I could’nt believe what I my eyes saw when I reached our POS in 9-4RP2 to help our alliance fleet. Local had over 400 pilots in it and more than 30 carrier were only a few kilometer outside of our force field, engaging the POS and our ships. Tau Ceti Federation, Mostly Harmless, Morsus Mihi and DEFI4ANT tried to pull down our POS. The fight was already raging for two long hours at this time.
Since I was flying in my Malediction I could’nt do anything other than watching the enemy carrier getting blown to pieces from within our force field! This was by far the largest fleet fight in my EvE career so far and it was exactly why I started playing EvE: To see a lot of big ships fighting each other and going down in huge explosions. And tonight I got what I am paying for!
Our fleet (140 pilots) mostly consisted of battleships which were constantly warping in and out, firing at those carrier. At the end it was like fishing in a barrel. All enemy carrier were sitting in 3-4 bubbles and our battleships just had to shoot them one by one.
Sadly, I lost my beloved Malediction while I tried to tackle a primary target which was outside of all bubbles and a Bestower while I was looting after the battle was over. But all in all our losses are tiny compared to the huge amount of ISK lost by TCF, MM, MH and DEFY. 33 carrier on the killboard so far.
What a nice evening!
In the last weeks I was a little absent from EvE and blogging because I have to write a few term papers for university. In the few hours I had the chance to play EvE I mostly flew missions in Null Sec or took the chance to get some PvP action. But nothing interesting happened so far, except of the fact that Stealth Bombers are becoming fairly popular in Ev0ke after some members of the KdZ managed to kill a lot ISK with them.
To bad for me that I haven’t finished training Fleet BS (60 days left) yet, so I can’t jump on the Stealth Bomber band wagon for now.
Uncategorized
August 23rd 2009
Every time I look at my wallet in EvE I become a little bit depressed and I don’t like to be depressed. That’s why I started ratting again. It’s not that I like ratting that much but for now it has the best time-money-risk-ratio.
The problem was to find the right ship for the job. In my early ratting days I flew a Harbinger and later a Apocalyspe which I lost a few weeks ago. Because the Apocalypse is far to expensive (250 mio ISK) at the moment I decided to jump into a Harbinger again. The last time I used the Harbinger in 0.0 I had a lot of problems fighting against the battleship rats. It took an awful long time (5 minutes) to kill one and I only could take one at a time. To my surprise this has changed a lot probably because I have better skills now.
Click here to read more.. »
A few days ago I had the chance to fly around in my new tackle frigate I described in my last post. Altogether I was pleased with the performance of my Executioner especially if you only have to pay 250,000 ISK for the ship + fitting. Nevertheless I had the feeling that 3000 m/s is’nt fast enough. Some of the ships we tried to attack were very fast and managed to escape. I would feel more comfortable if I could fly 4000 m/s – 5000 m/s.
I played a bit with EFT and the best I could build was an Executioner with two Nanofibers in the low slots which makes 3223 m/s. So in order to be able to fly 4000 m/s – 5000 m/s I would have to use another ship.
What can you recommend?
Uncategorized
July 22nd 2009
Editors note:
The fitting in this post is based on my skills and my experiences. I am relatively new to EvE and so this might not be the best fitting there is. I also chose an Amarr frigate because Amarr ships are the only ones I can fly.
In my previous post I described how my last roaming gang went and that I realized that my Punisher was not suitable for tackling enemy ships. Today I want to post my fitting for my new T1 tackle frigate. But before I’ll begin I would like to tell you what I think is most important for those kind of ships:
1. Speed
Since you will chase after your prey you should be able to be at least as fast as your victim or you’ll only see his rear light and a loud laugh when he is out of range of your warp disruptor and warps away.
2. Mobility
If you reached your target and it’s to slow to run from you (battleships for example) you want to orbit it with high speed and minimal distance to avoid being hit by its weapons (except for a few exceptions). You also want to align your ship fast to be in warp as quick as possible.
3. Capacitor
To use all of your ships equipment you need enough capacitor. Nothing is more annoying than running out of capacitor and to see your enemy warp away because your warp disruptor deactivated.
So my new ship should meet this specifications:
- Cheap
- Fast (>2500 m/s)
- High mobility (Align time < 4 seconds and small orbit radius @ high speed )
- Enough capacitor (>1 minute)
As basis I’ll use the Amarr Executioner because it’s a fast and cheap ship. Here is my fitting:
T1 Tackle Executioner
As you can see it’s very fast with 3000m/s, it’s aligning in only 3 seconds and with Nosferatu on my target the capacitor will last for about 1 minute and a few seconds. The overall cost for this ship is about 250,000 ISK so it is meeting all my specs.
I made some orbiting tests but they weren’t satisfying. With MWD enabled I could orbit a ship with nearly 2000m/s with a distance of 5000-6000m. To orbit at closer range I had to disable the MWD and that made me orbit at 2500-3000m with 500m/s. Both is not as good as I wanted it to be.
After my next gang I can hopefully write a post with a positive feedback on that fitting.
So stay tuned!
To push my PvP skills further I decided to take my little Punisher out for a spin and joined my corp mates in a small scale PvP roaming gang through the Syndicate and Outer Ring. To sum things up we killed three ships in about two hours and lost two ships. Not that much I guess but we had a good ISK efficiency.
Kills:
- Manticore (29 Mio. ISK)
- Astarte (168 Mio. ISK)
- Apocalypse (190 Mio. ISK)
Losses:
- Wolf (30 Mio. ISK)
- Purifier (29 Mio. ISK)
So all together we killed 387 Mio. ISK and lost 59 Mio. ISK. This is nearly a 6.5 to 1 ratio so we were pretty successful!
My job in our small gang was to tackle our targets because frankly, I couldn’t harm anyone with my Punisher. When we attacked our first target (Astarte) I tried to deal some damage with my autocannons but I only made a whopping 113 damage so the rest of the evening I did not bother to fire my guns.
Later I also realized that I was unable to be of value as a tackler because I wasn’t fast enough. Most of the time I’ve been the second or third one to arrive at the “crime scene” (my Punisher has a maximum speed of about 1800 m/s with the MWD enabled). The next time I go back to the Executioner which I favor over the Punisher because of the higher top speed (~2550 m/s) and higher mobility.
Yesterday I spontaneously pre-ordered my copy of Tony Gonzales upcoming EvE novel “The Empyrean Age”. I’ve never read an EvE related book before (maybe because there are so few?) but for 7 Euros I just had to try it out. Sadly I have to wait about three weeks since it will be shipped on August 3rd.
When I finished reading it I will write a review.
Uncategorized
July 12th 2009
You know the special feeling when you are doing something stupid in EvE Online and in the very moment you finished your click you already know you are going to screw up big time? This week I had such a “special” EvE moment. I lost my ratting Apocalypse (the ship you can see on the picture above) which I had build a few weeks ago for ratting battleships in 0.0 space. Overall I paid about 230 million ISK. A lot of money for me. And worst of all I had no insurance for the ship.
Amarr Apocalypse
So what went wrong? Looking back I have to concede that I did a big noob mistake. So that’s the story how I lost my first Apocalypse:
I was ratting in the belts. Local had about 60 pilots, most of them blue and two neutrals. I think you already know where this is going. While I shot one battleship after another I noticed a small ship approaching. First I thought it’s an alliance member looking for the same thing I was looking for: rats. But to be sure I checked Local to see if it’s a neutral. To my surprise it was a neutral but he left the belt and I thought everything is ok. WRONG. I should have become suspicious at this point. I stayed in the belt to loot and salvage the wrecks. While I was doing that I aligned to the only station in the system where I usually bring my loot so I just would have to click “warp” to leave the belt. And then it happened. The neutral returned and I became nervous and quickly warped away. He wasn’t able to target me.
But wait! I forgot something. My precious tech 2 drones (Warrior II)! That’s why I decided to return to the belt when I arrived at the station. I mean what can one small ship do? It’s not going to do any harm. Ohhh … how wrong I was. And I knew this the moment I entered warp. I knew I am going to get to the belt, get scrambled and killed.
And that’s exactly what happened. Immediately after I came to the belt I looked for something to warp to direct in front of me so I don’t have to do a lot of aligning but it was to late. The small ship (Rupture) blocked my ability to warp so I was stuck in the belt. Then all his friends came to finish me. All in all five players shared the joy of shooting at me. One Rupture, two Vexor, one Arbitrator and one Moa.
So what have I learned from all this?
- Never ever feel to comfortable even if the local is full of blues
- Never underestimate small ships
- Think twice before you warp back in such a situation
- Use the right “Overview” settings so you can tell if it’s friend or foe with one look
Stupid ideas
July 12th 2009
These days it’s good to have blog so you can write your opinions about everything no one is interested in to the interwebs. Since I have a little personal weblog for quite a while now where I write about everything which comes to my mind I thought it would be good to write about EvE Online there too. But after my third post on the topic I thought it would look bad if my more or less serious blog is full of EvE Online posts. Maybe some people could come to the conclusion that I am playing MMORPGs the whole day which is kind of wrong. So I decided to shift my EvE Online blog posts to a seperate blog and join the noble league of EvE bloggers.
But enough of this chit chat. Let’s come back to EvE.
At first I would like to write about my EvE background. I have started playing EvE in late November of 2008 after I played the 14 days trial two times. Immediately after I switched from trial to paid subscription I started looking for a corporation. To make things easier I decided to join a german corporation. Not that I am not capable of speaking english but when it comes to PvP and you have to pass information fast you don’t want to start thinking about the right vocabulary.
After a week long search I found the “Konstrukteure der Zukunft” (KdZ) which you can translate as “Constructors of the Future” and landed my ship in their hangar. And I am still loyal to them and will be in the future since it’s a nice group of people. The main focus of the about 80 members of my corporation is PvP but we also have some traders and miners. We are part of the Evoke alliance and currently located in the Syndicate.
My main character, Sodan Bikatur, is an Amarr warrior and just reached 10 million skill points. The focus is obviously PvP since I choose to be a warrior. But I am thinking of having another account because I like the whole trading/producing and mining thing EvE offers.
My PvP skills are low at best, in fact I start thinking I am not made for PvP. I got podded several times and till today I have not made a single kill. But I won’t give up so fast.
Most of my ingame time I spend ratting to get money for a new ship. I only get to play EvE two or three times a week so I sadly can’t make that much money. Or I just didn’t found the right way to generate a huge load of ISK (I think it’s the latter). From time to time I like to join my corporation members to get some PvP action in the hope to get some more experience but most of the time I end up in my beloved pod.
That’s for now. I hope to be able to write my next post within the next few days.
Stay tuned!
Uncategorized
July 11th 2009
sodan