Saturday, October 17, 2009

soft targets: i'm gonna gum you you death!

"battle badger standing by... where's my scimitar support?" - rustysherrif2

the life cycle of empire corporate combat is pretty predictable. the two sides talk a lot of shit to each other, they have a couple small skirmishes, eventually one of the small fights explodes into an all out brawl and the stronger organization becomes apparent. often after this has happened, the weaker of the two tries to prove their prowess and execute a stunning ambush once or twice and another major engagement comes to a head. regardless of who comes out victorious, both sides are fatigued by their losses and if they have any skill at all, can easily avoid further conflict until the aggressor bores of fruitless chases or runs out of the conviction to attempt raids on a target which blacked their eye sufficiently

a good example of the latter would be REIGN Alliance. REIGN is an empire alliance about 400 men strong. that many people clustered into secure space makes for generally poorly organized command structures and people eager to prove their bravery in fleet fights. these crews usually yield the most fun and fruitful combat environments

unfortunately, this was not the case

REIGN had a rather effective low skill combat doctrine, not unlike the one practiced by eve university. their combat fleets were comprised of the usual armor buffered, close range battleships with logistic support in low to mid numbers (3-8 ships). however, having the logistics on stand by allowed the battleships to use their high slots to fit cap war. also, unlike most combat forces that have the low skilled pilots fly tackle support for the fleet, REIGN trained all of their new pilots in electronic warfare. this meant that every time our fleets engaged, we were faced with more ECM ships (scorpions, griffins, blackbirds, falcons, rooks) than we had battleships in our fleet

in PRONS, we're used to fighting in situations where we're extremely outnumbered and coming out on top. in the REIGN campaign, we did just that... at first. following my war progression timeline, they should have gone into hiding and evasion mode
after the first large engagement
. however, they instead adjusted their strategy and added more logistics and e-war to offset our logistics and e-war... and their superior numbers proved too much to overcome

what you don't see in that fight is our 2 guardians, oneiros, two falcons, rook, and 4 remote repair dominixes that were all trying in vain to keep our high dps turret ships alive

even though we managed to do over 3 billion isk in damage to them (including a very strange and expensive curse), the 2 odd billion isk that we sustained in losses took its toll on our pilots and we dropped the war under the pretense that they were just "too much for us to handle"

on the opposite end of the spectrum, PRONS once again engaged in epic pitched battle against REPO

just like last time, we believe that they were hired on the cheap and sloppy due to some kind of connection to the junta. allow me to explain...

during our downtime between wars, we like to keep our skills sharp by probing out and terrorizing wormholes. unlike the bulk of our empire engagements which are focused against a single, specific target, these skirmishes are completely random against whoever happens to be in space in the wormhole we visit. in this particular tale, the unlucky wormhole denizens happened to be The ENTITY.

they were just sitting in their alliance POS in the J170409 wormhole, minding their own business when Ten Tron's neutral probing alt happened upon their operation. they greeted him with the typical "tough guy carebear" welcome- threatening his ship and his pod and setting a quite elaborate bubble/can/drone trap for his humble covert ops ship

of course, any time anyone is up for a fight, we here at project nemesis like to oblige them

after the dust had settled and their four battleships were sacked and looted, the smack talk commenced. to keep this short and to the point, Ten Tron announced (facetiously of course) that we were moving into their wormhole and waging a war against their alliance in order to procure a "rare resource" later to be identified as Havocium

this war followed the typical pattern for empire campaigns... except the large, deciding battle of the war was fought before the war declaration was even put up for a vote

seeing as they lacked the skill and manpower to fight a war machine as practiced as project nemesis, The ENTITY hired mercenaries... particularly our old friends at REPO. REPO's decision to take the contract on us after how poorly their last campaign went left many of us confused... until we saw Enigmatic Lunatic's employment history. this ENTITY security officer spent a month in the junta

funny how all of the pieces come together

anyway, since we had pretty much blacked the eyes of both of these organizations, we spent the better part of the wars' duration catching the odd hauler, chasing solo battlecruisers, and killing neutral remote repair alts

to be fair, the demonic empire, a newer REPO corporation, gave us (and won) the one head on battle of the war

hopefully they'll keep bringing it now that they're back on their own

1 comment:

  1. Try the lemon. It's delicious. Also, I found the Havocium...

    ReplyDelete