DRF vs NC: Brief geminate update

In the aftermath of the DRF reinforcing everything in geminate we lost two outposts, out of 7-ish which were reinforced. This isn't as bad as I had expected, so maybe they aren't quite confident to use their supers in EU/US time routinely. As mentioned in my previous post one had a horrible timer and was a foregone conclusion, and I guess they picked up one of the 6 which came out during euro and US time. At the moment the DRF have 4 outposts in geminate, which are all reinforced constantly what with :time zone war: and shit. At the moment there are also like 18 hostile towers reinforced in geminate, probably mostly technetium moons since there's no other reason there would be so many. As I recall from the atlas invasion there are like 12 or 16 in the region, which should come out around 50 billion isk per month.

CSM 6 results: Suck it, bitches

So the CSM results are out, and they are delicious. This year 0.0 has decided to organize for the purpose of being represented in the CSM, which has caused a diverse selection of nobodies on the forums to cry and whine about the vast nullsec conspiracy to control the CSM.

Well you're goddam right we're going to control the CSM if we feel like it. The ability to organize people is what wins elections, and we're better at it than you.

So suck it.

With the election over and the tears harvested, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

(the results are 7 nullsec players and 2 others, by the way)

DRF vs NC: Another superfight that it looks like we lost

Apparently while we weren't watching the DRF reinforced everything in geminate, something like 8 outposts. Today I was reading a goddamn book for the first time in forever (not bitter, grumble) and ignoring subcapital fleet messages when I missed a supers log in message and the first thing I heard was superfite now.

This was in late US time in our staging system, and apparently it went badly for us. Numbers were even in local but what I hear is that our supers were dying and theirs weren't, same as last time. I managed to load system, but didn't even get to warp in before our supers were ordered to log off. I'm hearing that we lost a titan and at least one supercarrier, but there may well have been more before I got on comms.

Talk about troubling. If their super blob can now winbutton in frick'n US time, the strategic situation starts to look grim. Structure app says half our outposts are coming out of reinforced in euro time, half in US and some retard timed one outpost for downtime, so we're almost certain to lose that one and we're really going to have to get the blob motivated to save the others.

I have to admit that I've been neglecting the game a bit -- a touch of bittervet syndrome after the last three times I logged in were all 4+ hour supercapital superlag garbage. I think I'll move a carebear alt or two out here and get in on some subcapital fleets. I've been wanting to try out this shield maelstrom thing, and one of my alts is like 8 days from hictors, which could be interesting. Taking a thousand-dollar supercarrier into laggy bullshit is stressful, even if they are disposable.

EDIT: No super losses are showing, but the finally tally is 1 erebus and 1 aeon lost.

Killboard

Blueprint copying update

Followers may recall I own some capital blueprints, which I make copies of to sell.

A year ago supercarrier blueprints were where it was at, but now it looks like we've reached something of a denouement in that market as they've all fallen below a billion isk (their pre-dominion value) except for the wyvern. A year ago nyx BPC were going for 3.3 billion; today they're 790 million. Interestingly the wyvern is the most expensive supercarrier BPC, with an MMPB (millions of isk per month per billion isk invested) of 27; I expect this is because with nyx and aeon being the only supercarriers actually worth flying few people invested in wyvern BPO, while a lot of people are caldari specced.

In the rest of the BPC market pretty much the only thing worth investing in are archon and thanatos blueprints (currently 40 MMPB), whose BPC have been fairly consistently worth more than chimera and nidhoggur BPC (currently 23 MMPB). The only other sub-supercapital with more than 25 MMPB is the orca, and that won't last.

If you have the cash titans are looking pretty good, and demand actually looks to have increased a bit. Leviathan BPC are over 3 billion for the first time, like, ever, and the other three are sitting at 8-10 billion, which is 22-27 MMPB. Avatar and erebus are probably the best investment opportunities; ragnaroks die more, which in theory could increase demand but more likely will make people stop flying them, while the avatar has the highest EHP and erebi are necessary for armor bonuses.

DRF vs NC: Another biggest supercap fight ever, part 2

After downtime everybody rushed to log in, and both sides loaded at the same time. We warped to the station immediately, lit cyno there and jumped in some more caps. A single hostile nyx warped to the station and we killed it.

The system was laggy and horribly bugged. Joining fleet lagged clients out and made outstanding calls never go down ever again.

After a while the node just sort of stopped. I'm used to lag, even extreme lag. I was in uemon when we lost all those titans; I was in LXQ when local broke 3000. This lag was much worse.

Supers were eventually ordered to recall drones and warp to friendly towers, and eventually we jumped out. This left system control in the hands of the russians while we had a bunch of supers blackscreened or logged out and not disappearing from space. At the time of posting we have lost at least 3 supercarriers. At this point we know the hostiles will retake and rep the station, so we're back to where we started.

There were two problems today. The first was engaging hostile supers on their tower. The second was leaving system and letting our supers get killed.

Sorry. There were 99 problems today, and 97 were CCP. The first four of CCP's problems are as follows:

1. Not letting the node die when it was broken.
2. Joining fleets in a laggy system makes clients stop working.
3. Ships do not disappear after 15 minutes after logging off. Or ever. Sometimes even in non-laggy systems.
4. I'm going to throw botting in here for the heck of it.

Confirmed dead:

Blue:

tish magev aeon
xan fenix nyx
lord dooks aeon
??? ???

Red:

drakul pensignton nyx

Superenemies

DRF vs NC: Another biggest supercap fight ever, part 1

This is getting annoyingly routine.

Today the o2o station came out of its' last reinforced timer during russian prime. If we can take the station and anchor a TCU we take the system.

We formed about 70 supers and got in system about 2.5 hours before the outpost came out. Local was about 1100, with reported 300 reds, when reds jumped in another 600+, including probably over 100 supercapitals. Around 3 hours before downtime we decided to engage, warped on grid and it was on.

The fight was on a hostile tower. Apparently they didn't blackscreen enough, and we lost an erebus to the doomsday volley. We kept with it, but they had more numbers than us and hostile titans could re-enter shield when they were primaried. Targets eventually did go down, oh-so-slowly, and the final tally was 7 blue titans lost for 4 red titans and 2 nyx killed. Part 2 is expected to happen after downtime.

At some point during the fight

Confirmed dead:

Blue:

bodynak erebus
countrywv erebus
daos leghki erebus
fuzion erebus
sammaster ragnarok
salvoxia ragnarok
lord deighton leviathan

Hostile:

miss shifty avatar
james kavourarias erebus
dimple knotwise erebus
melony814 erebus

drakul pensignton nyx
intensive nyx

killboard - isk ratio is broeken

EDIT:
(04:14:15 AM) rawr-shva-altrinsic: Dimple, James, Wallace2004, lipix were all there
(04:14:39 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: sala said they got new ones
(04:14:43 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: didnt get reimbursed

macro empire 4 ever!

Superfriends

Problem?

:trollface:

DRF vs NC: Early morning killmails

After slaughtering the DRF supers yesterday, we formed up this morning to kill the o2o ihub. Hostiles used their typical strategy of bringing triage carriers, but the tides have turned and today it was us that dropped supers on them. Thanks to ECM burst I got on about 55 killmails in 10 minutes, including krutoj in a triage carrier.

Enemy capitals as we arrived on grid

Killboard - 81 billion killed, 23 lost

After this was done we received information that the DRF had scheduled an evacuation op to lowsec. I'm not sure if they're giving up, or just getting out of the system because they can't hold it any more. In either case we killed the o2o ihub and now just need to take the station before we can get the systen back. It comes out of reinforced in late US time two days from now.

DRF vs NC: 20+ DRF supers down in o2o reverse uemon

Including at least 8 titans. But first, a general update.

After we lost all those supers in uemon hostiles were using their own super fleet with impunity while we could only use subcaps. As you might imagine, this resulted in not getting a lot done. There were a lot of fights, many of which we lost isk-wise because hostiles could use triage carriers.

Hostiles hold station systems o2o and and UG-, which have been reinforced constantly since the DRF took them over a month ago. The effort to retake them has been hindered by several factors -- enemy supers, the large number of timers involved in taking space under dominion, and some sort of downtime bug which messes with timers and makes op scheduling hard.

Anyway, after a full month of accomplishing fuck all word went out to superfriends that our glorious leaders had hatched a plan to get our supers back into the fight and get revenge for uemon. Razor subcapitals also moved up from sendaya to help with the planned purge (rzr supers were already in gem).

On tuesday we messed up a sov transfer in vale. DRF made a play for the system and failed.

Wednesday nothing happened. We got in 020 with about 80 supers and 800 other blues and put the ihub into armor reinforced. DRF went to ug- with 80 supers and reportedly support numbers similar to ours. We did the mexican standoff thing for a couple hours and they went home.

After redeyeing that op, this morning I slept through three alarms and missed the formup. I woke up to super fight messages on jabber and got in fleet. Lag was being peculiar, and despite loading grid, launching bombers and activating modules I couldn't lock anything. After a few relogs targets started working and I got on the last few supercarrier kills.

Apparently what happened is that they were tricked into thinking we were jumping out, jumped in trying to catch stragglers and ended up in the middle of our super fleet and surrounded by dictors. After losing a few titans without killing any of our supers they switched damage to dictors and tried to get out. We apparently didn't lose any supers at that time, though several did have to get off the field.

Word is that Raiden. ordered their supers to jump out before the russians did, which I think is a particularly delicious note. I sort of have it out for them, because they have quite a sizable ego without any deeds to back it up and because they have it out for the NC. Right after uemon their leader-or-whatever announced that they would destroy the NC through a war of attrition, and I'm eager to mock their terribleness whenever they get around to actually fighting.

Yaay the destroyer was the FC for this op. I think this brings him up to 15-ish titan and at least 20 supercarrier kills in the last 2-1/2 months.

EDIT: The killboard is showing 7 titan and 13 supercarrier kills, but two titans and one supercarrier are reported confirmed dead without generating killmails. This isn't too surprising since there were three killmails that were never generated after the uemon fight as well. I'm starting to suspect there's a bug with supercap killmails.

EDIT: One NC titan died well after the fight was finished. The pilot had been unable to relog earlier after multiple attempts and the titan refused to disappear from space. Fortunately it was vuk lau's alt and he didn't want that already being replaced titan anyway technetium technetium technetium.

MORE EDIT: The NC titan that died apparently respawned after downtime and was boarded by a red.

Supars

Killboard -- will take time to sync

Probably also dead:
Silus Yarmon (Avatar)
Captain Chomp (Erebus)
Spartanetz (Nyx)

Learning more in five hours than five years

Hark! For this is the first time I have made a non-eve post. Be grateful, ye masses, for I am a merciful god.

Today I learned how to multiply on a processor which is only capable of addition.

It turns out there's a trick, which is that multiplying binary numbers can be accomplished with a series of operations which does not at any point include multiplication. Check if one number ends in 1, add the second number to the result if so, drop the rightmost digit from the first number, move the second number one place to the left, and repeat until you run out of digits.

Homegrown assembly code, how adorable

In this example we multiply 27 and 32, ending up with 360 hex in register R7, which is 864 in real numbers. The loop takes 176 processor cycles.

You'd think a standard education would include maybe one month in which each day the basics of a different useful skill are taught. I'm pretty sure that month would be more useful than the remainder of primary and secondary education combined.

Screenshot sunday: Traffic control

Click

Or at least a busy scene. I think this was from the kalevala campaign.

CSM advocacy, mostly

Mittens' CSM thread is an interesting read. Especially the first six-ish pages, in which some anti-mittens posters made a variety of criticisms which really made me think. For example, one accuses mittens of lying all the time. Another accuses him of being a prolific scammer (and when mittens says that while he is fully in favor of scamming, he does not do it because he doesn't need the money, accuses him of scamming with an alt). Others say that he is in favor of the technetium situation, and that he wants a supercapital buff. It reveals a really fascinating divide between people who know anything about mittens and/or 0.0, and some sort of low information demographic who I assume are npc-sov dwellers.

Also it prompts me to give a meaningless endorsement to a CSM candidate, which I never thought I would do had I been asked yesterday. Somebody made a post that prompted me to look at the election forum thing. Grumble.

Back on topic.

Anybody who has been following mittens for a length of time can tell you the accusations listed are patently ridiculous. Not because mittens isn't a sadistic, metagaming bastard, which he is, but because he doesn't operate the way they describe. Of course mittens lies. He also bluffs, spins and trolls. But he knows when to lie, and when to spin, and he usually does it with a goal in mind. By examining his history we can see that his strategy has been to be honest when seriousposting, building a reputation for truth and accuracy, and then using that reputation to give immense weight to his words when he needs to use spin or trolling to manipulate morale or public opinion.

(he also does a lot of less purposeful trolling just for luls; forum warriors know what is a seriouspost and what is not)

I happen to have a perfect example of this on hand. I started following mittens back during delve war 2 (early 2009 IIRC) toward the end of the war, when bob (kenzoku) was trying to gain and keep a foothold in the east of their former territory. Mittens was posting daily war updates in goon forums to keep the rabble up to date. The 4/14 update was rather negative, and hostiles stole it to use as forum porn. Mittens noticed this (4/20), and proceeded to post it and all subsequent updates on CAOD.

(notice the politics here -- now the hostiles, whose alliance culture provided them little information as to the progress of the war, are getting accurate information from the enemy. This by itself is a cultural victory and hurts enemy morale, and when goons achieve something mittens can add trolling to the mix to further undermine the enemy's faith in their leadership)

I happened to save all those updates in a text document. They show mittens being honest (4/14 and most other updates), spinning hard and causing a massive turnabout in the war (5/21), trolling at the optimal time to undermine enemy leadership (6/5, 6/6) and undoubtedly lying at some point that I will never know about. The text file is here; it's an interesting read, and invaluable for anyone wondering about how mittens rolls. Copy-paste it somewhere with line wrap.

As well, if you haven't read his TTH articles you should probably just unsubscribe now, because you have already lost at eve; they are the seminal works about how successful corporations and alliances are made, how wars are won and lost, how and why failure cascades happen, and more.


The above I am providing as supporting evidence for my conclusion, which is this: Mittens is an astonishingly talented politician. Of all the people in eve he is the one who best understands how organizations are made, how they work, and how to galvanize them to achieve goals. He knows how to make things happen, and not just internally in the CSM.

His stated goal is to transform the CSM into an organization which can actually get things done, then use it to get action on the feature backlog -- those features which are broken or half implemented, or which were promised and then abandoned.

If that were to happen, it would make the game better. Mittens is our absolute best chance of pulling it off, and this is why he needs to be the CSM chair.

Supercarrier vs titan

A lot of people get here via that search and it's time for an answer. I've written about supercarrier vs titan before, but that was in the context of deciding which to get. This post is a more general comparison.

In many ways, supercarriers and titans are pretty similar. They have almost the same EHP (33-57 million) and in theory do about the same DPS (8000-11000). The major differences are price, utility and how they do their damage.

Price:

Supercarriers, properly fitted, cost about 16 to 24 billion depending on hull price and on whether they are an armor or a shield tank. Armor resist mods cost more, and armor tanks use a slave set while shield tanks don't have equivalent implants.

Titans start around 50 billion (maybe as low as 42 if you get a really good deal), or 65 on the open market. The fittings cost about the same, though shield tankers often spring for officer invunerability fields, which come in 4, 8 and 18 billion isk variations, and titan pilots often use officer cap recharge mods. One figures a minimum price of about 56 billion, with a range about 2.5-4x as much as a supercarrier.

Utility:

A big deal has been made of the fact that SC do more things than titans. They kill capitals, they kill subcapitals, they rep, they tackle, they neut. Reps are probably the biggest deal -- a supercarrier can permarun 2 capital remote reps with minimal refitting or under lag, making supercarrier blobs annoyingly resiliant under some conditions.

In a fight titans only do damage. They can also titan bridge, which is very important but not useful in a fight.

Damage:

Titans and supercarriers do about the same DPS, but titans have several advantages.

1. Moar damage. Although the erebus and avatar have fairly anemic damage for supercapitals, the leviathan and ragnarok both do more than a nyx (with a standard fit). With a close-range fit the lev and rag do 50-60% more, which is sort of a lot.
2. Doomsday. With three million alpha, put enough titans in one place and you can kill a supercapital in 30 seconds. Doomsday also volleys dreads, carriers and subcapitals.
3. Lag resistance. Titans' guns and doomsday devices work like any other activated module, and can be cycled in lag. In my tests during extreme lag fighter bombers had to be recalled and re-engaged before they would fire again, which takes twice as long as cycling a gun.
4. Subcapitals. To kill subcapitals supercarriers have to use fighters, which are slow, basically useless at hitting anything smaller than a battleship (normal drones can be used for sub-battleships, but come on) and decrease EFT DPS by 75%. Certainly supercarriers can seriously ruin the day of an incautious subcapital fleet, but in practice they aren't very effective against subcapitals. Titans, on the other hand, can kill any subcapital with the doomsday, which never misses (unless the target warps, so choose wisely). Titan guns are also effective against subcapitals with low angular velocity. You might ask yourself why any subcapital would be stationary with titans on grid, but in my experience sorting overview by angular velocity with a decent hostile fleet on grid will always show a few with low angular velocity -- either they aren't moving, are moving mostly toward or away from you, or are distant enough that angular velocity is low. A good hit by an avatar or erebus does about 30k damage to a subcapital, rag up to 105k, while levi uses missiles and is ineffective against subcaps. Even without lag and assuming the target doesn't warp off fighters take quite a while to do that sort of damage.

Supercarriers do have one advantage, which is that they do full EFT damage to pos mods and sov structures, neither of which titans can doomsday. They're great for defanging towers or shooting sov structures, though useless for reinforcing towers.

Short version, titans are better in a fight. Maybe not enough to really justify spending 2-3x as much as on a supercarrier, but if you've got the isk....

A list of macros in tenal

Two blue (with the same owner) and seven neutral. You might notice that 2 of the neutrals are offline; this screenshot was taken shortly after the patch today and I expect their owners hadn't gotten around to updating yet. I could wait for them to do so and get online, but I just finished checking the last of the systems with highly suspicious NPC kill patterns and feel like making a poast. I've reported the two blue macros to leadership, so we'll see what happens to them. I'll petition all of them after another day or so of watching their uptime, report what happens and then mock CCP when what happens is nothing.

Titan and hel keeled in counter-hotdrop

Somebody poked jabber for carriers and supers tonight. We logged in, and we waited. And waited. And waited.

Then we jumped in and landed on a small hostile fleet on a blue jump bridge pos, consisting of some battleships, a ragnarok, a hel and three or four dreads. Not sure who they were; I don't recognize the alliance name, and they were marked neutral so they probably weren't part of the DRF forces. Anyway, apparently the story is that we baited them with an aeon, got bubbles up when they jumped in and then brought in our own fleet. The bait aeon says he never got below 99% armor. EDIT: But it looks like they killed a chimera.

P'pew

EDIT: Youtube

It's always heartwarming to see blue jump effects light up a grid like that. Interesting video there, taken by somebody's cap transfer alt. This is the first time I've embedded a youtube video in anything, but enough videos are made of fights I take part in that I might have to make it a habit.

Titan

Hel

Killboard