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

Monday, October 5, 2009

what's the "show stopper"?

"write blog about shenanigans NAOW. Then about my beautiful eyes and firm buttocks" - weboide

i apologize for the lack of posting lately. my fight with the flu was long and gross, but i won in the end

now for our regularly scheduled eve updates...

PRONS is once again at war! in the world of high sec war decs and griefing, being memorable is never a good idea. unfortunately for zodicar, he must be lacking this particular piece of wisdom

we met zodicar way back when 5-20 first met the dark horses and prons. he was in terran alliance who was the first war dec that we shared in the formation of the WASTELAND alliance. he made a name for himself among our pilots for quickly docking or cloaking whenever one of our ships would enter local and promptly smacking us... all while divulging sensitive pieces of his real life data. particularly about his daughter

with that as the backdrop, i was out in my scimitar in piak visiting with md dawg and weboide when we saw our old pal zodicar sitting on the undock of the 3-19 station in a megathron. he was quite obviously baiting his wts (whoever they were) with a plate and sensor booster fit and failing at it miserably

so, feeling a bit mischeivous, i sent a private convo to his wt and told him to undock and aggress while the three of us remote repaired him. sure enough, as soon as the wt opened fire on zodicar, 6 of his corp mates lunged into system... even as we were laughing in local that we were repairing his war target!

clearly embarrassed, his corp mates unleashed some rage at us in local and pointed out the fact that prons was a "bunch of retards" and that our "(pvp skills are) lol". since that is taken as a challenge in the eve player versus player combat pilot world, we welcomed it and pushed the dec through that night

since it began, we've endured the typical empire war stages. first it was the station games. then it was the large, unorganized fleets charging into our home system and running once we showed the slightest amount of aggression. now we're on to hat trick fleets and hot drops

actually, that wasn't really a hot drop. we had been playing a little station game with zodicar for 30 or 40 minutes down in piak in a very random assortment of ships. once his fleet was in place, zodicar warped 600 off the station and waited for us to gank him, and gank him we did. unfortunately, we didn't have the manpower or the fleet cohesion to take on a drake/scimitar gang, so we podded back to uedama to change ships and regroup

however, there is nothing more frustrating than having eyes on an angry enemy fleet and lacking the manpower to fight it. we needed a hail mary and fast

scouts reported their fleet moving toward uedama as we shuffled ships and pods around system in front of their cloaked system scout. our carrier pilots quietly slipped out into kubinen and suited up into their dusty carriers leaving four of us in local in battleships. careful to be obvious and slow, we four bait battleships lumbered between the kubinen gate and the bottom station. as they piled in, we warped back to the kub gate with their forward scouts and the first two of their drakes in hot pursuit

without any scouting or intel, the wt fleet followed our battleships into kubinen, right as the carriers were in warp to the gate

the resulting chaos only yielded two kills, but we didn't lose double diamond's raven (it was scary close) and one of the kills was zodicar in his armageddon! the psychological blow was so great that their fleet completely scattered, running all different directions to their respective homes

they're probably done fighting now that we've put a little monetary and psyche hurt on them but so it goes with empire wars

o7 zodicar. project nemesis salutes you

and your daughter