EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Don't call it a Cinderella Story - Agony's path through ATXI

INTRODUCTION

Agony has participated in the tourney since AT3 with a couple of short breaks. In general, we finish in the Top 16, sometimes doing better, and sometimes worse. Our approach to entering the AT has evolved over the years to match what works for our corp: Keep it casual and fun, without onerous leadership or implausible aspirations. Preparations also can't take too much of our time due to family obligations and a desire to continue our regular PVP operations.

THE COST OF A TOURNEY

Many months before ATXI was announced, several of our members expressed an interest in flying in the AT. They went about fundraising for the tourney to help cover the costs, which can be a hurdle to smaller alliances like ourselves. Overall we raised 40b to enter the tourney, which is sufficient to cover expenses. Is this enough to fund a tourney team? In AT X Agony finished in the top 16 (while prepared to go further), and spent 11b on implants, 12b on ships, and 5b on fittings. This year CCP limited implants to 3% hardwiring, which drastically reduced implant costs, but also introduced ship bans which doubled ship hull costs. Unless you have a penchant for fielding highly blingy setups, 30-40b isk is still the approximate upfront cost of the tournament.

PREPARING OUR TEAM

It is a lot of work theorycrafting setups, scheduling practices, organizing matches, and preparing teams for the tournament. This year, we selected three volunteers to take on this responsibility: Gizznitt Malikite (our CEO and AT veteran), Roddex (relative newcomer), and Hsu Li (another AT veteran). The two major components in preparing our team were theorycrafting and practicing. Anyone can write a team composition on a napkin while out drinking, but it takes a considerable amount of effort to turn that concept into a ready-to-fly state and be able to execute it. So everyone was encouraged to contribute and many stepped up.

Originally, we had less than 20 people interested in the tourney, which is not enough to fully test any fleet comps against each other. We practiced the base concepts, and spent time honing piloting skills within an arena, such as situational awareness, comms discipline, and ship management. We participated in CCP’s “mock” tourney to get more practice, and extended a practice invite to RvB (with CCP’s approval). We didn't share setups, nor bring our most promising ones, but the lessons we learned as RvB often stomped us very much revealed the weaknesses or strengths of our setups. We owe thanks to our friends in RvB for the practice sessions, which we had a lot of fun doing. In the 7 weeks before and during the AT, we spent about 30 or so hours of practicing, and had about a dozen viable & varied fleet comps. With this, we felt well prepared to make a decent endeavor in the tourney.

WEEK 1: Yay, we're not out yet!

vs. Sadistica Alliance: Never having had an intel network and not really having time to dabble in that sort of stuff, we didn’t know what to expect from Sadistica. We decided to bring our Vindicator and AF setup, which is one of the stronger and popular setups fielded in AT X. Sadistica brought a damp triple-Domi setup with a support wing that was much weaker than ours. They used their frigate support to halt our Vindicator's progress and focused sentry fire on our battleships and Onieros. By keeping transversal up, our Onieros pilot survived, although we lost a Vindicator. Meanwhile, our strong AF wing took out their logistics, and most of their support shortly thereafter. GF, Sadistica.

vs. Confederation of xXPIZZAXx: For the second fight, we brought a similar setup with one more Maulus and Navy Megathron instead of a second Vindicator. xXPIZZAXx brought a modified Sleipnir Rush team with Caracals and stealth bombers. At the start, we had a bit of a Mexican standoff, but then led an attack with our battleships. xXPizzaXx primaried our Vindicator, but reps from our Onieros and damage mitigation from our damps kept it up long enough to web a Sliepnir. This fight really came down to a primary DPS race between our Vindicator and their Sliepnir, where our damps and tracks played a huge role in reducing their DPS and neutralizing their logistics. We won the DPS race, killed their Scimitar with our AFs, and finished the fight losing an Onieros, Ishkur, and Maulus. For those listening to the match commentary: yes, we had a smartbomb on our Vindicator. A flight of 20 EC-300/600 drones can jam out an ECCM-fit Vindicator often enough to turn a fight. Trading 12.5% of our “up-front” dps for the smartbombs generally provided more reliable overall dps. Good fight xXPizzaXx, it was close there for a while. Happy with our own performance, we sat down to watch some of the other matches and have a few beers while cheering our hero Maulus pilots.

WEEK 3: OMG, THIS IS SO MUCH FUN!

vs HUN Reloaded: We had a good idea of what Hun might bring due to their tendency to master only a limited number of setups (remember the Vargurs?). We chose our bans to encourage them to bring Navy Scorpions again, which were weak against damps. They banned the Keres and Maulus (again), leaving us the opportunity to modify our Vindicator and AF setup by adding a Celestis. Sure enough, Hun brought the SNI variant of their comp, and our hero Celestis pilot went to work negating most of their ranged DPS for a good five minutes. Eventually Hun put all their RSB’s on one SNI, at which point we rushed in, damped out their logistics, and ganked an AF. They responded by engaging our Onieros and almost brought it down. That’s when our jamming frigates neutralized their AF tackle and soon thereafter jammed their Basilisk, at which point our Vindicator and AF’s took out their Hawks and Harpies. Having won the support war, and having a stabilized logistics ship, we then attacked their Basilisk and won the fight. Our team felt this fight was by far our best match, from planning to execution, including an uncharacteristic display of patience by our normally aggressive pilots. Thank you for the GF HUN.

vs. Rote Kapelle: So, we were past Hun and with no real plan how to proceed now that we faced our next-door neighbors from Syndicate. Without a metagame plan, we just started to tailor our bans to keep our options open. When Rote banned Tengu & Vulture to avoid our Unbreakable tinker, we followed with the Domi. Likely to face Rattlers, we prepped our triple Hyperion Team, which, despite their low success rates in the tourney so far (including our own loss with them), we still believed was a strong setup. Rote brought a setup centered on two Fleet Typhoons that we weren’t sure how best to engage. At the start, we planned to kill their Basilisk, which smartly kited off. They primaried our Onieros, which had strong rep support from our Hyperions' logistics drones, as well as an afterburner to mitigate cruise missile and sentry damage. When we got tackle on a Typhoon, our Hyperions engaged and killed it while their Basilisk was held down by AF’s and unable to rep it because of jams and damps. As we were killing their Fleet Typhoon, they switched to one of our Hyperions, and almost took it out by neutralizing our Onieros reps with neuts and damps. We scored the first BS kill, and then sent our Hyperions after their tackled Basilisk, which our frigate wing was having trouble breaking. At this point, Rote blocked the passage of our battleships by tackling them with frigates, put major neut pressure on our Onieros with their Gilas and Typhoon, and put their DPS on the Hyperions. They successfully downed our first Hyperion, and had a second Hyperion pinned when our third Hyperion finally got tackle on their Basilisk. That enabled our frigates to start killing their support and free our up our pinned Hyperion. Once freed, the second Hyperion powered to their Basilisk which died shortly thereafter, but the match was still very close, as they almost had our second Hyperion down. We then tackled their remaining Fleet Typhoon and held it for our Hyperions to attack, while our remaining frigate wing took on a Gila. We lost our second Hyperion before their Typhoon died, and we lost two Enyos before the Gila died. At that time, we had a firm advantage and won the match. This was a very tough match, and we teetered on the edge of losing several times. GF Rote Kapelle.

vs. Ministry of Inappropriate Footwork (who are NOT M.I.F.): We actually had two hours until this match started, which gave us some time to prepare. We noticed that Footwork preferred close range brawling proteus comps and thought it was a good time to bring out our "Spam and Damp" missile kiting setup. We banned out their Vigilants because they were fast enough to catch our kiters, and banned the Ishtar just to limit their force projection. Sure enough, Footwork brought a triple Proteus brawling setup, and we proceeded to, well, spam and damp them to a slow death. They charged after our Basilisk with their AF’s, which allowed our Tengus, Caracals, and screening Sabres to take most of their frigate support as we damped out their Onieros. When we had difficulty killing their remaining Ishkurs who were receiving Onieros reps, we took out their logistics ship, and then their Ishkurs. At this point, Footwork managed to chase down one of our Tengus, tying up the scoreboard. However, through careful flying our remaining ships successfully kited within the Arena, killed their Prophecy (which didn’t have such insane kinetic resists), and won the match. This was one of our most piloting-intensive compositions, as kiting within the arena while evading tackle is much harder than it looks, and took some failed practices before we got it down. GF Footwork.

vs. Pandemic "I will taunt you a second time" Legion: To be honest, we weren't prepared to face PL again. We had a very short time to prepare for the match, and in a failed attempt to out-meta the meta-masters we brought exactly the same Hyp3rion setup that lost to them previously. Instead, they out-meta'ed us and brought Blackbirds & Proteus AGAIN. We did not expect such a duplicate match, and their composition, especially with Celestis damps and Proteus Information Warfare links, very effectively neutralized our team. Hyp3rions spent the entire match without locks or with 90-second lock timers, which was frustrating, but we've done the same to others in previous tournaments so we can't complain. At least our egos were also somewhat smoothed the next day, when it turned out that our only two losses in AT XI were to the eventual tourney winners GF PL, well done throughout the tourney.

Thanks for the AAR, these are always very interesting to read.

Nice read, you guys were a very strong team this year.

Great showing Agony, was very entertaining to watch your performances all three weekends. Looking forward to what you will bring in ATXII. May not have been able to 'out Meta the Meta masters' but you always represented a threat.

Well written AAR! It was a pleasure to fight. o7

Great piloting and nice AAR.