EVE Alliance Tournament Discussion

A few people wanted to hear about our ATXII attempt, so here goes. There's a tl;dr at the end.

At the beginning of this year, there was a bit of interest from a few members about us fielding a team for the AT, however not enough people were keen - about 5 people in total were. I wasn't one of those for some RL reasons & I wasn't particularly hot on Eve at that time.

I participated in NEO II as part of The Reputation Cartel (which I was a member of before for a few SCLs) and found out too late that I actually really enjoyed the tournament experience - the shakes, the adrenaline and the build up. In early April, I queried on our forums again and this time we managed to get the absolute minimum I considered necessary for an decent AT bid - 20 people who would be willing to play in the matches. 10-11 other Tuskers were also willing to help with practices when they could. To the average team that probably doesn't sound like a ton of interest, but considering that our corporation always hovers between 80 and 100, that's quite a high portion, particularly when about 20 of them haven't logged on since 2013.

It was at this time I basically recruited Bei ArtJay., one of the main guys from The Ministry of Inappropriate Footwork team from ATXI. I made it clear that the AT was not the focus of the corp, but it would feature heavily in the coming months. He accepted for some reason.

We started practicing almost immediately - our first practice was scheduled for Saturday 12th April, almost exactly 5 months to the day of AT XII finishing. It was probably excessively early, but considering we had very little AT experience in the team (I helped Hydra last year, Bei was in Footwork and another member was in RvB's ATX or ATIX team), we had very little understanding of the meta. We had a few guys who had also been in NEO II, but none of us had done amazingly well, so we weren't that well informed as to the current state of affairs. Our goal was to finish in the Top 16 basically.

We started off with 1 practice a week, which was on a Saturday at 19:00. Basically for our cross EU-US timezone team (75% EU, 25% US or something), that was the best compromise of timezone we could come up with. Thankfully most of our US guys were East Coast, which made it easier. We started off with the basics - manual piloting within a limited arena, how to tackle the most efficient way by spreading out your tacklers, managing transversal vs sentry drones etc. At this point we had about 20 guys show up for practice - about 25% of our entire corp who was not completely inactive.

Using the rules from NEO II (adjusted to allow for 12 pilots), we started making basic comps, pretty much extensions of what we saw in NEO II as well as from AT XI - stuff like Minmatar Rush (which I wasn't too keen on) as well as Gallente Rush (basically the Rep Cartel 3 x Astarte comp Bob made with an expanded support wing). Pretty basic stuff.

Anyway, at this point we didn't have enough people to do full internal tests so I reached out to potential other AT teams, keeping in mind that AT XII wasn't even officially announced. Through the ex-RvB pilot we had, we managed to arrange a practice with RvB in mid-May, using whatever comps you wanted on the Saturday as well as a practice vs Agony on the Sunday. Up until this point, we had not really flown in any 12 vs 12 practices, more like 5 vs 5 or just flying the ships by themselves with no cohesion between them. So, even though RvB are not the best team we were expecting to pretty much get smashed. We ended up "winning" the practice 3-2, even whilst fielding a 9 man under-pointed comp vs a full 12 man comp. We did get smashed by their Rattlesnake comp in our *amazing* Hyperion comp though. Goddamn Rattlesnakes running the Hype-train.

From that single practice we learnt so much about actually co-ordinating our fleets etc. that honestly it opened our eyes. Against Agony we faired much better, not dropping a match during our practice. At the time we were pretty ecstatic, but in hindsight they did run experimental comps vs our "standard" comps or just flew them weirdly (in our opinion). From this point forward (mid-May) we pretty much moved to two practices a week - one on the Saturday & one on the Sunday.

I started contacting other teams as it become more obvious which teams were going to participate and we wanted to find out what training partners we wanted, as well as how many. Most teams prefer to only have 1-2 training partners, but as it was our first tournament I wanted to have a bit of variety so we didn't end up tunnel visioning on a certain way of flying, certain types of comps etc. So, we ended up practicing with the following teams at one point or another:

Exodus
Ronin
Shadow Cartel
Triumvirate
RvB
Agony
Feign Disorder
N0IR.
Clockwork Pineapple
Rote Kapelle

In the end, we basically settled on three practice partners:

1. Exodus - simply because they were the biggest challenge as they could match us in terms of pure piloting, had far more experience and came up with some awesome comps. I think they were the only team to run a Marauder based comp vs us in practices.
2. Ronin - they flew the widest variety of comps of any practice partner we had and executed them well. With them we could be sure to get a wide range of comps to practice against - we once had a match of a Beam Absolution comp (don't ask) vs Armour Barghests. Who could possibly predict the winner?
3. RvB - they flew well and seemed to prefer a different style of flying compared to Exodus & Ronin

I'm pretty sure the above was sorted before the brackets were announced. We didn't establish regular practices with RvB due to clashes, eventually we arranged mid-week practices but our attendance was poor, regularly less than 10.

Match #5 vs C4mel:

We were already really happy with our results so far, being in the Winner's Bracket Semi-Finals, as well as being the #1 seed on the Brent scale (both C4mel and Hydra had lost more than 2 ships at this stage). We went into this match aware of the Marauder + mass heavy/sentry drone setup PL had introduced in Week 3. We figured there were a couple of counters, one of which was a modified Rattlesnake comp we fielded (our original one featured Mauluses, Shield Heretics/Worms, no AFs) and a tinker.

Anyway, we did not expect C4mel to field that setup, as we figured they would bring a control based comp as that seemed to be their style, as well as Hydra's. Hence why we brought the Armour Orthrus comp - it had 9 bonused damps, 11 unbonused damps, 3 bonused scramblers and 4 Kitsune jammers which was a ***** to deal with as the 3 Orthrus + 3 Heretic eliminates enemy support damn fast allowing you to focus your ewar even more. In the words of Shadow Cartel when we practiced it vs their Rattlesnake comp in the mid-week practice (after 3.5 minutes):

XX XX > ok, lets call it
XX XX > gf
XX XX > that
XX XX > is a nasty setup

Anyway, that failed horribly. We tried to clear off their drones which had a noticeable effect on their DPS, but it didn't really change anything as we would never have killed their Paladin. Out-played.

Match #6 vs C4mel:

We figured they would bring the same setup again and to be honest, we panicked. We ended up bringing the adapted Rattlesnake comp, which worked pretty well. We had our Worms & Crow each tackle a different ship, with all 3 Harpies & Hawk on the primary as the Worms could project their DPS via their drones and the AFs couldn't. In hindsight this was sub-optimal as the Rattlesnakes ended up doing most of the leg work, so we should have just tackled all of their Cruisers off the bait with our Frigates and quickly work our way through them.

Match #7 vs C4mel:

C4mel banned out the Rattlesnake so we figured they would bring out the same comp again despite changing their bans to ban Rattlesnakes. We had no other "easy" counter comp staged, besides I didn't have spare Harpies ready to go. Our only options being Gal Blitz (or spacewangs as it was informally called) or our Flagship comp adjusted slightly (swapping Vexors for Celestises/Kitsunes). We were getting pretty frantic due to the fast turnaround required for the Bo3s, which resulted in us bringing Gal Blitz, with the infamous hull tanked BNIs. Hull tanked BNIs are pretty legit - you get more EHP than an equivalent armour fit (107k vs 80k iirc) without any of the speed penalty. Sure, the logi frigs don't work quite so well, but they're only there to stem the bleeding, not stop it. That's what 8k+ overheated DPS is for.

Basically when we landed and saw their comp, we knew we had a chance. The original plan was to plow through their DPS core which would also screen us, breaking through due to their Tech1 hulls (Stratios gets a resist bonus but it has 1 less low than a VNI so ends up with the same tank generally). I changed it to trying to grab their Oneiros and killing that, but that cost us as they screened us too well (as you would expect...) and we didn't get enough DPS onto the Oneiros.

Match #8 - Ronin:

We were not looking forward to fighting Hydra in a BO1 elimination match, but luckily Ronin knocked them out which was awesome to see. Ronin's armour logi ban was interesting and left us only with our Rattlesnake comp and Gila based comps. We ended up bringing our original Rattlesnake comp vs a Sleipnir-Gila comp.

Ronin initially won the damp war but our Heretics pretty much volleyed one of their Mauluses which allowed us to regain control, meaning we had a bit more freedom to move around. We sent our Crow out to tackle their Scimitar, but he got tackled himself and died. In the meantime, we had a Harpy on our Scimitar with Sleipnirs & Gilas approaching. We cleared the Harpy off with our Heretics, whilst their aggressive movement forced their Scimitar into heavy neut range of our Rattlesnakes and exposing it to our DPS Tristan (didn't have any shield Kestrels or Merlins fit up, so Tristan had to do). It died shortly afterwards, at which point we started working through their Gilas. Whilst our Scimitar was tackled by their Sleipnirs, it managed to survive for ages as our Kitsune kept 2/3 of the Gila drones jammed, nullifying ~1200 DPS and 24 points. At this point, when it did die we were in a comfortably position. I flew poorly and got webbed by one of their Sleipnirs in my Claymore (had to fly my link alt as I can't use Siege Links on Sulei), but called for jams and the Sleipnir's web magically broke off. We kited them around and killed them. GFs all around and Ronin urged us to take the Championship.

Match #9 - Nulli

We were pretty annoyed about our performance vs C4Mel, but knew we could out-pilot Nulli.

We figured they would bring a Marauder setup as they banned Rattlesnake. We ran something we hoped would also do well - our Minmatar Rush comp with Shield Vexors and Harpies instead of the Heretics we normally ran. Here my second guessing messed us up, as their Vexors warped in at 30 whilst their Eos/VNI/Logi frigs warped in at 50. Therefore, I expected their Vexors to be bait tackler fit to slow down rush comps. We focused range damps on them, tackled them with our Harpies and ran past them to get onto the enemy VNIs. Unfortunately, with us having to run a Basilisk instead of a Scimitar we couldn't trade our logi as effectively as the drones caught up to it much faster, so we only traded a VNI for it. At that point our DPS basically split as the Harpies killed the Vexors they were tackling whilst our Sleipnirs ran around. It was unfortunate that the Sleipnir that Nulli first killed was the one with the Siege links as the remaining two Sleipnirs' tanks got considerably reduced. We ended up trading too unfavourably, losing our last Sleipnir.....

Nice story!!!

You forgot the part where you decided to keep all 6 bpc's for yourself though :)

I thought that the classiest move of all.

HI GODS