Tactics for T3

Traversal, traversal, traversal...

With T3's speed boost inherited from the Sleeper parts that go into making them it's all about traversal velocity, unless you are working a spider tank in which case you will be needing to maintain a closer formation. From what we've found within our wormhole our standard tank on T3 is good enough not to need any remote help, which might change if we move up to higher class wormhole, but for now we can fly as a freeform fleet happily enough.

So in any given fleet fight what we tend to do is have whoever gains attention maintain as fast a traversal velocity as possible on the hard hitters, while the other take out any webbers that might cause issue to this. We'll also get in under the guns of the larger ships so to avoid the worst of the damage as we can drop a 1000 dps battleship down to a very easily tankable 30dmg a shot by sitting in a nice orbit of them.

When encountering multiple hard hitting battleships I have a tendency to not use the inbuilt orbit as you can only set this to orbit a single target allowing the others to spread out and start to do damage again. Instead I'll manually adjust my course to orbit the group keeping them close to each other and thus avoiding more damage than necessary.

Themodynamics is a great skill when getting under the guns is necessary, as with hitting overheat on my AB II I can get to around 800m/s which very quickly gets you into a nice range. I can normally half the optimal range off a battleship before it can lock me at which point switching to a high traversal deals with the rest.

Industrial-ish

We've had a Devoter BP kicking around for a while from before we entered into WH's and we're making our money on the T2 market. It's always been one we wanted to build but we had no one to fly it. That recently changed as I finished propulsion jamming V and sorted out the last skill to get into in. So my co-director dropped out to high and got it built as we intend on sharing the ship (such is the way of WH life) once he finishes his training.

During a convenient High sec connection I got the ship fitted and was nicly setup with high-80-90% resists across the board, dual armor reps and a pair of bubbles (which thanks to my Amarrian background I can run almost cap stablly, note: must sort out the final rig to get it stable) .

Well I had the guys give it the once over to test it's a tank in preparation for actual combat, and felt pretty good that it'll stand up to a decent amount of damage. I didn't have to wait long...

We had a raider in a Tengu who didn't accept our invite to leave peacefully plus his salvaging alt. After my stealth bomber had a close encounter with a structure while scouting and subsequently exploding to the Tengu's missles I pulled the Devoter out to see if we couldn't discourage this raid by supplying the raider with a new clone.

Well we landed on the Tengu which promptly cloaked and moved away, but while trying to save his 1/2 Bil ship, the raider missed warping out his alt who was busy salvaging in his buzzard despite the sudden appearance of 2 new Tengu's and a Devoter. So a quick warp to salvage I dropped the bubble and dispensed justice on the alt, taking out a full sisters (which would have been useful to us) but dropping the Nano ribbons (which pays for my new Stealth bomber)

Well the raider wasn't too pleased with this, and after burning his tengu through the hastly assembled camp on our static, came back in an Absolution command ship to take revenge (this is after we pointed out his threats of a capital fleet to take down our pos wouldn't work due to mass limitations of the WH) I must say I have a healthy respect for command ships now, that thing was tough, and he was managing to break the tank on the Devoter on his own. But managed to escape and after a couple of scraps at the WH on his terms his bloodrage had diminished and he decided us "noobs" weren't worth his time. Good for us as along with the we recovered from the buzzard and the site we salvaged that he had just finished we netted a good 100M.

T3 fleet

Ok, I've been a bit lax on the post, but then RL has been busy, and what time I have found have for Eve has been packed with things to do/deal with.

When we first moved into the our WH our intention was to try and make some money, which worked, better than we could have expected, so we went from our small pos which we used as a bolt hole and little else, to setting ourselves up a large pos with all the kit to build ourselves T3.

This again we succeeded at, which took us 6 months or so of skill training to work towards, but it was a monumental day when the other director and I put the T3 fleet into manufacture.

We've since found the T3's to be invaluable in the wormhole, personally although I have seen the damage difference Tengu beating the Legion in damage output, the range advantage of around 30km on the Legion compared to under 18km on the Tengu to get that damage is not something the numbers alone will show. In a dynamic fight, having that extra range to be able to orbit the hard hitters under their guns while picking off the support ships at distance is justification enough to me that the Legion and Tengu can compete in a PvE situation.

(As you might guess from that I fly the only Legion in a Tengu fleet, but this does oddly complement each other as I can get to range alot sooner and help out the Tengu's to get into their damage range)

PI issues

I've been seeing a lot of the dropped cycles on the PI things and it does seem to be related to downtime, as cycles that I have run that don't run through DT work fine, whereas ones that cycle during it seem to drop, which reading Letrange's assessment does fit with what I have seen.

This does get annoying on the later cycles as a dropped batch is getting into the millions lost...

I've also had issues with cycle times not resetting which DeafPlasma has also noticed. I've had some extractors which I put onto the longest cycle at the start of PI and have yet to restart them, I'm loathed to decommission them just to stop the cycle as it would require me rebuilding just to fix one of CCP's bugs, I'm thinking that this again is related to downtime and the timer gets reset on DT, I'm going to have to wait till the weekend before I can confirm the cycle time reset.

Come on CCP there is people out here doing your debugging for you, you just need to fix it.

Maybe not so nice

So the other day I login to find a raid on our system going on. There is only me and the co-director online at this point so tackling a 3 BS and 1 T3 fleet looks like it is going to be difficult.

But we scan them down anyway and find them hiding round a wormhole (must have spotted our probes and waiting to see on a response). So we sit and watch in the hope that they will jump out, eventually they must have gotten bored and guessed we aren't up to hitting their fleet so they warp back to a site.

We follow on and see that they are using a large cluster of sentry drones as defence. Perfect expensive bomb target, so a quick swap to a purifier later and we are both lining up for a bombing run. Unfortunately they had just finished the site so I jumped the gun and launched while the sentry drones were still a viable target, despite this they managed to pull the drones before the bomb got them.

After this little scrape the raiding party went on the defensive and started playing cat and mouse between planets with my co-director scanning them down I went back to their salvage area and settled down to await the salvage boat we detected entering the system.

Eventually the thrasher appears and cloaks to await reinforcements, it does cross my mind to attempt to hit the cloaked ship as I do have a line on the direction and know the distance but decide it'll be worth letting them salvage the site first as it could result in some salvage loot. one of the BS's eventually comes back and salvaging commences by which point I've managed to position myself exactly where I want and am just awaiting the thrasher to approach the cluster I'm waiting for.

He moves into position and I go for the shot, de-cloak drop bomb bank away for warp (already got clipped by the T3 on first bombing run and don't want the BS to get me), he spots the bomb and attempts to dive out of blast radius with a microwarpdrive. Unfortunately for him he's not fast enough and is destroyed by the blast.

This is where I realise I should have cloaked instead of warped so that I could have looted the thrasher before the BS gets there, but ah well I managed a successful kill and got a compliment on the success off the guy I'd hit.

Well WH is slowly teaching me to PvP.

I'm too nice

You would think 6 months living in a wormhole fighting tooth and nail would have kicked the carebear out of me. Well you'd be wrong...

Last night we had an intruder drop through our end of life static, in a lone thorax. Odd to start with as he was dropping cores in a visible ship that is unsuited to wormholes. So a quick swap to my scan boat found it San-combat probes so ended up borrowing my co-directors boat and got started scanning him down.

I started trying to scan him out with ranged probes but he hadn't got himself into a fight yet so swapped to just trying to scan him down as fast as possible, which highlighted another oddity, he didn't notice combats around him for two minutes till I found him in one of our ladar sites. It looks like he nailed his first signature, then warped straight to it, and it being a ladar there was no combat to be had (yet...)

So we swap to our intruder protection ships (stealth bombers) and warp to range of him, since the guy was aligned to a planet I decided to forego our standard tactic of dropping bombs and closed within scram range to make sure we got a clean kill.

So we attack rip through his shields and most of his armor, we've got him pointed and dead by rights. At 20% armor he convo's me, which I initially am hesitant to accept, and he starts offering money for the ship. I'm more interested in how he got in as we'd thought our static had collapsed, (turns out it was at end of life and I'd screwed up refreshing my scans of the system earlier in the night)

Well while we were debating what to do about this ship now that it's on hull he'd repped some armor back (we'd stopped shooting stupidly) and dropped drones, which when in a stealth bomber I took as hostile and opened fore again. With drones ripping into my stealth bombers armor I had to bail from the fight and my co-director took over the point and he too has to soon warp off due to drones. On my way back into the fight I made the mistake of hitting the cloak instead of the warp scramble and prevented getting him re-pointed before he warps.

On talking to him afterwards he was new to wormholes (which was fairly self evident) and had jumped through our dying static, he hadn't even known to use directional. He was literally flying blind. I suspect if he'd gone to a combat site rather than a ladar he'd have been destroyed anyway, so in a way we ended up doing him a favour through our failure to destroy the ship when we had our chance.

Ah well is all good PvP experience and with any luck we'll learn how to better defend out patch.

Fire and forget launches?

Not sure many people have noticed this as it doesn't seem to be on the proposed fix list for PI or on any blogs, but it seems that if you trigger a launch you have to wait for the 3 seconds for the launch to happen otherwise it gets scrubbed.

You cannot trigger a launch and then go deal with extractors while the item is launching.

I think it's a bug as it does seem to be tied to the open CC control window.

PI all thumbs

Is it just me or is managing PI a bit on the tediously fiddly side. Now running a corp and manufacturing means I hit up against eve's awkward UI's a number of times. managing permissions and setting up POS reactions can be a pain. But I have a feeling PI is going to be so much more awkward since it requires tweaking every 24-96 hours to make it efficient.

Now if your only dealing with a few extractors on a single planet then your fine it's not a big hassle, I'm currently managing 5 planets across 2 characters, and could am able to boost that up to 12 planets across 3 characters. But when it comes to dealing with reactivating the extractors the interface is currently a pain to use.

I'm mostly running strip mining operations with the intention of moving the resources to a single character within our corp for refinment. so each planet has 8-14 extractors which is alot of clicking about to reactivate the extractors.

My thoughts n this is that a plantary overview window needs to be added where you can browse down the extractors on the list, trigger them to survey and select the item you want for all your extractors on that planet within a single window.

Pros:

• Quicker to manage a planet and allows the player to get back to other activites whcih will promote player uptake.
• Less hits on the server as you are less likely to miss extractors and resubmit your changes.

Cons:

• None?

And so it begins...

The great planetary rush has begun...

How not to raid a wormhole

Our recent luck with a nice high sec link was down to a solo pilot attempting to raid our wormhole. The thing is this guy can't have known much about wormholes, as he made a series mistakes which led to him losing his ship and nearly his pod.

Lessons from WH space:

1. Come prepared, don't warp into a wormhole in a destroyer and expect to win, especially when you don't know what class the wormhole is.
2. Know you sites, if you don't know them look them up So you at least know when you are likely to get warp scrambled.
3. Have a decent tank, again a destroyer cannot tank against a sleeper battleship.
4. Check directional, as if the wormhole is occupied and the occupants are online they are liable to be hunting you down with the aim of giving you a clone ticket back to where you came from.

This destroyer pilot managed fail on all above counts and nearly lost his pod as our corp has a tendency to get blood-lust going once easy prey appears within the gun sights.

Never rush a WH collapse

Never rush a WH collapse, at least that's what we've always gone by, since our move in we have built the obligatory spreadsheets that seem to power all of Eve's none shooty things.

But then there is always times where you slip up. This was one of them.

Now since our entry into our WH we have always been careful with our trusty space whale, it helps close WH's fast, can keep all valuables stored safe when we're not online, basically we have found it essential to our WH lives. Well we got lucky and got a High sec link, opened by a curious (if stupid) explorer, but thats another story.

So we used this high link to get our T3 manufacturing setup up to scratch so we can manufacture on site, we already react, this was just the next logical step. however once we were all back nice and safe in our WH we go to close the WH and screw up the calculations.

Orca now stuck in high sec, which isn't terrible at least it's not low/null/another wormhole.

But we now have the problem of getting it back into the wormhole or attempt to do things without it. Since our previous attempts to move the orca through low sec have had mixed success we weren't too keen on a repeat of that, however our high sec links are once in a blue moon event so we had little choice.

So we plan our route to avoid major gatecamp gateways (got to love 2d maps, makes route planning alot easier) and we setup an escort of a couple of webified stealth bombers, with dual purpose of helping the orca get to warp speed and high dps defence that we can scout with easily.

We made an uneventful trip to low sec gateway and then started the nerve racking process of moving the orca through low sec planet bouncing and aligning cloaked, scouting ahead. Everything that we should have done the first time. Fortunately this time we had a clean run and got the space whale home.

One thing we did learn is webifying an orca into warp is alot faster than it running an AB to boost to 75%. From the stealth bomber side as soon as the web is activated you lose your lock, definatly a must for future orca ops.

Stage 2 the Move

Scraping together the isk we had spare and decide we can afford to throw away a small pos and a few drakes in an effort to see if we can survive in WH space, one quick shopping spree later we have our trusty Orca stuffed with a small pos a load of ECM modules a few guns and fuel for 2 weeks.

Our move plan was to drop into the lowsec system that connected to the C5 I got lost in and then through into the C3 and setup home, and thats when things started to go wrong.

We warp to the lowsec entrance gate and find some pilots lurking, we wait and they carry on lurking, we take bets on them being pirates, they carry on lurking... We throw sence to the wind and attempt a jump. They follow.... &*@~#^&...

We now have a fleet of 1 drake (with very badly trained pilot), 1 orca with 1/2 a bil of gear on board, and a hauler with various other bits of kit and 2 pirates waiting for us to decloak. Some quick thinking and a bad decision later the drake has got to warp and the hauler is being attacked by one of the pirates. Lucky for us the gate guns are on our side and get that one ship to the point where he has to warp off and abandon the hunt on the hauler. Just leaves one pirate whale hunting at the gate...

Eventually whale requires air takes a gulp and dives back into the cloaky depths with the cloak we were smart enough to install. Unfortunately the whale hunter now knows exactly where to look, another snap decision to see if we were lucky enough to have a pirate who doesn't use a warp scrambler lead to whale being netted and impending doom closing in.

By this point we'd managed to stop panicking enough to get our drake heading back towards the gate to reinforce the space whale, and combined with the guns we manage to escape to the relative safety of the wormhole.

Lesson learned: Whales can tank...

The Beginning

Well the plan was get into a WH and make lots of money....

So far this has sort of worked but it's not all gone to plan. we've had 8 months now of living in the same wormhole I eventually found by wormhole riding a C1, to a C2 to Russian infested null sec space (who did not like me desperately attempting to scan a backdoor escape route out of Russian space) to a C5 (for 2 days of attempting to find a wormhole through the mess of signatures in that system) finally to what will become our C3 home.

Now all that we needed was to get a safe haven into the C3....

Route prediction: Death