Life in Eve: Home a-Roam

These days, we hardly need to go anywhere to find a fight. Immediately next door, we have a long-established I.LAW Amarr corporation that seems (at least to me – not everyone agrees) predisposed to relatively even fights. One more jump and you’re into the home staging system for Fweddit, which… has a lot of pilots. The same distance in the opposite direction (figuratively as well as literally) you’ll find the Agony Unleashed, full of pilots for whom I have tremendous respect, and if all else fails there’s notorious Amamake, filled to overflowing with pirate gangs.

None of that’s to say that you’ll always find the fight you’re looking for — it’s currently kind of rough running around solo, because the half-complete changes to complexes discourage pilots from clearing them on their own — but if you can find the pitch that the war zone is tuned to at the moment, things can be pretty cool.

Thursday, JR ran up a flag for pilots interested in a remote-repair armor gang — a concept that’s only marginally workable at present but likely to be very effective in December — the ship’s are cheap(ish) so it’s good training for when the tactic becomes (much) more effective.

We ran around for a very short roam (all of two system gates, I think) before JR got word of a nearby allied fleet trying to scare up a fight with Fweddit nearby. It seemed likely that either of our groups would be outmanned or outshipped by our opponents, but together…

We reformed as a single fleet and… well, all I’ll say is that we got a fight. Not convinced it was the fight we wanted, exactly, but it was certainly a fight. In short, the other side outnumbered and outshipped us, despite our Voltron maneuver. Also, there is a regrettable tendency to call the most recognizable enemy fleet commanders primary. I’ve made the same mistake, which is why I spotted it now, and the fact that some of those pilots recognize this and play to it by making themselves particularly easy-to-reach targets in particularly hard-to-kill ships.

So we kind of wasted a whole lot of time killing one or two guys who were set up to take the pounding, while the other guys took us apart at their leisure.

Once this fight was done (my ship survived — not sure how that happened), there was a long delay while JR and the other fleet’s commander talked, and by the time it was done, most everyone was done waiting around and had taken off for the night. One pilot had tracked a group of war targets who were banging around in frigates and looking for a fight, however. We had five or six pilots still willing to fly, and dropped on them in orbit around a planet in similarly-sized ships.

Both sides were looking for a good fight, but the game itself was set to deny us — something was seriously wrong with the local ‘grid’ — it was so small that my Condor was actually running off grid from my target by simply orbiting him. Neither side could accomplish anything, so we disengaged and retreated.

By this point, however, all sides were feeling a little denied, so we basically agreed on a place to meet up and conclude our fight. This went pretty well for us, as we were able to take out all five of their ships, with two of ours still on the field (mine included, albeit ever-so-slightly on fire). Good fights all around, and we called it a night.