Ah, another day in Geminate, land of the brave, home of the foolhardy.

I started the day with a frigate roam up through Great Wildlands, Etherium Reach, and on into Geminate itself. In LXQ2-T I found Badger Mk II caught in a bubble but it didn’t drop anything of real value. Yesterday Uemon was the sight of one of the largest supercapital battles New Eden has ever seen and today you could see the effects of the aftermath but at least it was safe for me and my Wolf to pass through, admiring the super capital ships that appeared on my scanner while I warped.

EOA-ZC, my preferred way into Geminate, was quiet so I hopped through UBX-CC and into AD-5B8 where I found a Harpy on the Eurgrana gate. He responded well to my overtures and returned my lock. It wasn’t really a fight, more of a quick and brutal execution but at least it was a kill.

As usual my next destination was L-HV5C where I hoped to find some DEM0N HUNTERS to fight but everything was quiet and no-one seemed interested in undocking. My next destination was AP9-LV, home of Violent Entity. A few battlecruisers undocked but nothing I had a chance of taking on so I decided to head back towards home.

Violent Entity seemed to object to me messing around in their home system and a Zealot and Retribution followed me into NQ-9IH. Show time! I fired up my microwarp drive and burnt away from the Zealot, eating volley after volley of scorch from his lasers until I pulled out to a safe range. As I’d hoped the Retribution gave chase, looking to tackle me. “Good bye,” came the taunt in local. As soon as I was happy with the separation between the Retribution and Zealot, plus the other guys who had jumped in as I burnt away, I turned my ship around and prepared to greet the Retribution with a traditional Minmatar welcome: overheated 200mm autocannons. Retributions can pack a mean tank but, despite his dual armour repairers, my new friend melted in short order and I was able to warp away to safety. “Hello, guys.” I wasn’t going anywhere.

Local was swelling now and they were starting to bring the kitchen sink out to kill me, a humble little Wolf pilot. By now they had a Curse, Falcon, Phobos, Ishkur, Malediction, Ares, and some assorted battlecruisers. That Ishkur had caught my eye. I wanted it and I wanted it alone. NQ-9IH is a natural choke point that protects Violent Entity’s constellation. Knowing this they had set up on my out gate and it was there that I warped now. As soon as I landed I turned tail and began to align out. A quick flash of my fine Brutor tailpipe and I warped off, hoping they’d want more of what I had to offer. Their Curse followed me but nothing bite-sized came with it and I quickly bounced back to the gate to see if I could tempt something else off. This time the Ishkur was away from the pack so I loaded EMP and prepared to go to war. My main concern was the Falcon so I made sure that I kept 100km away from him in order to prevent him getting any jams off. The Ishkur did want to dance and pretty soon we were locked in mortal combat. Knowing the Gallente ship would want to get in close I opted to align out to a celestial, ready to leave as soon as he exploded. Unfortunately for me, as the Ishkur began to go into structure, the Falcon was able to get into range and jam me. One or two seconds later and I would have been free but now I had to endure another slow, helpless death as their gang got into range and whored onto my lossmail.

Later that night I was FCing another one of my nano battlecruiser roams and we began to form up a gang in Egbinger. As usual the bulk of our fleet was formed of Hurricanes with a Deimos (I know, I know), Drake, and Ferox thrown in just to highlight quite how brilliant the Hurricane is. When we undocked there was a neutral Dominix on the undock but he had not aggressed the Ferox we sent out first and it was not worth taking GCC on someone who would be able to dock straight away. Instead we set course for M-MD3B and went to go find us a fight. Two jumps into Great Wildlands and our scout was reporting all clear when all of a sudden our local spiked. We were being followed by a gang twice as big as our own. I instantly called for the fleet to jump into 6WT-BE and burn off the gate. The hostiles followed and I began calling primaries. First to drop was a Rapier and a second Rapier was able to jump out to safety before we could nuke it. As is traditional, our opponents had called zombie primary and his Hurricane was our first loss. More primaries were called but we had difficulty keeping people pinned down but. As we lost ships, including my own, I gave the order to warp out and regroup. We lost 5 battlecruisers and a Deimos to their two Vagabonds and a Rapier. Not a stellar performance but they did outnumber us two to one and if the Deimos had been a proper ship then we would have finished up on efficiency too. After a bit of hesitation on my behalf we made our way back to Egbinger, looping through 0PI4-E to avoid the hostile gang between us and home.

While we took a break and reshipped people I had a think on what had happened in that fight and what we could have done better. The first thing that came to my mind was that the Deimos doesn’t really have a place in my gang concept. Let’s face it, the Deimos isn’t a particularly great ship and is almost an instant primary, especially when surrounded by battlecruisers. I want a cheap, disposable fleet that I can fight any group with and not have to worry about losses. I’m not going to yell at people for losing ships but I do want to stand a chance of winning each fight when it comes to ISK efficiency and that skewed the battle against us. I made sure that Slotos came back in something a bit cheaper that fits what I’m aiming to do. The next thing is that I kept us on our original gate too long. Once I’d cleared the initial tackle I should have warped us out, regrouped, and repositioned the gang so that we could go back for another round and draw them out again.

With these lessons learnt we set out again. We’d lost a few and gained a few but the best thing was when we undocked a gang of about 10 Hurricanes at the same time. It looked brilliant and I was so caught up admiring our fleet that I subconsciously set destination for Etherium Reach when I’d been meaning to go to Curse. Never mind, by the time I realised what I’d done I decided to just go with it and see what we’d find. This turned out to be a good decision.

On our way out towards Geminate we found a couple of lone ships which we mercilessly ganked but other than that it was as uneventful as when I’d done it earlier in the day. However, Suleiman reported a camp on our out gate in UBX-CC and bravely lost his Hurricane scouting them for us. They had approximately equal numbers to us with Drakes and Hurricanes providing their main fleet and some tackle and a Phobos backing them up. Around the gate were several anchored bubbles. This looked like the perfect chance to get a good fight.

I warped the gang to a pounce spot above the gate and then down to one of the bubbles furthest from the hostile gang. One of their interdictors burnt towards us but shied away when we opened up on him. We should have let him get into instapop range. Nothing else came towards us so I began to slowboat the gang towards them, pulsing our MWDs occaisionally and taking pot shots at soft targets. None of them wanted to fight and they began to jump back out until their were just three Drakes, the Phobos, and a Flycatcher on gate. This was ridiculous but as we mocked their bravery in local I had a cunning idea. The heavy inderdictor was still running his bubble on the gate, despite all the anchored bubbles around him. I ordered the gang to burn for him and as soon as they were in his bubble, start spamming the warp command. As soon as we got into the bubble the Phobos was aggressed by our warp commands and we set about killing him under the noses of the Drakes who just jumped to safety on the other side. Some of us, myself included, were so busy spamming warp that we didn’t notice we were no longer inside bubbles and got a bit of a shock when our ships reported “warp drive active” but no matter, we all came back in time to see the gate start to flash and local rise. I ordered the fleet to burn off to the edge of the anchored bubbles and see what came through. The answer was a 60 man battleship gang and we set about doing what we do best, killing the tackle the suicidally burnt for us. Unfortunately they had decided to bring six Basilisks so we were unable to make a real dent on their heavier ships but we killed lots of tackle that burnt for us. Our only real loss was Dian’s Hurricane when she warped back to us, forgetting that she’d get pulled into the bubbles. At one point the hostiles warped out to try and land on top of us but they too forgot about their bubbles and ended up well out of range.

With nothing left to kill we warped off an regrouped before returning to the gate to see what was happening. A Hurricane and Viator were looting our wrecks and a few Drakes hugged the gate but nothing major was on grid. I quickly warped us down to the Viator and we made him pay for being on the field. Unfortunately the Hurricane pilot had his wits about him and got out before we could hurt him. With no more soft targets available and because it was starting to get late we made the decision to get out and call it a night.

This was a much better fight on our behalf. On the battle report you will see a small Russian gang who were semi affiliated with us because they were friends with one of our gang members but because of their inappropriate fleet composition and the fact they weren’t on our Teamspeak I don’t count them as part of our gang. Watching them die completely unnecessarily was kind of amusing, though. The Falcon really isn’t an appropriate ship for this kind of nano gang and the Sentinel spent far too long in the bubbles soaking up Drake missiles. Still, once again the power of these nano fleets to engage much larger gangs was demonstrated and we only lost our scout and one bad warp in. It really is starting to come together.

In fact, things have come on so much so that I’m going to actually turn these into slightly more serious gangs. When I first started running them they were just a chance to hang out with friends, get pirates out into null sec, and die in a glorious fireball. Now we are starting to pull significant numbers – with the affiliated Russians we hit 17 in gang. This means that I think we can start to shift things up. We didn’t have our gang-link Loki last night and I think we really missed his bonuses in both fights. A bit more speed and agility would have helped keep people alive and the extended point range would have made sure people died. I’ve also had a donation of 1 billion ISK to help encourage good stories for this blog and I am going to use that to provide support ships for our fleets including Scimitars and interdictors of our own. That way I can keep the costs low for people coming along but also increase our efficiency. There isn’t going to be another one of these roams for a couple of weeks and in that time I am going to try and come up with a more co-ordinated fleet so that we can fight outnumbered even more effectively and also take some time to make sure I have an excellent set of bookmarks in the areas we roam so that I can warp our gang in and out to try and spread the opponents more.

I’ve definitely learnt a lot of lessons these last couple of weeks and with a couple of weeks off FCing this sort of gang I’m going to have some time to actually think what I’ve learnt and try and apply it to make these roams even better. One thing that is going to change is that I’m not going to run these as “anybody is welcome” and be a bit more selective about who gets invited. This isn’t because I want to be elitist but because I want to keep numbers under control so that we don’t end up rolling around as a disorganised blob ourselves. You can see the effect of not operating as a single unit in the Geminate fight where the Russian gang acted effectively independently and didn’t fit into our plans. Probably the main thing that came out of last night is that I have decided to train for the Claymore. Lokis provide better bonuses but they are too fragile to be on the field and if I am going to command these fleets I need to be on the battlefield amidst the action.

While I’m not running any of these skirmish gangs for a while I have offered to FC a Gunpoint Diplomacy corporate gang on Saturday and I’m planning something a bit different for that. Until then, fly recklessly and have fun!

PS: I know the battle reports look a bit funky but I can’t find any good, accurate representations, I’m afraid. If anyone can find better ones post them in the comments and I’ll edit the post.

PPS: I have enabled comments on my killboard now. The password is “rifter”.

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