Sometimes it bothers me when FC's shy away from even fights, or even slightly uneven fights where your fleet is at a disadvantage. I know that Eve revolves around real loss, so an FC will often times try to minimize losses. This means that a fight with an unclear outcome is a fight most won't want to engage in.
It bothers me though, when a relatively even fight is turned down because odds are both sides will take losses. But those are the fights where things are interesting. You don't know if you're going to win, so it depends heavily on the skills of the Pilots, the FC, and the ability to work together. If you win, it's a lot more satisfying, particularly for the FC as he can pat himself on the back for coming out ahead of an uncertain battle.
But people don't like uncertainty, and people don't like losing ships. So very few of these battles seem to take place. I shouldn't complain though, I never FC, and therefore I assume none of the risk nor reputation of leading fleets to failure, or loss.
On the other hand, there has been a quiet voice inside my head for a while that tells me I should grab some pilots by the balls and go fuck shit up. Last night, I took the command role for the first time in FW...
I had logged in to find that none of my corp-mates were on, so I hopped in my pimped out Jaguar. and went looking for a fight. I came to Kourmonen, where it was filling up with war targets going for a roam. A Crusader was on the gate to Auga, and I knew there was a fleet coming, but I decided to engage anyway. The warp from Kamela to Auga was 65+ AU, so I thought I might be able to pop him before the fleet came out of the long warp.
I waited for an opportunity to scramble the crusader, and pounced. He went down quick, but not quick enough, the rest of his mates showed up and managed to Disrupt me before I could warp out.
My Jag has a 'special' tank. It can take quite a bit of punishment, so I tried to maneuver for the minute long aggression timer. I actually managed to do that, but my maneuvering came at the cost of getting just out of gate range. Amazing that my Jaguar was able to last as long as it did. A whole minute with 3 Arbitrators, a hurricane and a few others on it.
I'm a bit bitter because it's expensive... around 80 million to get this thing kitted out, but it performs so well. I just happen to engage against unfavorable odds. I think I might be a bit more cautious with the next one I fit out.
I went back to pick up another ship and look for a fleet to join, because I wanted some revenge. There were people complaining about no fleet being up.
"X up for Amarr Stomping"
I started taking X's, I requested cruisers and battlecruiser's, to contend with the 12 man Amarr fleet.
I don't have much FC experience outside of running shuttle ops from Catch to Delve in my Goon days. Just moving people up the pipe to the front line in groups to avoid unnecessary losses. So I wanted to keep this fleet simple. Get ships together, find war targets, melt them.
The fleet location was Amamake, there were 11 or so of us and 10 or so of them at this point. They had been moving around in a circle, from Vard to Dal, Fleet intel had them jumping into Amamake, so I had everyone scramble to the Dal gate and tackle what they can. I was one of the first there, and I tried tackling, but I had forgotten to swap my scrambler for a disruptor so much was out of range. All we got was a Myrm on the gate, but a Kill is a kill.
It was webbed, and going nowhere. One of our ceptors had somehow angered the sentry gun gods, and was popped. He said he never activated modules, so I told him to petition it.
We regrouped on one of amamake's many stations and prepared to go after the rest of them, who had continued a circle. Another FC was running a 10 man gang, much like ours in the Dal/Auga area, and was reporting that the Amarr were moving in towards the Amamake gate. I had everyone arrive on the Auga gate in amamake, I sent a scout in to get fleet locations, they were coming to us.
The other Matar fleet was also in Auga, so we outnumbered the amarr pretty heavily now. They must have mis-scouted because they engaged the other matari fleet on the Auga side. I gave the order to jump, and started calling primaries. With so many ships, everything went down fast.
It was a great little skirmish for a first time FC. Only 2 losses from the matari side, and 13 on the Amarr side. Looks like kills were split half and half between the two matari fleets, we each had 1 loss, and about 6 kills. Including almost all the ships on my Jaguar kill.
Revenge is a meal best served cold.
No comments:
Post a Comment