Warfare & Tactics

If you want, my main can WarDec you and give you all the lessons you need.

Unfortunately you only have 5 members and in my experience the mouthy ones such as yourself never actually undock to engage.

Probably the activities of the pilots you mentioned had nothing to do with you and was just part of their regular business model.

Leave it to carebear hubris to believe anything they actually do matters and that they're capable of competing in arms with PvPers.

Perhaps you missed the part in the title where it said "STORY".

I enjoyed it and will keep an eye out for further updates, have fun.

Thanks, here’s an update …

It’s been quite an education so far.

Trying to run a solo hisec wardec against a widely dispersed alliance is hard work. Now I understand why, when I was a miner-noob, the griefers who hassled us worked in gangs and tended to camp gates on our main supply routes or station undocks.

The alliance that I’ve been trying to griefer-grief is spread widely across the cosmos: w-space, Vorsk and associated Minmatar hisec, Osmon / Gicodel SoE mission locations, and a bundle of Amarr hisec systems and regions.

For me it has been an exercise in meticulous surveillance, interspersed with mad 24-gate sprints to try for a single easy(ish) kill. It’s also been an education in tricks and counter-tricks.

Some of the things so far:
- I think they probably know who most of my scout alts are by now. Being solo there are only so many useful alts I can employ, and I don’t have anyone suitable for biomassing and replacing.
- One of their more clever hisec miners moved himself to a humungous system and setup in the belt furthest from any gate. The shortest warp to him was over 50AU, so when I land on his grid he has long-gone. OFC whenever I was in-system he stayed docked. I tried an in-warp corp-switch [1] tackle but made the switch too early (I should have waited until I was decelerating onto grid) and he was still gone when I landed, and now I have to wait another week on that alt. Perhaps a logoffski is my only way to catch him now, but I don’t think I can spare a character just on the off-chance he will start mining there again.
- One of their SoE distribution mission runners has sensibly setup instawarp undock BMs and is using a blockade runner. I’ve been ongrid with him several times but not yet managed to achieve a lock. I know it’s near impossible to catch a well flown blockade runner, often being on the other side of this coin[2], but it’s been fun trying … and anyway my presence and persistence must be reducing his standings / LP flow a little.
- I did manage to tackle a mission-runner battleship, killed all except one of his drones and tanked his damage, only to run out of cap, lose point, and let him run away  Lessons from that one –, torp the drones early with javelins (I was picking them off slowly with a single small autocannon), prolly use EM torps to start with (likely shield resistance hole, despite my bonuses) and take a lot more care with capacitor management (active shield-tanking AB stealth bomber with a cap booster) and watching my range. I got down to half structure, but managed to keep repping my shields up, and got him to half-shields before he ran away. I am counting the fact that he fled as being a moral victory 
- Yesterday I did catch and kill a hulk, a hauler, and a couple of pods … so far for no further losses. Slim pickings, but better than nothing.
- Their numbers have reduced since I decced them, from over 250 to 115 now (DOTLAN stats). OFC this could be natural attrition but, up until the dec, they had been growing steadily. One corp CEO did evemail me and made it clear that their alliance-dropping was due to the hassles of the wardec. Perhaps clutching at straws but I’ll claim another moral victory here.

Plan.

Stick with it for a while longer and see whether I can improve my seek-and-destroy tactics. Keep on trying to locate their wormhole. Try and come up with more tactics and ideas to improve my chances of gaining more kills. Resist the temptation to open more accounts to get more scout alts – CCP would approve but my bank manager would not.

___________

1. in-warp corp-switch. Intending tackler starts out in non-combatant corp but with application accepted to the wardec corp, just not confirmed by the tackler. Opens the corp window to recruiting tab, commences warp to target (could be done while stationary, but I wanted to have no decloak delay – recon – once ongrid with target) and during that warp hit the ‘accept’ button on the corp recruitment offer. The idea is that when I land I am at war with the target and able to lock / point him instantly. You can only do this once a week per character though.
2. https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=77821&find=unread … yes, I do like writing rambling longwinded stories 

Thanks, that is interesting. Clearly I am going to need to do some more checking on that front.

I love this to bits. Keep up playing EVE your own way! Don't let anyone discourage you!

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Thanks for sharing your story. :)

yay, they live :-)

p.s. I had a long chat with the guy who pulled the ghost-rider on me ... sneaky b.tard that he was. In between calling him uncharitable things I was very complimentary of his little trick, kudos to him. Curiously, after that chat, he applied to come join our alliance, and seems to be happily and competently defending Vale from TEMP right now.

Lmao, the fact the guy tries to save face as an npc corp member is quite funny.

Good on you mate, especially if you are only learning. Leeroying into a corp of multiple players would be less than smart, afking in their systems and hunting those away from the main school was your best chance at picking some off.

You may have lost an expensive covops, but its hardly a chest beating achievement to kill a covops in a heavy assault cruiser, you just got unlucky to be decloaked. In future in those situations, I would suggest always warping to 10km or so after checking for any roids, cans, corpses etc that may decloak you, if things look bad when you land you have a chance at bouncing out, and you only have to burn 1km to grab point if things look good.

My take aways from reading.

1. Solo player gives something new a go, and has some fun.
2. You lost a ship but learned a lesson in the process.
3. You dissuaded them from their original purpose.
4. You inspired some of the hostile members to change sides.
5. You didn't give in to an extortion attempt from someone without a spine to back it up.

Entertaining read anyway :)