Ships & Modules

I feel like this may be an unforseen consequence of TiDi rather than a balance issue, but what counters a fleet of carriers this large?

They usually have ECCM like crazy, and if there are only 200 archons in that blob (lets face it, thats a conservative estimate), thats 11.4 bhaalgorn hours of neuting without considering that they can cap transfer each other to generate cap from nowhere.

This seems like a job for the almighty Titan; it's the king of alpha strike and will be able to rip those carriers down one by one, but of course nobody is just going to cyno in a titan alone, so youre also going to bring in a support fleet.

The problem is simply a matter of time. All of these ships in local are going to cause a lot of lag, and at 10% TiDi, 5 hours IRL becomes 30 minutes in game. This means that you will get a maximum of 6 DDs off killing a whooping 6 carriers in 5 hours, so in order for you to kill all 200 carriers, you would need 34 titans, and it would still take you all of the 5 hours. This not to mention that you are risking nearly 8 times the ISK value in titans alone to make this happen.

The problem is that once you have a sufficiently large slowcat fleet, if one of your pilots makes a mistake, you only need to bring in a few hundred slow cats and rep until down time which is made possible by TiDi slowing everything down, nothing will die unless they have a large enough fleet to alpha strike the titan/supercarrier that made the mistake.

We know this is the case because that was exactly PL's plan when test screwed up in Z9PP-H. Of course we never got to see this in action because of CCP shenanigans, but should this be a viable tactic?

Thoughts? Comments?

keep the bubbles up, so they cant leave, and attack somewhere else?

carriers can be remote repped dreads in siege cannot.
carriers can focus fire much better than dreads because of drone assist
carriers can stay aligned and warp out dreads are stuck.
dreads have much higher dps and if they focus fire they can volley a carrier.
lol at triage carriers in a big fleet

Congratulations, you have discovered the complaint of the month - slowcats and sentry drones..

In another post, I mention 4 tactics for dealing with the blobs:
https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=4117162#post4117162

Many nullsec fleet doctrines have "cat" at the end because Shadoo likes cats. So there.

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Simple really, just remove the ... because HTML can't be directly posted to the forum =) Only certain colours work though, so nothing like dark green works.

As for what can counter slowcats, goons are making their artillery Naglars now (Omegafleet), Megathron fleet and Domi fleet has both worked out in the past as well. You would need 2 titans to doomsday the same carrier as they would likely be DD tanked to prevent one DD from killing it. Chimeras are also tougher than Archons I believe, at least there hasn't been any of them lost from a similar doctrine (I believe).

big enough alpha fleet outside of their sentries reach will kill them one by one.
Yes, it will lag like hell but, well, thats always the thing mass battles will run into.

That didn't sound butt-hurt at all...

The CFC brings us one answer to this conundrum: Cry about it anywhere and everywhere you can, at every opportunity, to as many people as possible. Ensure you have some seats on the CSM, and/or that some devs used to be members of your corp/alliance/coalition. Author whiny articles on every propaganda outlet you have access to. Basically, cause a big enough PR stink, and you can motivate CCP to step in and solve your problems for you by changing the rules of the game itself. (see impending OmniLink nerf)

Alternatively:



This classic strategy - or slightly different flavors of it, such as a coordinated, many-pronged invasion - requires a massive numerical advantage to truly apply any pressure. Weight of numbers is an asset that the CFC regularly capitalizes on in lieu of inspired, novel or unique tactics, so it is doubly interesting that they deflect this suggestion whenever faced with it, if they indeed acknowledge that it was floated at all. The best I've gotten is different variations on "But that would be really hard, because timers". I have tentatively concluded that, in actuality, they decided that a political campaign would achieve their goals in a much simpler and more cost-efficient manner.

Just as Sun Tzu said! Attack where the enemy is not.

War is an economic tool to profits, not a tool to get glory for winning epic battles. So if the enemy gathers hundreds of capitals in one spot (preferably because you tricked them into going to a time and place of your choosing) means you can accomplish something elsewhere. heck, you can probably win a battle if an enemy fleet of 200+ carriers attack something of yours that is valuable, if you have a fleet ready to attack something of value to them. Then they can disengage to go defend their valuable asset while you just then protected yours without firing a shot. You can also just goad the enemy to travel all over the universe in search of your forces and then never giving them a fight, that is very demoralizing for their pilots and will decrease fleet size considerably over time.
Taking a system from the enemy while they take one from you and never going for a huge confrontation is also a possible tool for exhausting pilots and depleting morale. If you do it right it happens faster to the enemy than to your own forces, and then it doesn't matter how many capitals the enemy have, because they aren't flying.

I think I'm right in saying that not a single war in Eve was won because one side got all or most of their ships destroyed. So don't be so quick to think in terms of "how to destroy the enemy fleet?" when the problem at hand is really "how to take over their territory in such a way that they don't bother to take it back?". If you can take their territory by not ever confronting their huge fleets, you don't ever confront their huge fleets.

PS: You may use glory to raise morale so your pilots turn up to battles when you need them to, but as the commander you should be immune to the wanting of glory.

PostPostScript: Have you ever considered that using slowcat fleets and other fleets that are demoralizing to fight against, is actually just a morale weapon that is used on purpose for its demoralizing effect, not its battle-winning effect?

If the CFC brought their Mael fleet instead of domis, they would have won.

I'm pretty sure 900 arty maels could alpha a single archon. This is a lot cheaper than risking a bunch of titans, and it would bring mittens and the rest of the CFC's guys upstairs great satisfaction as they used their beloved sub-caps to batter a slowcat fleet, rather than forcing a capital escalation.

Sebo and tracking computers with range scripts would put you outside of the Sentry drone range, if the the slowcats supporting subcaps came to shoot you, they would have 0 traversal against an arty mael blob....you'd batter the subcaps too.

This all said I'm just an armchair general in all this, null is for carebears. LONG LIVE W-SPACE