Now, I figure many people just want to see the video, so here's a few disclaimers about it first:
1. This was my first time using OBS on this computer. I had my PTT button set for desktop audio, not my computer's audio. This means you get to hear the wonderful sound of me typing and speaking, but not the chat from the rest of the fleet.
2. Comms are not always kept to Uni's PG standard. I did my best, but there were some...frustrations that I didn't catch in time. Children be warned, mute the video.
3. At a couple points, I mention OpFor stole our second defense fleet--this was inaccurate. See below for further details.
4. The recording is incomplete, as I was podded out before the fight ended.
If anyone has a more complete recording, you are, of course, welcome to post it.
Without further ado:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hejrpf3S8Fk
So, now to the actual analysis.
First off, as you've probably heard, the primary defense fleet was stolen by OpFor. However, through the donations of many WHC members and some reserves that were not stolen, we were able to build a secondary defense fleet. This was largely SBC, though we had a number of Feroxes ready. SBC certainly wouldn't be ideal into the enemy composition, as they would just kite us out, but it at least gave us something. The first mistake I made was assuming that all the fits would be pretty standard. Many of the Command Ships, for some reason, didn't have a prop mod fit. I'm not sure why (I'm not aware of any propless Command Ships in Uni's doctrines), but I should've confirmed the fits, and I didn't. Otherwise, ship handouts went mostly fine. Once everyone in the fleet had ships, I dumped the remaining fits in the general hangar. The idea was that people could reship (or if we were lucky, new people joining the defense) by themselves. Now, we know OpFor had spies in Uni, so they could've stolen said ships. So putting them there was probably a mistake. I didn't want to waste a pilot to sit docked handing out ships though. Maybe I could've had someone stuck out of the hole ready to contract ships over? That probably would've been the safest option. However, a random manager saw the ships in the general hangar, and for some reason decided to ignore the decision and plans of SFC and the CCs, and instructed someone to eject these ships. As such, we had no doctrine reships available for the rest of the fight.
Second, we had no bookmarks on grid. I'm not sure if none ever existed, or I couldn't get in touch with the right people to gain access to them. We require a bookmark grid for blue structures, I'm not sure why we don't require the same for Uni structures.
Third, Caps are strong. Like, really strong. I'm sure many of you know this intellectually, I know I did, but I wasn't really thinking about it. This was, after all, my first time FC'ing with friendly caps. I ran the fleet as a 'okay I'm gonna run the subcaps as a normal fleet and hope the cap pilots know what they're doing.' I'd call this my biggest mistake in this fight, and it was made repeatedly. Their logi could not hold against HAW dreads, and their dps could not break a single FAX. Playing to these strengths would've made the fleet ultimately more successful.
For example, we took the fight on the hull timer for the Fortizar. Now Fortizars have a very large grid. This let the enemy easily kite outside the range of our caps. We had to choose whether to leave our caps behind and try to fight them, or let them sit out of range and attack the Fortizar. Had we, instead, forced them to roll the hole on Saturday, and then warped our defense fleet, with caps, to the new hole, we would've been in a much better situation. We could've easily popped and podded their rollers, at the very least, and potentially regained hole control to get additional pilots in.
I'm not gonna play-by-play the whole fight, though there are plenty of instances of me doing stupid things. There's countless instances of me using the wrong ammo, or making unclear calls. In my defense, I'd been on 12+ hours every day of the eviction and my brain was pretty jelly. I still wish I had done better. There are, however, a few moments I will talk about.
1. The early spy squad warping. When you know the enemy has spies, turn off freemove before you undock. Thank goodness no one actually died to that.
2. In general, I should've been picking off the command destroyers more. Booshes are annoying, and they're significantly less tanky than the cruisers. Also, generally, having everyone only lock the primary/secondary lets the enemy know who to rep. Had we all locked up and sent our drones at random targets, it would've created a small degree of confusion in that. When the enemy is multiboxing 4 accounts each, that can create an edge.
3. When we warped onto the Vargur--that was obvious bait. But if
4. When the can with our reships popped--once again, had we put the caps on it, they would've been in trouble. Like, this is the biggest repeat lesson when I look at this. Had we been moving our caps around, it would've easily created zones they could not mess around with. We could've (somewhat) protected the reships and had our reinforcements form up in a semblance of doctrine. I did eventually try to charge the caps in, too late, without sufficient support.
Thank you to everyone who came out, and I'm glad to have flown with you. I do wish I could've done better running it, and hopefully some of you can learn from this, for if you're ever running a similar fight (though, hopefully, we don't have to deal with a WHC eviction for a very long time).