[The Crazy 8's] T2 Armor Frigates - 2

[Budda Sereda]

As was planned ( https://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtop ... 87#p874987 ) we went 2nd time in a "Crazy 8's" formate.

Usually, I'm trying to be modest, but today I can say with confidence and essentially repeat what many pilots told during the fleet:
It was a blast! Just a few reasons why I believe it was a very successful one:
- we came back to Stackmon in almost the same squad as we left (compare pilots from the 1st and the last kills)
- in just 11 of pilots we killed as many ships as we get in 50 men Spectre Fleet

Separately I want to mention the pilots skills: I rarely needed to explain the plan more than once, and it always worked perfectly. Good job guys, it was pleasure to fly with you!

Today, in order to reduce the amount of time I'm spending writing AAR, and because that was just TOO many events, I'm going to describe the most educational part of the fleet.
To make the report more complete, and also because of the nature of the fleet, I'm asking all participants: please do post what new did you learn during the fleet!.

We formed up with 2 logies, 1 EWar (Crucifier), 3 interceptors (1 pure scout/tackle, 2 DD), and 3 Comets, 2 Enyos, and 1 Catalyst. I started fleet in a Catalyst as my Enyo was sitting in Nennamaila and I was going to reship once we reach it. I lost my Catalyst just 2 jumps before Nen few guys joined/left us as we went through the fleet.

Spoiler

Arashi Shizukana
Arrek Lemmont
Breenie Shi
Budda Sereda
Gerrath Sabrinn
Jyo Cbip
Luca Goh
Lucius Septimus Severus
Redpoint Lu'Varro
Rider Isleman
Tsuwen Sun
Tyler Arnoux
Yuri Levnik
Z0X Ambrye

Here are all kills and loses from the fleet and below some details.

(02:20:27Z) Ostingele
Procurer +40.96m

(02:47:46Z) Vlillirier
Hurricane +107.35m
Catalyst -10.71m

(03:09:50Z) Nennamaila
Enyo -35.24m

(03:15:42Z) Akidagi
Maller +40.59m
Capsule +0.74m
Vexor +41.56m

(03:33:46Z) Oinasiken
Malediction -43.04m
Hawk +162.3m

(03:39:24Z) Nisuwa
Venture +0.31m

(03:48:56Z) Tama
Vexor +12.28m
Federation Navy Comet -32.14m
Capsule +0.01m
Capsule -0.01m

(04:04:40Z) Tama, Kedama, Uphallant
Federation Navy Comet +26.12m
Punisher +0.63m - this Punisher warped away from Zox, but 5-10 minutes later I got him in the same plex
Incursus +2.96m
Vexor +12.29m
Capsule +0.01m

(04:25:15Z) Rakapas
Federation Navy Comet +26.58m
Capsule +0.01m

(04:31:38Z) Pynekastoh
Cormorant +8.69m

(04:39:11Z) Nennamaila, Hikkoken
Federation Navy Comet -21.3m
Venture +0.39m

(04:47:00Z) Aldranette, Vlillirier
Corax +10.1m
Taranis -41.7m
Coercer +15.58m

(04:59:06Z) Moclinamaud
Malediction -42.95m

(05:06:11Z) Agoze
Nightmare +779.27m
Taranis -35.72m
Enyo -62.05m
Enyo -38.63m
Tristan -11.83m
Brutix Navy Issue +298.04m


Stats
ISK Destroyed: 1,586,745,853.12
ISK Lost: 375,322,518.64
ISK Delta: 1,211,423,334.48
Efficiency: 80.871%

Interesting observations

1. We only lost T2 frigates fighting 2 BNIs (with total OH DPS at 1600), during regular engagements they appeared quite tanky and unkillable together with logies.
2. Deacon and Thalia can easily keep alive an armor fit Enyo under gate guns (+Corax).

Lessons learned

1. If the number of pilots in a "Crazy 8's" format exceeds 8, comms often get messy. The start was especially hard, but I feel as it went through we did figure out how to run it successfully.
2. I believe what made it work well is that only a few pilots were playing a role of scouts/tackles and this reduced amount of comms to a reasonable level.
3. Expectedly, new and not very experienced pilots were lost quite a few times during fleet. Though Kudos to all newcomers and especially Redpoint Lu'Varro - he clearly was lost in the beginning and with very little support was able to figure out what to do and helped all of us to stay alive.
4. Be aware of the amount of your DPS: tackling BS (Hyperion) on the gate has little chance to succeed unless you can push him off the gate. Luckily, we only lost 1 Catalyst. Consider having a CD with MJFG for the fleet.
5. Align-out BEFORE engaging at the station or the gate, especially, if there are no logies nearby.
6. Be persistent and don't afraid to 3rd party: you can get juicy killmails and loot.

I will comment a bit more regarding the last item.

Nightmare and BNI.

We were already coming back home in almost a full squad trying to pick targets on the way back. Arashi was probably the quickest (or the most tired?) and was in Agoze while I was in Vlillirier repairing damage from the recent engagement while he called "Nightmare on D-scan", I was very skeptikal we can take it. In few minutes Arashi called: "let's upship", I thought: why not? and got the fleet together in Vey on Agoze gate... while we were slowly moving ( it was already 3 hours in active fighting ) Arashi reshipped and ... reported:
- 3 BNIs on D-scan as well
- they all are in the Warzone Complex.

I asked to get eyes and see if they are fighting or not, it appeared they were, so I called to jump and warp. My first intention was 3rd party, get on killmail, and run away before we lose something.

Those guys appeared 110 km from the beacon... Somebody asked if they are aligned towards something, and it appeared they were: I called "warp to the station and after - to the Warzone at 100km".

Together with Yuri, we slowboated (2000m/s are very slow if you need to go through the 100km)... and barely scratched that Nightmare to appear on the killmail. Luckily for us he killed 1 BNI, I locked 2 others and 1 of them was 15% in armor.... at this right moment the rest of the fleet landed so I called the wounded BNI as primary, a point on the 2nd one... and losing only Yuri and myself we get that BNI down.
Unfortunately, some guys needed to bounce and we did not have scram so the last one MJD-ed from the grid. Anyway, 2 juicy kills and around 200M loot from just this engagement. Which will provide extended SRP for the next "Crazy 8's" fleet (which will go into nul-sec). Thanks Arashi for being persistent!

Many thanks to all!

P.S. Please do share your feedback: https://goo.gl/forms/W6OTiwPMD2Lu1lmL2

[Yuri Levnik]

This fleet was a heap and a half of fun! Lots of action, lots of good fights and great kills. I really like the pace of fast frigates and flexible fleet movement - lots of action! Definitely looking foreward to the next one.

I got on the Nightmare kill because I agreed to watch the targets for Arashi while he upshipped. I saw the BNIs form up and warp to the Nightmare on the Warzone site so I called them out on comms and went in to see if they were fighting. They were, but were ~200mm off, so I burned in (Taranis is fast!) and got a few shots in before the Nightmare popped. The BNI that killed me web/scammed me down, but I think they were too busy killing me and Budda to watch local and Dscan so the rest of y'all caught 'em by surprise (;

I did drop a bookmark on them but it was a personal bookmark and I was in a pod so I wasn't sure how to use that to help y'all warp in. Thoughts?

[Budda Sereda]

I did drop a bookmark on them but it was a personal bookmark and I was in a pod so I wasn't sure how to use that to help y'all warp in. Thoughts?

AFAIK, in FW space, plexes are considered to be a dead space: you can't warp inside, you can warp to fleet-mate or wreck. The best you can do is to warp at range to the center of the plex. If you need to move to a certain location you need to warp from another place that is aligned to that location. For example, if ship "a" and "b" warp from planet 1 at 100km, they land at the same place. But if ship "c" would try to warp at 100 to either 'a' or 'b' from the planet 1 it would land together with all of them.
Even though I fly in low-sec quite a while, a really never validated that yet but I believe that is how it works.

[Yuri Levnik]

I honestly have no idea what the warp in rules are for the Warzone Extraction sites. We were outside the gate, so warping to a bookmark might have worked...

[Rider Isleman]

Very fun fleet Budda.

[Kora K]

I honestly have no idea what the warp in rules are for the Warzone Extraction sites. We were outside the gate, so warping to a bookmark might have worked...

It works like any deadspace pocket. You can't warp to fleetmate directly, you can't warp inside or to bookmarks, ...

[Arrek Lemmont]

This was a really good fleet.

What I could have done better:

• I forgot to retrieve drones once or twice.
• I was picking up a replacement drone when we lost the Catalyst. I should have told the FC he was temporarily down 1 logi.
• While I did drop bounce bookmarks when arriving at some gates, many times I didn't and I could have used one more than once.

It's true that our two tech-2 logi frigates were keeping assault frigates alive under gate guns. These frigates have the same excellent resist profile as a HAC or a Command Ship. But it's good that after aggressing our pilots were bouncing to a gate tac and back. Gate guns do a lot of damage.

I tried a few things and they worked well:

• Coreli A-Type small remote reppers are affordable and use less cap, as well as having all-round better performance. Cap performance of the Deacon was excellent.
• I finally found a good shortcut mapping for whispering to Logi channel on Mumble (2nd thumb-button on mouse). This made it easier to communicate fluidly with my fellow logi pilot.
• When waiting on a gate, I positioned logi on the far side of the gate, 2000 m from the zero-contour of the gate. If we needed to jump, we could do so quickly. If a target warped to the gate, we were in the best position to quickly burn out of neut/scram/web range. By the 'far side the gate', I mean away from other gates. Often a gate is in the inner part of the solar system, so you have to use your judgement. I was looking at the solar system map (old map, not new map) each time.
• During some of the fights, I maintained a manual orbit @ 20 km from the action, with the orbit transverse to the opposition.

[Luca Goh]

I’ll echo what others have said: this was quite a fun fleet. Obviously our ability to find a fair bit of content and the success we had in our engagements was a part of this, but I think the format lends itself to a good time: the increased flexibility, autonomy, responsibility, and communication of a smaller gang make things much more interactive and engaging for the average participant. It’s a fun format, and when you’re flying with skillful and knowledgeable pilots like we were fortunate to do then it really shines.

I agree both that comms were messy to problematic levels at times and that they got better as the fleet progressed, though I don’t really know what to attribute that improvement to. I think the main way that comms could be easily improved would be to a) avoid calling potential targets when we’re already clearly pursuing a different target and b) avoid calling targets that are small/uninteresting to engage for our fleet. To the second point, there were a lot of calls for solo frigates that would not be worthwhile or interesting for us to engage as a whole, including times when these got brought up while we were trying to pin down larger fair. I think the freedom of this kind of a format should encourage people to go after such smaller targets alone or in pairs; they can announce that they’re doing this for example rather than interrupting the whole fleet to see if ten of us will try to gather up and blob a frigate. So in this respect, I think flying in this “doctrine” requires a mentality shift away from trying to kill anything to trying to find larger ships/groups to engage. Just my humble opinion.

A Command Destroyer would definitely be a worthwhile addition to this doctrine as there were a few times where we could have avoided gate/station games that way. I wish I was closer than ~20 days to training into one.

On the point of individuals getting lost: I’ve also noticed that this can be a big difference between small gang roaming and more conventional, formal Uni fleets. No matter how clear calls are, the more dispersed and conversant nature of these such roams can definitely throw people. I’d encourage those who are new to this style of fleet to be more assertive in their movements and not always worry about waiting for commands. Perhaps more importantly, I’d also encourage people to speak up sooner with questions as to our location or if clarification is needed for anything. Oftentimes when I’m roaming with others and our course of action isn’t clear I’ll just ask as soon as I can find the space in comms to do so: information can easily get lost in the flurry so don’t be afraid to ask for clarification.

The fight with the BNI was great. I only wish that I could have closed a bit sooner to get in on the Nightmare. I’m still not quite certain how I lost my scram on the second BNI, except that I was having to do a lot of piloting and cap management in that fight. I should have been more vocal as to my circumstances; I made the assumption with multiple other pilots on grid that he was scrammed by someone else, which I shouldn’t have done.

On a personal note, I was glad to find it much more easy to adjust to having logi with us this time around. Last time I made a few mistakes because it was something I wasn't used to, and this time out I feel I handled it much better in terms of engaging on gates and gauging my life expectancy.

Awesome fleet! And great to break outside of the traditional Uni fleet mold. Hopefully we have somewhere near the same amount of success in null as we’ve had in low, but if not, we’ll learn from that too and be all the better for it.

Edit to add: for the record, we were engaging the BNIs/Nightmares outside of the Warzone site, not in dead space, so a bookmark would theoretically have worked. If Yuri was still on grid in his pod and willing to try to hang on we could have had people warp to him; otherwise I don't know if we could have used his personal bookmark. Even if he would have dropped it in the corp folder it would have likely taken some time to propagate. That's good quick thinking, but I'm not sure how we could have used it.

[Arrek Lemmont]

...

That's a fair analysis of the comms for the fleet and some of the pros and cons of doing things differently.

Edit to add: for the record, we were engaging the BNIs/Nightmares outside of the Warzone site, not in dead space, so a bookmark would theoretically have worked. If Yuri was still on grid in his pod and willing to try to hang on we could have had people warp to him; otherwise I don't know if we could have used his personal bookmark. Even if he would have dropped it in the corp folder it would have likely taken some time to propagate. That's good quick thinking, but I'm not sure how we could have used it.

Yes, the fight with the BNIs/Nightmares was at the warp-in part of the Warzone site, i.e., before its first acceleration gate. But that room is also deadspace.