Missions & Complexes

So me and my buddies have a small 5 man corp, we've been playing over a year now, a couple of guys over 4,advancing to l4's and such, some pvp, and basic wormhole C2 stuff lately. The problem were having is that we want to eventually get into a C4 and set up shop with a pos with a static C3. We have almost all the tools to do it, but one of the big issues we've heard about is that to do C4's everyone must have the same type of tank, shield or armor, and spider tank each other.

What I want to know is if this is true, we have 3 shield guys (all caldari) and 2 armor guys (gallente and amarr). Can it be done in a mixed fleet? I know it would be better to go shields ideally but that would mean months of cross-training for 2 of us and we would like to avoid it if its actually viable to do it with our 5 combo as is (possibly 6-7 as the 2 vets have separate account alts for scanning/salvaging/industrial etc). Also one of our guys alt is carrier trained now (thanatos), and upon purchase of our C4 we were thinking of building one in system, does this change our viability?

Any constructive thoughts or actual experience with this would be greatly appreciated.

If you are spider-tanking then there are advantages in all having the same main tank **but** C4 sites do not require large fleets and most certainly do not require a spider-tanking approach.

C4 sites can be cleared in relative safety by a decent two-ship local-tanking fleet. They can even be cleared (still) by a single ship but that's very slow and not really worth the effort.

If you are going to be fielding a decent fleet of four DPS ships then you should have little difficulty clearing the sites fairly quickly. By all means setup some repping and cap-transfer chains while you learn the ropes but as your experience and confidence grows you will probably find yourselves dropping some of the tank efforts in favour of a bit more DPS.

The neuts in a c4 can be a pain, unlike in C3 where they're more of interest value, so you will need to develop methods to either counter the neuting or avoid it. Given that my C4 efforts were 'solo' two-ship I tended to try avoid the worst of the neuting via kiting.



Your three caldari guys, if not done already, should probably look at using tengu (or nighthawk if they've gone that direction). It may not be too tough to redirect the gallante guy towards the rattlesnake (huge semi-passive buffer tank, and reasonable DPS with decent skills - part of my routine C4 2-ship fleet). As for the Amarr guy, idk, perhaps an amarr T3 or nightmare while he redirects some training time towards the tengu.




From what you describe it sounds absolutely do-able, providing the lower-skilled players can field ships tough enough to tank the sleepers for a while. Your 4-or-so ships should have no problems being able to kill enough sleepers.

When I run c4 sites here's my basic setup:
- Scanner guy cloaked with a deep-space probe deployed at all times. This warns us of any new WHs and uninvited ships in system, way in advance of anything appearing on DS. I also pop him ongrid when we're running mag / radar sites ... although I am advised that they no longer despawn immediately if you leave them unattended.
- uber-fleet-booster tengu guy sitting in POS and pumping out the boost vibes.
- 2 x DPS guys on grid killing sleepers. This is usually 1 x 5HML tengu (those four elite sleeper BSs pump out a bit much for my wee 6HML tengu to cope with) and 1 x rattlesnake.

When the site has lots of nasty neuters I setup bookmarks (using my scanner guy) and use them for short tactical warps to let me kite the sleepers. FYI, if you kite them out far enough you will find that they stop at a certain distance from their start point. You can use this fact to your advantage, and that can be useful if you're not strong and yet confident running the sites.

Once I have cleared a collection of sites I swap one of my DPS guys to a noctis and go salvage / loot the despawned locations.

A heavily neuted tengu can go down startlingly quickly. A heavily neuted rattlesnake goes down, eventually, and takes forever to replenish its cap .... like 20+ jumps back to the POS if you haven't got a cap-transfer to help.



We do not run carriers in any of our w-systems (C2s, C3s, & C4) and I have mixed feelings about their utility. From the sounds of it you do not **need** a carrier for your C4 efforts, but it might be a good place to build and play with a carrier anyways. You probably should not expect the presence of a carrier to enhance your future onselling of the system but if you're willing to write the acrrier off when you're finished then it may be worthwhile.

Carriers do not trigger capital-ship spawns in C4 systems ... that's c5s and c6s.



Hopefully constructive, and certainly based on actual experience ... although not-a-clue re Amarr ships.

Yes, but then to get back to the POS and recuperate took a stack of jumps ... the natural cap-replenishment of the snake is just so darn slow. This occurred before I'd sorted out the best way for us to approach the sites, and has only happened twice. It would probably have been quicker, and more sensible, to warp the tengu back to the POS and reship or refit for cap-tarnsfer, then warp to the snake-in-space and pass her enough cap to warp back to the POS in one jump ... but I tended to leave the tengu there battling on solo while the snake limped slowly home.

we used to have a c2 static c4 and got rather adept at running them. all you need is logistics. this can be the caldari guys in tengu's with RR or just 1 person in a dedicated logistics ship, either scimitar or basilisk. the gallente and amarr pilots can easily train basic shield skills (is like a week?) and then fit any ship for shield use. if youre not sure how, look at incursion fleets. they use all kinda abominations on armor ships that still live.

in general id still recommend the gallente and amarr pilots to look at cross training. Tengu is just the ultimate wormhole ship for all classes. 5 is enough to run all the c5 sites, 7 for c6.

As for using capitals, yea it works great. just be aware that capitals die easily in wormholes to roaming gangs and they suck at running like hell

Tech 2 shield tanking modules should be fitable within two weeks for everyone. For Shield transfer you can use medium ded-space modules (the lower ones are rather cheap) instead of large tech 2 for almost the same transfer amount.

Gallente wears shield tanks rather well (shield tanked domi is always nice for example) and will work fine.
Amarr is more difficult or let's say creative: try an apoc or maybe better: navy arma (both have 4 med slots which should be all used for shield tank - together with a dcu in the lows).

Consider also shield drones to assist your tanking.

shield tanking anything is easy. I successfully did c4s and c3s with a shield gang of tengus with an armageddon. yes, 3 mids 1000 dps armageddon. It really isnt hard lol Just use resist rigs a damage control a photon and 2 invulns.