Crime & Punishment

Vanguard ganking info
From: HardinSalvor
Sent: 2012.01.16 18:30
To: BTL News,

Hey folks. Long mail, but part of it is v. important.
If you are too lazy to read the whole thing, scroll down and read the last 2 paragraphs!


First, a little background info for those of you new to incursions. When incursions first came out, they lasted around 5 hours. Once the influence dropped low enough for the mom to spawn, people would rush to kill it and it would die along with the incursion. Through some diplomacy, a status quo was created where we avoid killing the mom as long as possible in order to farm the incursion.

There's an alliance called Brick Squad., led by Darius III, working together with Kill It With Fire and The Skunkworks, are aiming to kill all motherships once they spawn for an extended period of time.

They've had some success, and I think it's likely they'll try again sometime soon. When they do come back, there's not a great deal we can do to stop them. We will of course do the best we can to compete the sites and prevent them from being paid, but at the end of the day if they come with a large enough fleet the mothership is going to die one way or another. So expect it, be prepared, come along on the competing fleet if you can, and laugh it off.

More on mom killing some other time. But now, the important part.

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The same groups are stepping up their attacks on -> VANGUARD FLEETS <-. So if you run vanguards regularly, you need to start paying attention.

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The attacks are targeted against shiny faction BS, because they drop the best loot and tears. To kill a vanguard fleet, the attackers will prevent your shiny BS from getting repped. Here is some common ways which they can do that, and some advice on what steps you can take to prevent it.

Gank the logi - straight up suicide gank. Use some T3 BC's or T1 BS to kill the logi. This is probably the least likely tactic, since logi tend to be moderately well tanked and can of course rep each other. If you're concerned, use a fit with a high ehp.

Neut the logi - this is a little smarter, and probably more likely. Instead of shooting the logi as above, they'll use heavy neuts to cap out the logi making them unable to rep anything. The best way you can defend against this is by using range. Heavy neuts have a fairly short range of about 25km. Since logi can rep from way further than that, the logi can move away from the fleet/warp in point to buy some time. This also works for ganks.

Jam the logi - using blackbirds with overloaded ECM to jam the logi. To defend against this, you can fit an ECCM module to your logistics ship. Ladar for scimitars, gravimetric for basilisks.

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The next tactic is the most common and the most effective, pay attention!

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BE the logi - it's really simple. They join or create a fleet using their alts flying logi ships. When the fleet is full of shiny ships, they either don't enter the site or don't rep anyone but each other. This is one of the main reasons we have bans and blacklists - each time an alt is used, we try to record the name and ban them from BTL. TDF maintains an incursions blacklist which you can subscribe too by joining the mailing list "public incursion blacklist". But these bans/blackists can only work retrospectively ie after they have already killed someone.

For this reason, the best defence you have is >>>> don't fly with logi you don't know <<<<. And of course, don't fly what you can't afford to loose.


o7,
Hardin

I'm confused, where do Goonswarm come in?

Goons are not directly involved "yet" from what I understand.

As for that mail it ought to be mentioned that now is the time to start training unknown alts into jammers. Remove logi support in a mom site and brick squad's interdiction will serve nothing more than to galvanize support for his removal from the CSM.