Rifter Drifter

Elfhat0r, a former Tusker, has written an E-war guide and this has got me thinking about electronic warfare and its place in our fleets.

Electronic warfare is a very powerful tool in Eve. All too often it boils down to Falcon alts and flavour of the month fits with tracking disruptors. The tracking disruptor fits are fun but when every solo ship of any worth is accompanied by a Falcon things quickly get dull. A well designed e-war presence can really swing the impetus of a fight in your favour. Force multiplication is the name of the game. How can a bunch of frigates or cruisers overwhelm a force with greater firepower?

Generally when I run around in a gang of more than three or four ships I like to start thinking how e-war can support the gang. A lot of times these days we knowingly engage bait or opposition who we know can bring support. In these situations it is important to maximise your survivability. There are generally two ways that I approach brining e-war in a gang. The first is probably the most traditional, dedicated e-war ships. The second is probably my preferred approach but also slightly harder to organise and manage, that is e-war distributed evenly through the fleet without specialist ships.

Every race in Eve has its own distinctive flavour of electronic warfare. Generally this is designed to either enhance its own strengths or play against its traditional enemy’s weaknesses. For example the Amarr use tracking disruptors to try and counter the Minmatars’ strengths of speed and flexible range. The Minmatar for their part use target painters to try and maximise the amount of damage that their guns do against the tanky and immobile Amarr. Caldari ships use ECM to jam their Gallente counterparts. When jammed the Gallente are unable bring their high damage blasters to bear. Likewise the Gallente take advantage of the fact that ECM is best applied from long range to use sensor dampners to bring the ECM ships into range. The increase lock time also makes it harder to remove their drones from the equation.

The advantage of bringing dedicated e-war ships to a fight is that each race’s ship has a bonus to its flavour of e-war. Even better the T2 ships have a bonus to a second variant, except the Caldari who have a capacitor bonus to their ECM. (Amarr: neut range, Minmatar: web range, Gallente: scram range.) This makes the ships very powerful in their roles. Force Recons also have the advantage of fitting a covert ops cloak so that they can move around in safety and only be deployed when needed. The disadvantage of these specialist ships is that they make obvious targets to be removed from the battlefield, bring limited DPS, and are generally pretty fragile.

The typical fleets that I command tend to be either frigate wolfpacks or T1 cruiser gangs. In these gangs I prefer the distributed e-war approach. Rather than having a bunch of redundant scrams and webs it is better to spread the e-war out through the fleet. This means that we can bring maximum damage to bear on our targets and also makes it more difficult for the opponent to remove the e-war. The downside is that we no longer benefit from the role-specific bonuses of the dedicated e-war platforms. It also takes a bit longer to organise the gang to make sure that a suitable balance is obtained and means that members should be versed in all forms of e-war.

Both approaches are very effective at what they do. Personally I prefer the e-war specialist approach in informal gangs. Its easier for someone to bring a Griffin or Blackbird along than it is to try and split e-war between a handful of ships. In larger fleets, though, I prefer the distributed approach. At the end of the day its horses for courses and everyone will have their favoured method. I just thought I’d share some thoughts.