to sit cloaked on a bridge and kill anything that comes through (which is how I lost a ship last week) and then cloak up before the POS guns open fire on them. One of our allies - Fatal Ascension, uses Stealth Bombers as their MAIN fleet to shoot structures and then cloak when the defenders arrive in their impotent supercaps.

5- It's not up to me, but I believe anyone in good standing is welcome back at any time.

[Morat20]

Sweet k/d numbers. :) So much more money there then ever I had....

[amiable]

I reactivated and all of the myriad of reasons why I quit came flooding back to me.  It's a shame because people wise I think Eve has the most interesting and fun folks who play (including endie, Phildo and crew), but game-play wise  .  I haven't read the EvE f13 forums in a while, can someone point me to a thread here I can vent my spleen about the horrible implementation of ambulation?

[Reg]

The "Summer Expansion - Incarna" thread should fill all of your ambulation bitching needs. It's about the 4th thread from the top on page 1 of the Eve forum.

[Endie]

Crossposting from the subforum where we have a bunch of returning players:

For anyone thinking about when to use a 5-day resub, you may wish to bear the following corp ops in mind over the following six days:

Tonight (Tuesday) evening eurotime: roam in our successful shield-tanking format, with drakes instead of canes as the backbone this week, and the usual lachesis/scimis/huginn/dictors/light tackle to round it our.  Newbies very welcome, although Halo will tell you you are "so bad at this game" (I have 750 kills and one or maybe two losses this year and he tells me I am awful at Eve not once but twice in a post, yesterday, so this is unavoidable).  These ops run every week, sometimes twice a week.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday evenings eurotime (afternoons US): corp blackops hot-dropping.  Unusually for us this is not, I'm afraid, very newbie-friendly, but we've had people wanting to do it for ages.  Recon ships, bombers and black-ops battleships being bridged onto baited targets.

Saturday evening bonus op euro/US crossover: interceptor gang that rogueant is running in return for getting to choose his own corp title.  Rogue is allegedly as good as - or better than - halo.  Perfectly newbie-friendly: just fit out a t1 frigate for speed (vigils are great and you can train to use one with an mwd, point and stabs in a few hours) and come along to learn how to fly fast stuff.

We are also brainstorming good, cheap T1 gangs for newbie corp FCs to take out at zero cost to anyone to learn how to FC with no pressure.  Those will be ultra-newbie friendly (you may end up FCing, after all!)

On top of this there will be newbie-friendly alliance operations most days as well, spread through US and Euro timezones.  The US dudes have more ops, but Euros and crossover time have Mister Vee, who is possibly the best FC in the game.  You'll tend to find out about these by hanging out on jabber and receiving "log in for fight" broadcasts, which is a nice, lazy way to play because you can do other stuff within earshot of the ping and never miss a fight (supercap dudes get SMS messages but that's a mixed blessing when you forget to turn off your phone ringer before going to bed).  Rifters are always welcome on these, and any FC who ever tries to say otherwise (dbrb, ninetales) gets negrepped into the ground.

Here are the ops that I can remember from the last ten days or so:

Last Saturday - Corp roam to Syndicate: killed stuff outnumbered
Last Sunday - Corp roam to Drone Regions: killed stuff massively outnumbered (best fight yet)
Last Monday - Alliance strategic ops in Anzac, Euro and US timezones.  There were a few of these this week and we took a system and various tech.  Huge success.  Also, Comstr FCed an alliance fleet to help take EC-.
Last Tuesday - Early US/late EU Evening Alliance roam to Syndicate: no as easy as it looks, is it?  Newbie FC lost heavily
Friday - US TZ Someone takes out an alliance welpfleet and gets murdered.
Saturday - US TZ Alliance op in Cobalt Edge.  Murdered Dirt Nap Squad's elite PvPers.
Saturday - Euro evening/US Afternoon ambush on vast Raiden supercap fleet with experimental, throwaway fleet: kill a few things including a carrier; almost kill supercarrier; almost kill titan.  Lessons were learned to refine the fleet, but basically a big welp.
Sunday - Alliance late Euro/early US evening op: we and our allies in a three-way brawl against the Germans of Ev0ke and the combined forces of Borg/Brick/Morsus Mihi when they decide to attack our allies' sovereignty.  Huge win against both enemies.  Fortunes are made by our elite wreck-looters.  The nine Bat Country dudes there were on 116 kills, including 42 Heavy Assault Cruisers, 43 logistics ships, 9 strategic cruisers and three command ships.
Sunday/Monday - US evening drunken (slosh) op in frigates.  Slosh ops cannot be welps.
Monday - US Evening: our revised welpfleet doctrine goes out and kills five PL capital ships and a bunch of support ships.

So there is tons of stuff to do (this doesn't count the various small gangs, Topgoon ganks and pretty much 23/7 EC- chillaxing gatecamp) and I have forgotten more ops I imagine.  Just read the alliance and corp forums and hang out on jabber.