[AAR] Solitude Caracal Clash

[Sturym]

Spoiler

Roam members (17) -
Amber Charante - Tackle
Budda Sereda - DD
Calder Ormand - DD/3IC/Anchor
Crimson Herring - DD/FC
Flechette - EWAR
Hillybilly Hinken - Scout 2
I Skip Legday - DD
Imad Gratia - DD
Lanik Solette - DD
Rheaha Preynar -
Space Warfare Development - DD/SB
Sturym - DD/FC
Trevor Grambling - DD
Tyler Arnoux - EWAR
Wokum - DD
Yuri Levnik - Scout1
lswjnek Oxkold - DD

Well tonight was my inaugural fleet, so admittedly things got off to a slow start. I was clinging to Yuri like a child in a storm, however he had some internet issues that lead to us hanging in station longer than we wanted. When it was clear he was having issues, we moved Hillybilly to Scout and undocked to head towards JH-M2W to pick up Budda. Wokum was running a short bit behind, and unfortunately was caught while flying a shuttle to catch up with us.

(01:18:11Z) 6-CZ49
Gallente Shuttle -0.02m

While enroute to JH-M2W, we heard there were Cavemen looking for a fight at the sun in PC9-AY. We mulled over the decision as we didn't have logi on the flight, but after a quick concensus from the team, we decided to make a go of it. Intel told us 4 x Caracals, 3 x Scythes, 1 x Vexor, 1 x Griffin. While waiting for another Griffin to join us, they flew in to us at the gate. Shield Mods on, engage...

(01:49:33Z) JH-M2W, PC9-AY
Caracal -33.6m
Caracal -54.02m
Scythe +11.95m
Capsule -0.01m
Caracal +16.05m
Capsule +0.01m

It didn't feel like it, but the fight was short, and they warped off prior to us getting any of them dead-dead. We took two losses right away, but finally broke a Scythe and that allowed us to pop a Caracal. Wasn't the most glorious first run, but it sure made the first hour fly on by.

What we learned in Part 1:
Fighting against ships with Logi is very challenging, even with lots of DD.
I went against what we suggested in the past and engaged in PC9-AY. It was still a fun fight.
I feel like I struggled to call primaries... maybe I did better than I thought, but I noticed I got off course and was not tethered on Calder, our anchor.

After GFs in local, we decided to dock up, repair, re-ship, and I handed over FC to Crimson. (To Be Continued...)

(02:35:53Z) Babirmoult
Hecate +101.05m

(02:48:50Z) Hare
Griffin -1.61m
Caracal -14.67m

(03:39:28Z) Anckee
Caracal -36.65m
Caracal -19.45m


Stats
ISK Destroyed: 129,060,553.91
ISK Lost: 160,032,447.18
ISK Delta: -30,971,893.27
Efficiency: 44.643%

[Amber Charante]

It was a fun fleet, especially getting the awesome bounties placed on us.

[Sturym]

I'm leaving the bounties part for Crimson to report.

[Crimson Herring]

PART 2

With the Cavemen scattered and our ships repaired, we set off toward Solitude low-sec via Y9G-KS. Most of the systems seemed pretty dead, with the few neutrals we encountered either docked up or flying cloaky ships. Eventually one of our scouts found a Hecate on D-scan ratting asteroid belts in Babirmoult, and managed to get tackle on it! The Hecate went down very quickly, it was destroyed even before our entire DD wing landed. The pilot was not particularly happy, and placed some pretty nice bounties on several of the involved fleet members. We left GFs in local, and our attention turned to a Harbinger another of our scouts seen jump into our system.

We managed to track the Harbinger to the Hare gate, where we followed it through. There we attempted to engage it. I was about to command the fleet to engage the Harbinger and take gate guns, when one of the fleet members notified the fleet that he had been aggressed by the Harbinger. For reasons that are still not clear to me, however, this did not cause him to go flashy, and the rest of us still took gate guns. This in turn caused some confusion, which led to us loosing a Griffin to the sentry guns. We were about to break his tank however, when our original tackle had to warp off due to the sentry guns. Due to poor coordination on my part, none of our other tackle ships had tackle on it, and it warped away, but not before managing to kill one of our Caracals.

At this point we docked for a bio break and repair. As the fleet had been going for about 2 hours by now, several people dropped fleet, which opened up the opportunity to arrange honorable combat with Arson Industries. Previously they had expressed reluctance due to the size of our fleet, but now they were quite willing to fight what we had left. While we waited for them to assemble, we looked for clone soldiers to shoot and take their tags, only finding a 950M bounty battle ship. We also saw the Hecate pilot again; he had come back with yet another Hecate, but this time with a cloak. We briefly attempted to bait him into de-cloaking by killing the belt rats, but he was not eager for a re-match.

We then made our way to Anckee, where the pilots from Arson had formed up. We met them at the sun, where they had a Harbinger and a Harbinger Navy Issue, against some tackle scouts and the 7-8 DD ships we had left. We had good application initially, and quickly began to eat through the tank of the HNI. At this moment, however, they warped in an Exequror and an Augoror. Despite the opposing logi, we still seemed to be breaking the tank of the HNI, so I decided not to switch primaries, in hopes we would then have to deal with only one opposing damage dealer. However, one of our Caracals got pointed and shortly thereafter popped, and it became clear that we would not break the HNI before losing most of our fleet. At this point I called for the fleet to scatter, still thinking I might try to reform and reengage. I was pointed on the way out, however, and very quickly popped, so Calder Ormand took over and made the call to concede, as we had now lost 2 DD.

Reflections/Lessons Leanred in Part 2:
I need to better understand aggression mechanics, especially as it applies to gate guns. Something allowed the Harbinger in Hare to aggress a fleet member without giving the fleet aggression rights back, and my lack of awareness of that likely contributed to the loss of the Griffin.

I also had some issues with comms control. There were a several experienced FCs and PvPers in the fleet who volunteered recommendations and adivce, which I greatly appreciated. This advice had an undesirable side effect though of creating cross-talk in a few cases, in particular when I was getting reports from my scouts. This fleet was open comms, and I didn't really feel the need to change that this fleet, but I might in the future try requesting that advice and recommendations be put exclusively in Fleet chat. I think that may significantly reduce collisions in comms and also provide me an opportunity to go back and look at the logs later if it's something I may be able to apply in the future.

Further contributing to the comms issues, there were a few people independently acting as scouts beyond the two designated scouts for the fleet. I think part of this was due to tech issues at the start of the fleet that left us with just one scout, but the result was that I was getting reports from three to four people, and did not know where the other scouts where most of the time. Soli low-sec was empty enough that it did not become a hazzard that I felt I needed to address, and honestly my biggest concern was being able to find content in the first place, so I rolled with it. In a different situation, though, it could have easily gotten out of hand, especially is someone ran into trouble several jumps away and I was not aware of their location.

I also don't know if I made the right call to keep the HNI as primary when the Arson logi showed up. Normally I would have immediately switched primary to Logi, but the HNI was already really close to hull, and Exequrors and Augorors themselves are fairly tank from what I understand. Keeping the HNI as primary did not work out in this case, but I'm also not sure if setting the logi as primary would have gone any better.

Special thanks also to Sturym for twice reminding me (and the fleet) to put on shield mods, as I would have otherwise forgotten.

All things considered, I think it went pretty well for an inaugural fleet, and many thanks to all who participated

[Sturym]

Very well put, Crimson. Good things learned all around.

The Hecate we destroyed was named "I ALWAYS BOUNTY" or something of that nature... Something he made good on by putting 100 Mil bounties on everyone who aggressed him. Fairly comical in my eyes... Amber even did his best to suggest a different fitting. While this was done in suggestion to help someone survive better in low sec, he didn't take well to it... boasting his 1 billion in ISK revenue the week prior.

I had a lot of fun last night! I sincerely look forward to more fleets!

[Yuri Levnik]

RE the Hurricane (and his buddy in a Deimos, who we also engaged on gates), I know some of us had suspect timers which was why the Hurricane was able to engage us without going flashy. I can't remember if we got the timers from the Hecate or if we took a swipe at someone else. Once the shooting started our folks who were not flashy probably started shooting the Hurricane/Deimos on the assumption that it had gone flashy and got a nasty surprise when they got suspect timers and took gate guns instead Note also that the Deimos, Hurricane *and* Hecate were all corpmates of the guys we fought at the sun in Anckee (in fact, the Deimos pilot was Drake Arson himself; he's my usual contact with the Filthy Peasants and was in the Harbinger in the fight at the sun).

RE switching damage to the Exequror or Augoror, I would have been very tempted to do so. Those are some pretty strong repairs and they did ultimately catch the Harbinger Navy Issue just in time. However, we've tried to break that Exequror before (Drake pilots it on an alt) and failed, and Caracals, in particular, are scary for target swaps because you really want a fully loaded RLML clip before you start shooting anything. So I don't think keeping us on the Harbinger Navy Issue was a bad call, especially since we had at least one EWAR pilot on grid trying to shut down the reps from the Exeq.

Overall, y'all did good! We had some lively fights and you got yourselves some kills. It took me a full month of running fleets before I got any kills, so you're doing better than I was back when I first started. Not sure if that's encouraging or not (;

Pew pew!
Yuri

[Budda Sereda]

It is great to have 2 new FCs coming from Solitude. Welcome guys! I would say it was a good start! Hope you've enjoyed it and will continue running interesting fleets.

Differently from what wrote I was not flying DD. My intention was to fly a CD with MJFG and links, but it happened differently.

In the very beginning, when the fleet formed up at WG, I was in PC9. I learned about visitors fleet sitting on the sun, and as they had 2 ECM ships, 3 logies, and we had none logies I decided that 1 logy won't help much, just will be killed or pushed out from the grid, so decided to take a Griffin.

I did fly ECM EWar in the past but never against more than 2-3 ships at the same time, so that was quite a bit of a new experience. Few difficulties I had:
1. Hard time finding proper Scythe to jam as it was called by the tag number and I needed to see who is not "tag 2".
2. Align-out and stay out of opponents' caracals, by yet stay in optimal range of JAMs
3. Hard time useing modules via hotkeys: need to get used to mapping of jam types to hot keys.
Yet, I'm glad we got few kills and hope saved somebody from dying.

Later in fleet I reshipped into a frigate ... and it happened I went roaming in a Kestrel

Some recommendations:

1. Broadcast primaries and secondaries (default hot-key is 'x')
2. Please call as you wish, but always repeat "Primary's player name and ship"
3. Taking fight at range with no logy support, call players to align out once they started taking damage so when their tank is down - warp away. They can come back and contribute dps: no need waiting to be killed.

Thoughts:

All doctrines have strengths and weaknesses. If BLAP Caracals fleet engages another Caracals fleet it will have a hard time to win unless you have a good tackle ship:
- if you tackle something in a close range you will die because of low tank/resist.
- if you shoot with no tackle and opponents are smart and experienced they will just disengage.
I recommend EACH BLAP Caracal grooming for roaming to have Keres. Though, you need to be aware of:
a. tackle range limitation: 42km cold, 50km OH; minus some buffer to not lose a point when opponent disengages.
b. think tank (only 8.5k EHP).