DRF vs NC: Skirmishes

So far, the DRF have not made a serious push to take tribute. PL and possibly Tri (ncdot) have moved to venal, where naturally they are trying to take tech moons. The difference between now and january, is that now they can call on half the galaxy for support whenever we outnumber them.

There have been some fights, but nothing major.

Today we were trying to take down a hostile tower a blue system. It was cyno jammed, and we had capitals and supers in system and they didn't, but we were outnumbered about 3 to 1. They jumped in and our subcapitals, carriers, and supercapitals with the exception of nyxes fought them on the gate. Nyxes were stationed on the cyno jammer to rep it when the hostiles tried to take it down, and indeed one of their fleets broke off and engaged the jammer.

It dropped very slowly as our subcapitals were killed off, and as it got close to being incapped the FC ordered supercapitals to log off by stages, first a titan that he thought would be primaried when the hostiles came in, then the rest of the titans a few minutes later, then the supercarriers. In what I am convinced was half luck, half brilliance and half lag, for a total of 100% awesome and 50% not awesome but it worked out for us so that's okay, this plan actually worked, and when the jammer went down and the hostiles dropped 150 supercapitals on us, they got no supercap kills; though a wyvern had been lost to subcapitals earlier.

It would have been really spectacular if I didn't have a good idea how much luck was involved, but it was still pretty impressive.

EDIT: MM KB still broken, link removed.

DRF vs NC: CSAA save

DRF reinforced a RAGE CSAA and it came out this morning. Fortunately rage hasn't been disbanded recently, so the system's strategic index was full up and there was a cyno jammer keeping the hostile super fleet out, while we could bring in capitals via jump bridges. The fighting started before downtime and I got in fleet immediately after.

Getting in system was fun. I came through the bridge 25 km from the pos shield just as about 170 hostiles landed next to me. Unfortunately the hostile FC wasn't a complete retard, and instead of trying to take down my nyx popped two carriers that were slowboating toward the shield first. They did shoot me for a while and I got down to about 10% shield (in an armor tank) before they switched targets. A third blue carrier was pulled back from structure as the rest of our caps moved outside the pos shield and got the spider tank going.

In total we lost the two carriers, and a bunch of battleships apparently mostly before downtime. After the third carrier was saved we pretty much owned everything we could tackle. Most of the fighting was on a stargate as we bubbled a hostile fleet that jumped in, and the final score looks to be about 3:2 in our favor plus we saved the CSAA.

There are another 2 CSAA in reinforced, which we would have to screw up to not save. A couple of our outposts are also in shield reinforced, coming out in euro/US time minutes from the CSAA. We might let the outposts go to armor RF to save the CSAA.

EDIT: It looks like I got on 66 kills today. Thank you, ECM burst!

An "oh shit" moment


But I got better

Killboard -- 34b killed for 20 lost

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.

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

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

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!

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)

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

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....

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.

Killmail

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.

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

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.

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

Killmail

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

PL vs NC: Nyx down in supercapital skirmish

Today we formed up caps to reinforce some towers in venal. We didn't have a support fleet, and after half an hour of forming we only had only 70 capitals in fleet. A corpmate commented on this, and I speculated that our numbers would increase quickly if we got a fight.

After we reinforced the first tower PL cynoed in their standard abaddon fleet and warped it to some caps that were near the shield. We started melting them with fighters as they slowly took down a couple of dreads. Then they cynoed in a bunch of supercarriers.

Red supers jumping in as we kill abaddons

Red supers warped to the edge of the pos shield, we went siege green and I crashed again. This is the second cap fight in a row that has happened, and both times were when I was changing overview settings. I detect a pattern.

Anyhow, we started with 70 in fleet and one titan. By the time I logged back in we had 256 in fleet, 10 titans and PL were inside pos shields. It looks like we lost 6 dreads and 2 carriers, and killed a few BS and a shitfit nyx.

Killboard -- 37 billion killed, 14 lost

EDIT: All cap kills are showing on both sides. Should be 23 killed, 14 lost.

Yet another PL titan down

Killmail

It happened at 1 a.m. local so I wasn't involved personally, but it is surely worth mentioning; this is the 8th titan PL have lost in combat in the last nine days. The NC are also continuing the venal purge, and currently 23 PL towers are reinforced and due to come out over the course of 14 hours on saturday.

Apparently molle has announced a grand op today to attack cloud ring in order to take pressure off their pets in fountain. This could become interesting.

EDIT: It looks like this was an actual fight and we lost about 34 capitals though no supers. This should make the fight nearly even by isk, but I would take a titan kill over an equivalent number of capitals for insurance/replacement/morale reasons.

PL vs NC: Venal purge

Combat Your Quad 3500mm Siege Artillery I perfectly strikes ... wrecking for 56467.8 damage.

My post about who is winning in venal probably should have been posted a little earlier, because it sure became outdated in a hurry. After killing their titans we started one of our trademark region purges of venal. As one FC put it, "I'm [bleep]ing sick and tired of [bleep]ing around with [bleep]ing PL and their [bleep]ing towers."

Goons, angered that PL broke The Bropact, along with test, have been essential for providing US time coverage, while friendly russians stella polaris and rebellion have provided cover in russian time. We've killed a couple of dozen towers, which has been boring since PL can't compete with our ~massive blob~.

Recent tower kills

As a high point, we did get to drop supercarriers on some PL triage carriers and kill shadoo, who is an FC or leader or something.

Hotdrop

I also, for the first time ever, encountered an unstronted pos during this operation. Thanks PL.

PL looses another titan

I had just gotten home when a jabber ping for supers went out. I logged in, jumped to h-pa... and the PL titan we had tackled was already dead. Oh well.

Killmail

On the way home PL bridged their subcaps on our subcap return fleet on a gate (again) and we jumped all our capitals in (again). Unfortunately they deagressed and jumped out rather than dropping supers, but I got a nice screenshot out of it (plus a phreeze killmail).

Always remember rule 37