Saturday, February 26, 2011

DRF vs NC: 8 white noise supercarriers down

Except I'm not there any more. I'm in the south with the rest of my alliance, trying to get some of the rabble off the geminate bandwagon. Not that I'm mad or anything.

Anyway, yaay the destroyer did a counter-hotdrop and killed 8 WN supercarriers. Off the top of my head that's 18 supercapital kills he's FCd in the last two months. I think this puts us at 13 super kills and 16 losses for the geminate campaign, though of course most of our losses were titans.

EDIT: Youtube

Killboard

Whenever I clone jump out of my supercarrier we get a bunch of nice kills. This time it wasn't actually during the jump clone cooldown, or even when I was online or paying attention, but I start to suspect I could win entire campaigns just by repeatedly clone jumping in and out of the area of operations....

Monday, February 21, 2011

DRF vs NC: I spoke too soon, but we killed a titan so that's okay

As mentioned in the edit on my last post, DRF look to have retaken o2o. It seems as though their TCU was never vulnerable (not sure why). After we left the system to shoot the k25 station they jumped in, flipped the station back and repped it. They then moved to k25, where after a short fight their supers drove NC subcaps off field and they killed our onlining TCU and flipped the station to red control. They left system though, and there isn't a TCU of their anchoring, so I anticipate we will likely take the system this evening.

After they jumped out somebody said in super channel that we had a titan tackled. Apparently he had logged off in k25 with aggression. I jumped on comms, got my scout alt in fleet and found somebody to warp to.

Never killed a titan while I had effects on before. It looks pretty good.

DRF vs NC: Sorry kalle

16:11:18 Notify The station O2O SOLAR STRONGHOLD has been captured by Incidental Damage corporation!

...you're still the biggest loser.

Following the capital slaughter in uemon fighting has continued in geminate. In my last post about the region I had stated that all stations had been saved, which turns out to be inaccurate. Enemy forces had fallen back to o2o and camped the system until their TCU could anchor, and they took that station. Further, the TCU which blue forces anchored in station systems K25 and 04 were bugged, and hostiles were able to take both systems without going through a timer. They also anchored TCU in two non station systems for some reason.

With the hostiles' heavy supercapital advantage we have essentually only used subcapitals; as a supercarrier pilot I have been on standby the entire time. I've considered switching out to subcapitals, but if supers get called we're going to need everybody.

Fighting has been mainly in o2o. We've burned a lot of ships there against hostiles supported by supercapitals and triage carriers, accomplishing strategic objectives but generally failing to achieve positive isk ratios. As of this morning all 3 hostile outposts were in armor reinforced, as was one blue outpost nearby.

Anticipating that I would sit out the fight again I got a scout-gu alt in o2o and set up a warpin on the station so I could watch the fight.

('scout-gu' is one of my standard fits, a cloaky/nullified tengu with istabs)


Not a fight

That didn't happen. The hostiles didn't even form up, and we retook the station without incident. I'll mention if anything interesting happens later on, but the failure to form would tend to indicate that they have abandoned the campaign. The last hostile station, 04, comes out of armor reinforced in just under two days so maybe something will happen then.

EDIT: It looks like reds are making a play for o2o. After blues went to k25 to hit the station they moved jumped to o2o and flipped the station back. I'm not familiar enough with soverignty to say for certain how the mechanics will work at this point. Either they have to anchor a TCU, which will take 8 hours and we could realistically try to drive them off, or they just have to rep the station in which case it's already back in their hands.

Currently they have 500 in o2o and blues have 700 in k25. Hostile supers are on o2o station so I'll be watching jabber for possible goodfites.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Super capital emo post

There are a number of things about which I had considered posting prior to the supercapital slaughter in uemon but will sound totally whiny now. I'm going to get them all out of the way in one post.

1. Because of supers, the NC is not invincible.

This sure would this have been prescient. It's something I had thought about after hearing that AAA+atlas can field 100 supers. The NC is extremely light on supercapitals for its' size, being able to field only around 100. DRF+pets, at half our size (if you count DC), can also field 100. Atlas+AAA, together less than one-tenth our size, can field 100. Pandemic legion, less than 1/30th our size, has about 100 though not all in the same time zone. If only one or two of these entities allied against us we could accurately complain about being blobbed, because supers are all that matter these days.

2. Coalition supercarrier initiative.

The NC makes somewhere in excess of eight hundred billion isk per month from tech moons. If we don't want to die, we should take that isk and turn it into free supercarriers for everybody who can fly one.

3. One nyx per account

One often hears about DRF super pilots bringing multiple supercarriers to a fight, and by "multiple" I mean 5-ish. Cough botmasters cough. Instead of going for a titan, which tend to be primary, I should replicate their method and try to get a nyx on each of my accounts, ending up with 3 times the DPS and EHP for about the same price.

FAKE EDIT: This is now my medium-long term plan, assuming the coalition doesn't die in the meantime.

4. Supercarriers are overpowered.

This isn't news to anybody. I don't know if I've actually brought it up here, but on forums and EN24 I have been one of the "as a supercarrier pilot, I think they need a nerf" crew. Supercarriers are incredibly overpowered, having as much EHP and DPS as titans for one third the price.

Some people have been complaining about capitals being overpowered since forever. Pre-dominion I didn't think it was much of an issue (except for AOE DD) but today there's no role for anything but supercarriers and hictors. I'm going to to is make some suggestions that I'm confident almost everybody will agree with:

1. Subcapitals should be effective against capitals and supercapitals, but not more effective than capitals and supercapitals are against each other.
2. Supercarriers need a serious nerf.
3. Dreadnaughts should be useful in a capital fight.

I hate when people present ideas for fixing something they think is broken. For one thing it's pointless because CCP won't use their suggestions. For another their ideas are always stupid. I'm going to do it anyway though, just to get it off my mind.

Overhaul part 1: capitals
1. Titans need... a buff? This will make sense later. They should have 40-60 million EHP instead of 30-50. The doomsday bonus will be increased to 20% damage per level for a maximum of 4 million damage.
2. Supercarriers are ridiculously overpowered and need to be nerfed a lot. We will turn them into tier 3 capitals.
a. Damage should be reduced significantly. I propose 4000 DPS (5000 with nyx bonus), slightly more than a standard dread fit.
b. EHP should be reduced significantly. I propose 20-30m EHP, half as much as titans.
c. They should be made vulnerable to standard warp disruptors but not other forms of ECM. Maybe webbers.
d. Capital RR modules should be restricted to carriers in order to prevent invincible supercarrier RR blobs. Supercarrier high slots will be reduced by 2.
e. Supercarriers should be allowed to dock because of all the nerfs. Maybe it should be possible to build them in stations as well.
3. Dreads need an EHP buff to make them useful. Increasing their EHP by 150% gives them 5 million, a meaningful fraction of supercarrier EHP and enough to tank a level 5 doomsday.
4. Let's go ahead and increase carriers' EHP by 150% as well so they don't get left behind. This will give them 2.5 million EHP, still vulnerable to doomsdays.

I think that would balance capitals and supers a bit. Dreads that can tank for a few seconds, weaker supercarriers, carriers with a little more EHP to keep up with dreads. Now we need to make subcapitals useful.

There has been a lot of discussion about how to do this. The simplest way would be to just have capitals take increased damage from subcapitals. Subcapitals should do less damage to capitals and supers than dreadnaughts, the lowest-damage capital damage dealers. For the sake of this discussion dreadnaughts do 3500 DPS.

Let us say that in order to be a 0.0 entity you should be able to field 100 alpha maelstroms. And let us say that alpha maelstroms do 600 DPS (10,000 volley) with a cycle time of 18 seconds.

Overhaul part 2: subcapitals
1. Today a small battleship fleet can kill a carrier in just a few seconds, which I think is okay in terms of balance. Let's have carriers and dreadnaughts take increased damage equivalent to their EHP buff, giving them 1 and 2 million EHP against subcapitals and taking 18 and 36 seconds respectively to kill.
2. Supercarriers should have the largest damage increase from subcapitals. Let's have them take 300% increased damage, meaning the maelstroms will be doing 2400 DPS each, 2/3 as much as a sieged dreadnaught. Supercarriers will have 5 to 7.5 million EHP against subcapitals, taking 90 to 135 seconds for the maelstroms to kill compared to 540 to 1080 seconds today.
3. As the only supercapitals, titans should still be challenging to kill with subcapitals. 100% damage increase, taking 360 to 540 seconds to kill (unless somebody brought neuts).

Monday, February 14, 2011

DRF vs NC: NC dies horribly in biggest super fight ever

Our glorious commanders were out running an ahac gang and hostiles brought some capitals. Jabber ping went out for caps+supers, our support killed their support and out capitals jumped in to kill theirs.


After jumping in

We killed a few dreads and carriers there, and once they were dead we warped to another cyno in system where a number of enemy supercarriers had jumped to one of their pos. The first one we primaried was in half armor and got bumped inside, but we got the second.


Nyx going down

That's when things started to go bad. Hostiles jumped in everything. We jumped in everything. Raiden. jumped in everything. Everybody called for everybody to log in everything and everybody jumped everything in. At the peak of the fight there must have been at least 200 supercapitals on grid.


UI off near beginning of the fight


From corpmate, brackets on during the fight

At the beginning only the hostiles had dictors on grid, and while we lost titans theirs could warp out. Eventually things stabilized, half because of increasing lag and half because we got some hics on field and killed some of theirs. We eventually managed to kill 2 titans and possibly a few other things.


First red titan dying


Second red titan dying

Lag started to increase again and more of our titans started going down. Eventually my outstanding calls just stopped completing, and when the oldest was 32 minutes I decided to relog. Before I got back in supers were ordered to jump out, so I canceled the login and logged in a second character on the same account in hopes that it would help the server recognize that I was logged out, and at this point it looks like I'm safe. It looks like we lost 9 titans and killed 2 titans and 2 supercarriers. As I write this hostiles are trying to get out and we are killing some that are blackscreened so it's possible we might get some more kills. Apparently we have a bunch of hostile supercarriers and a titan or two tackled, but the lag is so bad they would take a very long time to kill.

If the NC dies I'm totally blaming it on my curse, though I might change the time limit to 1.5 years.

Battlereport -- very broken but has links to killmails

Sunday, February 13, 2011

DRF vs NC: First hours

As mentioned in my previous post, Rebellion alliance (-R-), based primarily in Geminate, was disbanded shortly before downtime today and their space was immediately set upon by drone lands (DRF) forces. Reports indicate that large areas of geminate not controlled by -R- were SBUd.

Combat started immediately after downtime. Three of the six vulnerable stations in geminate were taken by DRF even before friendlies arrived on the scene. Hostiles are reported to have numbered 600 with around 100 supercapitals, much more than we could muster in the middle of the night with no warning.

Similar to the stella polaris sov loss during max 2 our goal here will be to take control of the area and kill TCU which are being onlined. If TCU can be killed before they online, the stations can be immediately retaken by friendlies and friendly TCU anchored; if the enemy TCU anchor we will have to go through the stations' reinforcement cycles to retake them. The enemy will set them to come out in their prime time, which for the mostly EU/US northern coalition is the middle of the night and early morning.

The early hours consisted of subcapital skirmishes, in QKTR (17b killed, 13b lost) and M-M (35b killed, 3b lost). The M-M battle apparently destroyed the bulk of the hostile support, and culminated in a node crash.

As this was going on cyno chains were being run from fountain to tribute, and around 1630 we finally formed a capital fleet and moved to a staging system in the area of operation. Numbers were weak at first, but slowly climbed until we had a full fleet of capitals and supers.

As of now capitals are on standby, support have killed one TCU and are working on others. I'm on different comms of course, but there has been no news of continued resistance after the fight in M-M. Hostiles have about 40 supercapitals standing by right now, down from 65 reported earlier and 100 at the start of the situation. At the moment this is shaping up to be more of a stella polaris situation where we recover all the sov, rather than a major disaster.

We now know that the rebellion disband was coordinated with the DRF deployment, and there is a question as to whether the deployment was because of the disband. If so, it is uncertain as to whether they will pursue a campaign against systems which have sov.

Rebellion alliance disbanded; Fountain roadtrip over

14:12:37 Combat Your Tyrfing hits Serpentis Fleet Outpost, doing 6749.2 damage.

-Combat operations in Fountain

In reverse order

We spent about a week grinding structures in fountain. With the complete lack of organized resistance the region could have been taken by one guy in a bomber, but supercarriers made it faster.


Small numbers


Over the last few weeks the eastern front has been heating up, with several significant DRF incursions into geminate. These were turned back by eastern NC alliances including friendly russians Rebellion and Stella Polaris. In the last week DRF supercapitals have been reported moving to lowsec near geminate and the fountain deployment was cancelled to deal with the russian menace.

One hour before the time of writing the other shoe dropped. What I'm hearing is that an executor-director level spy disbanded Rebellion alliance just before downtime, dropping soverignty in two Geminate constellations including six station systems. Immediately following this large numbers of DRF supercapitals were reported in geminate.

It looks like things just got real. The first response fleets are moving out now, and I'm rushing to get alts and assets into position.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Fresh off the presses: PL in Delve

Minutes ago PL was spotted moving a massive supercapital fleet to delve. This is of great interest to me as so far nobody has actually attacked delve. My understanding is that even NC leadership aren't aware who, if anybody, is planning to take it. AAA+co have only moved on querious and pure blind, and DC (along with NC superfriends ^^) have not moved beyond fountain.

Do PL plan to take the region, or are they just there for goodfites when somebody else does? Is this a revenge campaign against IT, who are rumored to have stiffed them on the pure blind contract?

The drama!

FAKE EDIT:

(1:40:08 PM) the_mittani: two scenarios for pl in delve
(1:40:24 PM) the_mittani: most likely: punishment for molle not paying them according to contract
(1:40:37 PM) the_mittani: he was 50b overdue last time i checked
(1:40:53 PM) the_mittani: scenario two: molle has shelled out even more to have pl defend delve for him. unlikely, but possible
(1:41:50 PM) ***********: three: they are there to hotdrop idiots using undermanned fleets reinforcing delve
(1:42:36 PM) the_mittani: put one and three together and you have a pl in npc delve situation

More searches which brought people to this blog

"eve fail fits"

Kugutsumen has a perma-pinned topic where people may post killmails of epic fail. At the time of writing it contains 36 pages of hilarity.


"who write eve fail"

This is TOP SECRET INFORMATION. Actually I'm just not looking for name recognition so I don't use my main character's name and cut it out of screenshots. It would be easy to discover if you put your mind to it, but if you need to contact me without using comments you can also just use the about/contact link at upper right.


"warp Stabbed Supercarrier eve"

Supercarriers and titans are immune to disruptors and scramblers. They are vulnerable only to bubbles and infinite points, neither of which are affected by warp core stabilizers. Don't fit them, or you WILL end up in the failfits topic above.


"reason to fly hel supercarrier"

Because you can't fly anything else. Hel is the worst supercarrier, with the possible exception of the revenant.

Alternatively, because they're awesome looking.


"insurance payout for a wyvern supercarrier"

About a billion isk.

Titans and supercarriers used to receive the same default insurance proportion as other ships, which at least in the case of titans amounted to serious isk. The payout for supercapitals was reduced significantly around may of 2010 and now supercarriers give about a billion, titans even less.


"eve lowest warp distance"

150 km"eve highest dps titan"

This is a very interesting question, requiring a long form answer. Titan fittings are something of a black art, and fitting one for damage is a balancing act. When it comes to the highest DPS there are two contenders, the ragnarok and the leviathan. Because they are shield tanked they may fit damage mods in the lows instead of tank, although they sacrifice cap recharge and some tank (from power diagnostic systems) when using damage mods.

In terms of raw DPS, fitting lev and rag with short-range weapons (2500mm autocannons, citadel torpedo launchers) and a doomsday, and not counting smartbombs, the rag does 15970 DPS and the lev comes out just ahead at 16659. There are critical differences here, however, in terms of how the damage is dealt.

The autocannon ragnarok has a range of only 20+32 km. It does good damage, but this range is far too short for a capital fight, or even a pos bash. The leviathan has a range of 60 km, which may be adequate in many situations. Conversely, while the leviathan has missiles and is essentially completely useless against subcapitals, the ragnarok has guns and is able to hit subcapitals if their angular velocity is low enough. There is a video from the h-w siege in which our favorite titan pilot demonstrates the awesomeness of the ragnarok's (artillery) volley damage against battleships.

A second consideration is cycle time. During high lag situations, which many capital fights are, all weapons have the same cycle time due to extreme lag. In this case volley damage is much more important than raw DPS. Capital autocannons and torpedos have a cycle time of about 8 seconds, while artillery and cruise missiles are closer to 20 and do twice the volley damage. In this case the ragnarok does 10600 DPS and 116k volley, while the leviathan does 11,100 DPS and 118k volley, again coming out slightly ahead (and having a much longer range than CR artillery ammo).

The leviathan wins in both cases and I am forced to concede it to be the highest DPS titan and an awesome damage dealer against capital targets. Watch that video, though, and ask yourself if you'd rather have the highest EFT DPS or be able to volley battleships from a hundred kilometers.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Blueprint copying status update

A whie ago I got some capital BPO to make isk by copying, and made a post about it. A little later I got a nyx BPO, back when copies were trading at upward of 3 billion isk each. Later I predicted that nyx BPC prices would continue to fall because of oversupply and market saturation. They have, currently trading at around 1.3 billion -- actually lower than aeon BPC, which have a cheaper BPO. I expect them to continue to fall.

On the other hand, I recently sold my first copy. It might not have earned 3 billion like it would have a year ago, but pulling 1.28 billion out of thin air is still a nice feeling.


Another interesting event recently has been an extremely odd spike in the price of of carrier BPC, trading as high as 170% above their traditional value of around 50 million. It's normalizing at this point, but for a while archon BPC were going for 133 million, almost a third the mineral cost of the ship's hull. Currently they're down to 84 million, but I did get to sell one at 120 while the prices were heading upward.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Dear scrubs

Please get out of the way of our cyno ships. It does not end well for you.


Drone damage notifications

You might have noticed that they exist now.

They make flying a supercarrier more fun.


30 seconds of damage

Sunday, February 6, 2011

One year

No, not the blog. One year in my corp.

Previously I have made emo posts about how every corp and alliance I join fail cascades within one year. Except for one, which joined the enemy instead. To date my curse has claimed three corporations and caused a forth to join the enemy, killed two 0.0 alliances (nearly three), and claimed two regions.

As of today I've been in the same corp and alliance for just over one year, and my corporation, alliance and coalition are in the best state they ever have been. Curse broken.

EDIT: Four months later my corp died, the coalition died, and my alliance lost its space. Welp.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Fountain supercarrier roadtrip

Our glorious leaders have arranged a weekend volunteer roadtrip to fountain to help grind structures. Naturally I lept at the chance, having never invaded the southwest before. With recent news that IT is disbanding, perhaps we'll even get to stay on for delve.

We did a couple of cyno trains trains today. Still being on jump clone cooldown I couldn't get into my HG slave clone so I plugged in some LG slaves, a CC3 and a ZET500 before we left -- 60% as good as top-end implants for a quarter the price. It gives my nyx a 9 instead of an 11 doomsday tank - without fleet bonuses and overheating - but I'm not too worried.

Apparently for some ~strange reason~ people expect supercapital pilots to have jump drive calibration 5 (I'm working on it) and as a result I was left behind. I did my own cynos instead, and on the second-to-last jump came across a small gang of blue bombers hitting an offline medium tower. I offered to help, and there were many bffs and lols.


BFF <3

At present there are 6 stations and 14 Ihubs reinforced in fountain. I anticipate a long grind over the next few days.

Friday, February 4, 2011

Nyx gank

We formed a small cap/super gang this morning to rep a tower, carriers in system and supers on standby in case PL tried something. I was in a carrier, having moved the nyx to my holding alt earlier so I could carebear on my main.


Then goons got a nyx tackled in deklein. We jumped in and killed it.

...sort of anticlimactic, but there's not much to tell.


See above

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

IT pets vs NC: Goodtimes in KQK

Jabber ping with CAPITAL LETTERS went out for supers. I logged in just as PL hotdropped our capital fleet with subcaps.

Jumping to KQK I found myself 100 km off a ball of red ships surrounding a blue ragnarok,which was in high shields. I put fighters on primaries.

Many of our ships were inside a pos, and the FC elected to change the password in order to bump people out and get them into the fight. A lot of people were bounced in the wrong direction, but it saved everyone from having to slowboat and consensus in fleet chat was that this was a good move overall.

The rag's shields were dropping at a fair rate and PL jumped in a few close-range dreads. Carriers were ordered to triage green and put reps on the titan. I eventually managed to warp at 50 to a fleet member on the other side of the rag, which put me in rep range.

The rag's shields stabilized at 25% around this time and started pulling back, and the hostiles disengaged. Was good fight; they went all in and shot nothing but the titan, but if they had gone after some caps or subcaps the killboard wouldn't be nearly so one-sided.


Toward the end of the fight

Killboard -- 25 billion killed for 0.1 lost