Before the fleet
A lot of stuff was going on behind the scenes. Our cap pilots were moving to staging areas, we had eyes on Snuffbox's 5 Titan bridging systems, our scout net was spread wide, we had a complex route set up to get maximum combat options and places to hide a huge fleet (barely any of which ended up being used). We had boosters set up and a command structure put into place before the main fleet form up was done. Plus we had mini lesson by two podlets about dragons and fleet manoeuvres. So for everyone who participated in the sheer amount of tasks that made these events work, thank you, you made my life easier and my tasks flow with meaningful direction.
Our Cap fleet
This time, instead of falling to the usual cap triage fleet we tried out Pantheon instead, essentially remote rep, non-triage carriers. I would love feedback on how this went in comparison to the normal triage setup and if it made a difference in your eyes. Bar in mind without Pantheon we would have had double dread dps as well as 4 carriers.
The Fleet
We had a four stage set up, dictated by where our caps would jump to and where we could then hunt. The first stage was around Metropolis and during fleet form up our scout commander had thoroughly searched the area in the hope of finding the corps that I had marked for them. Sadly nothing so we moved towards Stage 2.
Stage two was originally going to be with a bait fleet in Old Man Star with the main fleet a few jumps away. But things changed when we heard that Shadow Cartel was interested in fighting. We made it clear to them that we would fight them on the condition that Snuff box would have no involvement in it. They agreed but even so we had eyes following the snuff fleet wherever they went to ensure that they would not interfere.
The fight was really tough as they were flying a fast moving machariel fleet with TWELVE guardians supporting them. Their fits were pretty dam blinged out to (as the battle report shows) so they were very tough to catch and blow up before their reps landed. I decided to focus on their Archon when it came clear that we were not able to finish them off, though its fit was very much a neut and dps sponge. Before the archon being blown up though we had all the Machariels drop sentries and they were chewing through our ships. I called three archons in so that our designated Smart bombing ship could refit his ship from dps/neut to full smat bomb so that he could wipe out their drone ball, which he did. Reps were barely holding so I called the rest of the archons in to add support.
They fought well though as they flew away from our carriers and we chased them moving the fleet further away from the safety of our super reps and even stressing the link to our sub cap logi ship. After only blowing a few of their ships up it was clear that this was not going to go in our direction so I had the fleet burn back to the carriers so we could safely extract.
The battle was very evenly matched isk wise and as challenging as it was it was certainly an interesting fight
battle report - http://killfeed.eveuniversity.org/?a=ki ... _id=283135
their losses – 5.42B
our losses – 5.44B
battle time line - http://evf-eve.com/services/brcat/?s=49 ... t=KQav&r=1
For this fight I want to thank Luc Lavoiser and Zakkus Koch and make sure they are added to the killmails as they stayed away from the fight watching for local spike and resisted the call to KM whore. Pro unistas
Logi to be added:
Spoiler
Crimson Cadelanne
Glasi Vookto
Hofborn
Izmaragd Dawnstar
Jore Unn
Lamonica Eistiras
Le Loup Gris
Piotr Mauleradze
T Toralen
Torg Navatin
ISpeedAtNight LastInLine
Alex Stadfeld
We continued roaming after some time off and had our second fight with Galmil. This took a while to set up so before that we decided to run 7 besieged sites in the neighbouring systems. Carrier ratting besieged is seriously OP .
The Galmil fight was an interesting one. I had previously had my frigs make tacticals around the fight point and expecting them to arrive with arty Tempest Fleet Issues as I wanted space to manoeuvre to get closer to them. They landed at range, we on-grid warped away and aligned back to them. One of our inties slipped behind them and we warped to them at 50 odd km and we landed really close to them. Their long range, low tracking but high alpha weapon advantage was robbed from them and with judicious use of our damps, moving between scan res and range damps, we kept their logi of centre and was able to burn them down with a surprising amount of speed. I honestly think this fight should have been MUCH harder but due to a fantastic early manoeuvring we took the field with minimal losses.
Battle report - http://killfeed.eveuniversity.org/?a=ki ... _id=283165
losses – 0.09B
destroyed – 4.54B
To be fair though they were brave in coming to take us on, even though our fleet was less than half the size that we started with, we were still a force. Oh and no we did not drop caps for this, that would have been insulting.
We went home.
Another long 5 hour dragon slayer but good company, interesting fights and challenging encounters made for a fun night. Thank you for those that can and for sticking around so long.
Hugs
gareth
P.S.
as always mini-aar's from my sub commanders would be appreciated.