A couple of days ago, I came across a C3 crew who were running sites, 4 Tengus, 1 Loki and a Noctis on standby in their POS fields. Oh, also at that POS, a Chimera carrier with fighter drones out. Our team had about 3 guys online with varying interest and skill in PvP and since I did not see any way to threaten the site runners directly, I planned to take down the Noctis in some glorious Banzai charge. I sort of hoped that the site runners would warp in the Noctis, then move on to the next site. That would be my sweet spot to drop the industrial and make away with little loot but some bragging rights. Needless to say, I was in my bomber – that’s what I use for solo hunting in Wormhole Space.
But it turns out that the T3s stayed as body guards with the Noctis after the combat was done – and I have been in that situation before. Annoying, staring at prey and not being able to do anything about it.
Then a few more of our guys logged in and among them Dean – one of our more aggressive PvP-ers. He stated that players who hunt with bombers are basically carebears (ouch!), organized everyone into Drakes (the lowest common denominator that we can all fly) and warped us into the middle of the 5 T3 site runners. Who ran like hell – they likely had a scout on the WH in and saw us coming a mile away.
Arm-chair generals will now debate whether we should have warped a bubble ship in first etc but that is beside the point. Dean saw the situation, put everyone into some PvP ship and just warped on top of them. Elegant? No. Risky? Not really (we knew the opposing team is a carebear corp and please, we used Drakes). Decisive? Absolutely.
That made me think. For the very vast majority of my EVE time, I have been carebearing, organizing recruitment drives, trained total newbs not to get seen or killed and stalked solo or at best in ultra-small teams, often consisting only of 1 or 2 other pilots. I spent some time with Red v. Blue and faction war, hanging out with great and not so great FCs. But I never really caught the bug of fleet engagements, never wanted to be an FC myself and rather assessed the situation from a solo perspective who uses the fleet as a means to get the job done. Maybe because I had not spent enough time in that environment but likely also because I spent way too much time reliant on myself and nobody else.
Ok, lets back up a second. My fleet mate took charge of a situation after most of the intel work was done. We knew who they were, how many and where. We know their combat record, we knew that they were PvE fit, we knew that it is likely not a a single guy with tons of alts. How did we know this? Because a couple of my fleet mates and I had spent time stalking them. I am good at that – I am very rarely wrong in my situation awareness. To see and not to be seen (Videre sine videri) is what I do well. And with limited game time (as readers of these humble pages may have noticed), I should likely focus on that rather than try to be what I am not good at: “balls-out engagements”.
In this vein, I thought about writing an EVE guide, since every experienced pilot seems to have one. I have not done it yet this since I am intimidated by experts like pjharvey, Ripard Teg and many others. And what kind of guide would it be? Solo hunting in WH space? There are excellent guides already. A real “how-to manual” is out, I am just not qualified.
But I will start a series of short posts here, explaining my approach to Wormhole survival, both for defensive and offensive use. It will not be a guide but simply explain how and why I do things and I hope to learn from the comments the errors of my ways.
So, watch this space. And if you don’t see anything, that does not mean, I am not watching you…
A journey through the mind 