Wednesday, December 7, 2011

battle report- 12/6/2011

Sometimes I sneak into your room at night and play with your face like a puppet - Triksterism

sunday december 4th, 2011

warlord protagonist received intel that a player owned customs office (poco) that was attacked by some old acquaintances of ours was coming out of reinforced in a back-end system in molden heath. upon further investigation, it turned out that the defenders were HELM alliance, a long-time ally of sworn pirate enemies electus matari and dragoons. they were further partnered with broken chains alliance and some local terribads, g spot alliance

since this first reinforcement was set to come out squarely in our best EU/US tz overlap, we geared up to drop one of our strongest battalfleets on top of them: armor buffer bs w/heavy neuts supported by triage

the warlord's fleet formed up to respond with about 12 armor BS and a couple triage carriers prepped for action supporting the 10 or so THC2 guys in their shield bs

as we moved down the pipe, intel was coming in that HELM and their allies had both in-gates camped with substantial tackle. nothing we couldn't deal with, but it would prevent us from getting to the nugget we were lurching for: the BCA nuthugger repping the poco + his motley supporting fleet

alas, when we hit the gate the repping fleet legged it. our intel was splotchy at best about what they had in its entirety, but my best guess is about 25 sub caps including: 3 basilisks, 2 scimitars, a hyperion, at least one falcon, at least 2 sleipnirs, as well as several t3s

maybe we came on a bit strong~

no matter. they had repped the poco back over 50% and we came for a fight. the one kill we did get was never going to satisfy... so we reinforced the poco again. since our dps was a bit on the overwhelming side and our balls were swollen and blue we went ahead and reinforced two others as well

now with 3 fresh timers and our pimp hand shown, we waited and watched
----

tuesday, december 6th, 2011

pre-staging began at 1845. mid/close range armor buffer bs w/heavy neut + eccm was the order. fleet numbers up until about 1945 were anemic at best. no carrier pilots, 6 armor bs pilots... people were only trickling in

god damn this RF timer sucked

luckily, people were willing to travel great distances (looking at you triksterism and suleiman shouaa) and help bump up our numbers a bit

scouts reported a substantial number of anti-pirate coalition members congregating around unertek. scouting myself, unertek local was up to 60 or so without us in it. adjacent systems had as many as 15 more milling around, gearing up for the brawl. final number of pirates and alts in our fleet: 33

i decided to join up our fleet into one homogeneous blab in klingt, right next door to the hostile fleet. EM had obvious scouts attached to our movements, but i knew that would be the case anyway. coming in from klingt through a minmatar constellation gate (FUCKING HUGE~) would be messy, but messy is what i was going for. the idea was that the large gate could have let the bulk of our BS escape their meager tackle and warp to station for a better warp in on the poco where i wanted the fight to go down

it wasn't meant to be that way, unfortunately

the HELM/gspot/BCA gang was right on the first poco, happily repping it with 3 scimitars and 3 thanatos. they were covering these ships with a small attachment of sub bs ships: sleipnirs, lokis, tengus, recons, cynabals, 2 widows (drool) and at least one cloaked falcon. the EM LR alpha fleet was set up 50 or so km off the klingt gate with 9 maelstroms, 3 scorpions, 4 scimitars, 2 lokis, lachesis, vulture and a few odd interceptors

i chose to jump into them~

holding cloak and assessing our field position, i was hoping the maels and scorps didn't have much in the way of propulsion fit and we could burn for them while primarying something with scorch/barrage. that was the intention anyway. while we caught up with them pretty easily, our fleet because quite spread and the damage was evident. we dropped a scorpion, but we had started losing ships since i had ordered the thanatos on the field at the cyno ship furthest from the alpha fleet. while this kept pressure off the triage carrier itself, it was more to assist it in escape if that became and issue

the fleet quickly pulled range from the thanny (who triaged immediately) and kept taking heavy losses (relative to our smaller size) realizing rep range was going to be the issue here, i order krole to light his cyno and the archon to join the fray pretty much right in middle of the bottom portion of the EM fleet

right as i ordered the cyno lit, HELM alliance did something quite brash

they warped their fleet (including 2 widows and 3 thanatos) right to 0 on our triage thanny

realizing that now leaving the thanny so far from its dps support under 3 other carriers and a curse worth of neuting was a bad idea, i ordered all bs to hot burn back to manc in the thanatos and titus's archon to jump to the lower cyno, sacrificing krole's typhoon to the alpha gang

as the fleet closed with manc once again, damage all but stopped and we were able to put down a ludicrous amount of pain on the HELM fleet. dispatching their t2 cruisers, 2 scimitars, 2 widows and a sleipnir right off, we then started tearing apart the first thanatos

he went down like a taiwanese hooker

after that we mopped up a little more support and started closing with the other two carriers. one of them managed to warp as EM was motoring back into optimal for those big 1400s forcing off our tackle, the other decided he would triage to help his chances of survival

and that it did

we had lost enough dps and neuts that trying to stay on the triage thanny under shelling from the 1400s in the maels was going to be a problem. plus the constant jamming from the 2 remaining scorps (+1 widow that reshipped) was making it hard to fully apply what dps we had left... so i ordered us to pull out

both carriers went red on their triage while our fleet swatted back the tackle trying to pin them to the gate and they both warped off to station. this wasn't the best spot for us to lack any form of reps (sorry blise) but we deaggro'd and jumped into klingt, lumbering to the safety of the station

all said, it was an incredibly fun fight for everyone involved

EM believes that to be a resounding victory considering they killed 10 battleships and a battlecruiser and only lost one scorpion. we consider it a victory because we lost 10 battleships but slaughtered the fuck out of HELM to the tune of 6b worth of face-smashing damage on ludicrously fit ships. HELM considers it a victory because they held the field and got to smack titus in local for not undocking his archon to fight them further.... alone

i consider it a victory as we brawled face first into 2x our numbers with less logi, no ewar and little support and didn't derp as hard as we should have

had the HELM fleet not warped to 0 on our triage thanny, we would have lost more BS than we killed on the EM LR fleet and this would be a harsh lesson in important role ships for outnumbered fleet engagements. our bs didn't have enough webs to engage the prop fitted EM fleet the way i had intended. even if we had dropped the archon in the middle of their fleet, they would have continued to burn and pulled range until they pulled our ships off the archon, killed a few more and just warped off leaving us with two carriers on the gate for them to tackle and us to scramble to save

so, final numbers:
US-- 29: 24 battleships, 3 battlecruisers and 2 triage carriers
THEM-- 50: 18 battleships (including black ops), 11 battlecruisers (including command ships), 6 cruisers (including faction, HACs and recons), 5 frigates and destroyers, 7 total scimitars and 3 thanatos (of which at least one was triage)

thanks to: HELM for being terrible, sulei and trik for hauling balls to come down for the fight (extra thanks to sulei for baller t2 info link), finheri for taking over target calling when i started derping, THC2 for rf'ing this bitch in the first place, EM for bringing the gfs, titus and manc for triaging our asses (extra thanks to manc for armor links), everyone else for bootin' and suitin' to help kick some faces and pere madeline for leaving the fight early, allowing us to kill their thanatos

http://ransm.killmail.org/?a=kill_related&kll_id=11816603

gf