EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

Fight #3 vs. YOUR VOTES DON'T COUNT
Oh my god, it's PL B (except it's not), hide your wives, lock your kids and pull out the big guns, we have a situation here! We have studied the scary, lean and mean shield dps setups that Waffles fielded over the first weekend, and decided that the best medicine here would be to give them the taste of the same tactic; that said, we were quite sure that Waffles will bring a new setup, a counter to our dps setups (a lot of TDs, maybe missiles, maybe a lot of neuts). We have banned the Dominix (to not have to worry about them), and then Malice - because basically there was no other ship that we would have been afraid of, and even though it was unlikely Waffles would field it, it's a nasty nasty ship, likely THE most evil tournament ship ever.

The match ended up to be a mirror match, only that we started in a slightly advantageous position (there was a good chance that Waffles would come at 0 with their big ships, so we had our BS's @10km with Null loaded, and intended to 90% web and TD their battleships and thus avoid most of their damage). The AFs were tasked to dive for the enemy logistic and kill it asap (with the support from sentry drones fielded by our BS's). And that's exactly what happened once the match started, we were slightly more on the ball, recieved less damage and killed their ships a little bit faster, which led to the victory.

Biggest mistakes: one burnt MWD, otherwise a pretty flawless match for us \o/

Fight #4 vs. Rote Kapelle
I remember Sakura Nihil and Bacchanalian from the early ATs. I enjoy and regularly read Jester's blog. I followed Bob Shaftoes and luckycss progress through NEO tournament. I knew Rote were the smart guys, the dangerous kind of smart guys, which I have a lot of respect for. What I didn't know was that there was a grudge between my guys and Rote from the Syndicate days, when I wasn't already flying any more. Apparently there have been many bitter fights, hotdrops, killmail disputes and R0NIN were usually on the losing side - something that my guys wanted to pay back.

If we suspected Waffles to bring a counter to our turret setups, we were certain in the case of Rote that they will do it. We knew we have to surprise them, and force them into a game they won't expect. Saturday late night, we had this idea to bring the very same setup we have flown against Waffles, but make it so that Rote will never suspect that we're bringing it - by banning both armor logistics, and thus outing all of the setups we have flown previously. I think the plan worked pretty well, and even though Rote fielded a decent anti-turret counter, it was gimped by T1 logistics, and the Geddons are not that great neut platforms due to 24sec heavy neut activation timer.

Biggest mistakes: we have lost the fleet bonuses when Navy Dominix died because we didn't shuffle the fleet structure accordingly; this is why was the poor Vindi so close to death during the middle of fight (the ship survived with 8% of structure); also I joined the prestigious Beyond the Edge of Glory club during this fight.

We have been thrilled to make it through the second weekend without a loss, and started preparing for the final weekend. We have been painfully aware of the amount of fights that can potentially happen on the road to finals, and decided we cannot let us lose a single match. We made a one big final shopping list (about 9B worth of ships), prepared two setups for Saturday and carefully examined the Exodus team for any sort of weakness. We have also decided that our variant of Minnie rush tactic will work fine against the Dominix fleet and that it's rather about how one flies the tactic, than what one fields. We knew we will want to play the tactic against the Exodus, but were not sure in which one match to field it. In the end we figured that we must wait for the bans, see if we will ban first or second, direct the bans one way or the other and then field a tactic accordingly. Last but not least, we had prepared two new anti-Ishtar/Gila setups (based on our existing setups, but modified for survivability against the sentry drones).

Fight #5 vs. Exodus (series match #1)
For some reason, we've been able to gather only very little intel on the Exodus, and I have totally missed the part where they have been second twice in the SCL o_O. This is not to say that we have underestimated them, but maybe we did, a little. After seeing the first ban (Claymore), we decided to roll with cruiser/damp fleet and ban Dominix and Armageddon in the hopes they will bring their flagship, we will have an early damping advantage, and kill the flagship for some nice extra income. Exodus avoided the bait, and brought the Ishtar/Gila fleet - which was one of the things we expected to see, but did have very little practice against.

We have been struggling right from the start of the match - we have lost the early e-war, slowly won the control back, and then again lost it several times during the match due to frenetic switching of the damps between the targets who managed to outdampen us, and their logistics. We had the lead at one point in the battle, but we failed to capitalize on it and instead of collapsing back into the ball of blaster death, we loosened up our formation even more, spread the damage too thin while trying to catch up with the targets and started losing ships. Crap.

Biggest mistakes: not sticking to the plan; not pulling away once we had a lead.

Fight #9 vs. Pandemic Legion (series match #1)
If there is a Nemesis of the R0NIN team, it would have to be the Pandemic Legion. On our best day (or when they shoot themselves in the foot), we can beat them - as we did in AT4 and NEO; but this match was our first proper AT rematch ever since they defeated us in AT6 finals. And Sunday wasn't our best day, sadly. We had a really simple strategy for Sunday - ban Dominix and Malice in all the fights, bring our anti-Ishtar/Gila setups (Sleipnir comp, group tanked BS/AF comp, Proteus comp), and if they ban Sleipnirs, immediately use their armor counterpart fleet comp - the Protei. That situation happened right in the first match, and it was on.

We wanted to take out their logistics, tackle some of their big ships nearby and have our logi surviving as long as possible. PL surprised us with their counter-dive on our logistic instead of kiting around, and threw us off balance. We swapped the logistics, and started brawling. PL was either lucky, or analysed our team really well, because the first Proteus to go down had the armor link (and we've been a bit cheap and predictable on the links front - the same guy had always armor links). If it wasn't for this - we might have had a slightly better chance, but would still probably lose, since PL had always the opportunity to starburst or kite away once they had a decent point lead.

Biggest mistakes: being in the losers bracket, pitted against PL

Fight #10 vs. Pandemic Legion (series match #2)
With Sleipnir being banned again, we had just the one setup to field - tanked flagship Vindicator AF rush with 5+2 super-bonused Damnation and Guardian that was supposed to tank a lot, and heal a lot. I'm still not sure what went wrong in this one - probably everything at once, because the Guardian evaporated in the first 20 seconds, and our flagship followed within the first minute. This was quite embarassing, we simply crumbled and got dunked.

Biggest mistakes: everything

And that was it, we were out in the 4th place, richer by the awesome experience of flying in the best and toughest Alliance Tournament that has happened ever so far, but otherwise still poor and without the shinies that we sought so much after. It's quite paradoxical that the best feeling about the tournament (apart from winning it) is to be finally out and relieved of the stress on all the levels that need to be managed. But we will be back for more, this was great!

I'd like to thank CCP for creating this wonderful game and tournament, and giving us players the opportunity to experience the e-sport of the future. I'm pretty sure that tournaments like these are one of the next big things in the entertainment industry, there will be more of it, and they will be ever more popular. Some of my buddies who've never played EvE admitted that this stuff is actually pretty intense and in a way even better than the regular sports they're used to watching.

I would also like to thank to all our opponents for the good fights; to all of my team-mates for the hard work, commitment and determination; to everyone who has been cheering for us; to the ATXI tournament commentators and the whole production team for a damn fine job; and to our Eve Online Hold'em (eohpoker.com) sponsors for their generous financial help.

/Sairait

awesome AAR

A great read for sure. A fantastic team, your match vs Darkside was just great.

Great AAR thanks for taking the time to post it :)

Good read, thanks.

+1 thanks for the good read and detailed insights

Thank you for the good read. I was very impressed with you guys last year when I observed you during our training session prior to NEO, and I think that with 12 only people you made fantastic result. Hopefully you will continue with your competitive flying and we meet again.