Wednesday 29 April 2015

The Few Against the Many Pt1 (Renters vs Catch)

There is one thing in Eve Online that has inspired me to keep on playing more than anything else and that is the idea of the few against the many. I have never enjoyed the game more then when I am out manned, out gunned and out shipped but have a small dedicated group at my back and we out fly our opponents to either victory or at least a very heroic defeat. This series of posts is dedicated to that ideal and has some stories I've either been assisting others in their struggle against overwhelming odds or have led the struggle against such odds myself.

Renters vs Catch
So since my last post I have moved out into Null-Sec in search for the 'Good Fights' I was promised abounded in it. It was heavily suggested in the comments section of the EN24 copy of this post that Catch was the place to get these fights. So I found some old friends living a few jumps away from Catch and moved in with them in Renter Land (Impass) for a while and started forming up fleets to go and find us some good fights.

My idea was a simple one. Fast moving ships capable of damage projection at range to eliminate as many of our opponents as possible before we got overwhelmed. I thought we could expect maybe 3v1 odds in our opponents favor and made strategies accordingly. How wrong I was. If I formed up a 5 man fleet I could expect no less then a 30-40 man fleet coming after us. After our first few 'Heroic Defeats' I changed up the plan a little. We were no longer trying to claim the field with our few brave renter brothers that dared to venture into the heart of the evil Hero Coalition stronghold. Instead our goal was maximum damage with minimal losses. We affected this time and again with RLM Caracals until Brave simply stopped forming up or worse still hugged their gates and stations and wouldn't risk trying to hero tackle a single one of us with frigates or interdictors and instead went home and docked up ignoring us.

Well this was no fun so we went looking for a smaller group then brave and found Sugar. These guys were living in a system 1 jump out of our original route and often formed up mere 2v1 odds for us. After a week of bringing our tired old RLM Caracals and dunking frigates all day long we decided to mix it up a bit and brought out my tried and tested Tristan. This gave us an opportunity to bring a different sort of fight to these valiant pilots willing to go out with 2v1 or less odds in their favor.

On our first frigate only roam to Sugar we wound up with 7 Tristans fielded against a mere 12 of Sugar's finest. Our match up was on the station since they were tired of chasing us I guess. We dove in the second one of their number agressed us initiating a timer. We were outnumbered and up against 3 logistics ships, 6 cruisers, 2 frigates and 1 destroyer. seeing that they brought all armor logistics and had 1 shield cruiser on field after picking off the frigates and destroyer first and ordering my fleet mates to bounce out as needed we targeted the RLM Caracal they were fielding. After what seemed like an eternity (but the recording shows was only 15 seconds) it finally died. We were unable to kill another ship due to logistics keeping them up just long enough for everybody to dock. This was by far our best fight in Catch and was never to be matched again. Each subsequent fight consisted of our enemy fielding no less then 1 Logi Ship per frigate we fielded (we never got more then 5 Tristans again either). The idea of 'Good Fights' in Null-Sec began to dry up for us. We changed back to our kiting tactics and have been very successful with them but have never found an opponent in all of catch willing to match us 1 for 1.

However all is not lost for Null-Sec as the really good fights came from the Russians of Stain. Hats off to these lads for bringing manageable numbers too our door and giving us some really good fights.

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