Sunday, January 25, 2009

Real life

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. I am still active in the faction warfare and we had some nice battles against our amarr counterparts. Real life kicked me in the butt though and i am trying to get some play time. New updates soon.

Meanwhile in a battle at Amamake system of only 40 to 50 odd ships we got so bad lag that the whole speed-campaign of CCP feels like a joke. But that being my first lag battle in some months i still feel confident. At least we got a nice battle. I was on duty in my Ares interceptor to get some points on enemies. Then we got reports on the enemy fleet which was around the same strength as our fleet. Hidden to us were the some ten or fifteen ships in surrounding systems including some heavy hitters and battleships. This led to our disaster as we fielded more frigate class ships and no battleship. That and the lag was the downfall of our Task Force "Stoogie". Kudos to our enemies for a smack free battle and to our pilots who stood and fled not.

But revenge will come.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Strategy in space

I did some more ventures into the faction warfare of EVE lately.

Beginning from the 1st of January i participated in the destruction of eight ships and two pods. I joined a new corporation as i had the feeling that my old corp wasnt doing very much. But i hold no grudge to them and have learned some nice tips for PVP. The Tribal Core is deeply in Faction Warfare. I found some very nice people there and they are mostly active during the euopean evening. Thats very great because i can mostly play at this timeframe.

Based from my last post you could get the impression that you can not have very much fun with FW. Bug what you can get is a lot of PVP action. For beginnners in PVP it is an ideal way to get experience in fleet combat. The FC's are mostly competent and even if the militia guys are mostly a bunch of chaotic and unorganized ot Faction Warfare. Pirates (cough cough) and a lot of war targets present themselves. Sometimes you just stay with some other guys from militia in your PVP ships at the gates and wait .. and wait ..... and wait ..... but no targets present themselves. Then you switch to your T1 Cruiser or T1 frigate to run down a complex and all of a sudden the amarr militia is coming in PVP outfit. On other days there is just cat and mouse with fleets and the FC is consulting intel channels, maps and scouts to get a doublecross route to cut the enemy of.

Pure plexing isn't fun. But if you mix it with some PVP and harrassing attacks on the amarr worlds .. then it is.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Faction warfare - how and some comments

Letrange has done a good job of writing the main mechanics of Factional Warfare into a post at his site. Check it out here. He is commenting on the things he thinks are good and the one that are not so good.

I have to agree to his point of view, especially the defensive plexing is one of the most boring and time consuming things to do. With no reward its kind of a game where you wait for an enemy. And with the current flavor of the month called "THE BLOB" there is little a solo pilot can do.

Letrange summarizes as following: "Conclusion: An interesting tool to learn Pew Pew. It's biggest advantage is that you don't have the sec-status worrys of the typical anti-pirate campaign (only about 1/3 of all pirates are -5 sec status or below from what I've observed) and you dont' have to go Pirate to get some action. But until the rewards are tweeked and consequences thrown in at best it's only a training tool. The inability of alliances to retain corporations while letting those corporations go do FW means it's a disapointing training tool as well."

I wholeheartedly agree. Thanks to Letrange for posting this.

On the official eve-online forum, scrapheap-challenge and the german forums there is currently a discussion going if FW is dead or not. Let's wait for CCP to patch it to its best. I cant see why they should leave FW in this state.

Saturday, January 3, 2009

Fun and not

With the help from other milita guys I destroyed some more ship and their pilots and crew. But it did not satisfy me. Even when blowing things in space up was a well cultivated sports of mine, doing it in milita didn't gave me the kicks i experienced when flying alone and on the lookout for some game i could prey on. *sigh*

On the other hand gave me the combat and fights done in a fleet a valuable sight of fleet combat. Even if it was a bit unorganized. An experience i would not miss and that i will need once, i know.

But the majority of faction warfare was to sit at gates, at planets to scan military complexes out and to play cat and mouse with the enemy militia. It was a boring game. A game i didn't want to play forever. But now i just had to go through this period of time to hone my skills.

In the meantime i killed some more pilots. A merlin and a crusader fell to my Ares, warp disrupted for the fleet to blast 'em to smitherens. The merlin pilot was podded too. Such was the onslaught of our small fleet. The Ares is a wonderfull tool for that job. It can stay out of range of almost every other ship except another interceptor and pinpoint the target with its sophisticated Warp disruptors. Then the interceptor pilot just calls in the heavy guys to kill the target. One has to be careful though to not do some silly pilot errors. Or very fast warrior drones. These are the fastest drones in the galaxy and they can catch an careless or fooldhardy interceptor.