A Week of Eve: Day One and Two

My family are out of town so I have more time than usual to play Eve. Here's some notes on the first couple of days. Today is Day Three, and so far it's not a good one: my air conditioner is broken (90 degrees outside), I locked myself out of the house after leaving the other car at the dealer to be serviced, and my video editing templates are gone or screwed up.

Day One: Before work I popped over to our local asteroid belts for a spot of ratting. I took my trusty kiting Algos, rigged to apply about 250dps with drones alone, while I sit at 70km away sipping tea.  I found what I was looking for, a Clone Soldier and deployed the drones. To my surprise, I started taking damage! I tried to move further away, and he managed to chase and get closer to me, hitting me all the way! What happened?! I recalled drones and got out with a scrap of armor remaining. I repaired and tried again with the same result!  A little googling revealed that Clone Soldiers got buffed in the last patch: they move faster and hit further out. Small kiting ships can't do the job any more, sadly.

That evening I joined in on small gang roams around Fliet. We found a cruiser gang, and came back later that night and had a big ol' fight in Iwisoda. We lost 3 Exequrors right off the bat, and 1 Vexor but our DPS wore them down and we eventually killed 13 Caracals and Ospreys (here's one kill). The chase to hunt them down took a while and the best part was Marcel's palpable glee when our scouts reported them going into Iwisoda, a dead-end system.

Here's a moment where our three remaining Exeqs saved a Vexor from the edge of destruction; I burned out two reppers because I didn't un-overheat them. I know I suck at logi :) Luckily the fight was swinging our way at that point.

Day Two:  I've read recently that the nullsec powers are bored and have started to come and play in lowsec.  Today I found out it's true.

Overload Everything fleet taking out our POCO

I started the evening with some plexing in Heyd: it's nice to get some LP again since the Gallente militia are in Tier 3.  We then did POCO defense in Fliet and after a few minutes some visitors cyno'd in:12 Abaddons, 2 Loki, Proteus, 2 Archons and an Armageddon Navy Issue from alliance Overload Everything! We warped away and our shield repping Scythes tried to come back and get some last-ditch reps on our poco to slow them down, but we were alpha'd off the field quickly.

Overload Everything quickly destroyed our POCO and set up their own. When their Archons and Abaddons separated we tried to tackle the Archons while we hit the Abaddons with Vexors, but the battleships warped off as soon as we tackled the Archons. We should have, in retrospect, hit the battleships first, or as close to simultaneously with the Archon tackles as we could. We sent out scouts to try and find them, knowing their Abaddons would be slow to move around using gates, but we couldn't find them. Then we noticed there was an Erebus in system!  This meant that not only had they used a Titan to bridge in, they'd used another to bridge out. That's some serious firepower!

After they'd left the system we stayed in our Vexors and started hitting their new POCO. They came back in Ishtars, with Zealot, Scimitar, Lachesis and Huginn for support and took us on. We sent them packing, including this 245M Ishtar and 179M Scimitar piloted by one of the Overload Everything guys.  I think our inclusion of jams on our Vexors always surprises people that haven't fought us before!

Here's video of that fight...we need to have more pilots in small ships to apply tackle and keep their bling on the field so we can kill it. If you're a new player and wonder what's your place in battles like this, watch the video and notice the end, when we're unable to keep the enemy on field: you could have been there to help us! :)

The slightly mood was considerably lightened by this hilarious Firetail which arrived at the end of the fight. 217M ISK of random stuff, including Snowball and Fireworks launchers...we'll take it :)

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We continued our recent run of structure bashing/defense ops in Heyd, attacking a POS and putting into reinforce. On the way back we ran into a Gila fleet on a gate, but most of our fleet had warped off. We lost a Vexor Navy Issue and a Talos, but killed a 511M ISK Gila.

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My security status is dropping and I might just let it slide for a while. I don't have much reason to go to high-sec, except to the island next door for occasional manufacturing, and at only -2.2, I'm not in danger of being blocked from there anytime soon. My PI operations are at a halt, as planned, and I've got plenty of stock for selling Tristans and Algoses to corpmates through contracts: I've sold five so far.