Wednesday, June 25, 2014

The down side of Low Sec combat

Down Side I hear you say!

Well it depends on your view point.

Initiating combat with a ship that's not a war target and does not have a severely negative security status (-5 or less) gets you a ticking off from CONCORD.
The form that this takes is to reduce your security status for each offense. This is a % , I believe of the difference between your current and -10.0. So the higher your status the quicker you fall, and the blacker your soul the less it hurts...
As an example John had a security rating of 1.4 before embarking on shooting people. Not massive but good enough. Now 15 ship kills and 6 Capsule kills later it stands at -4.4. You seem to lose 10 times as much for shooting capsules.
I have also been belt ratting in this period, which raises security, usually by 0.01 a time(see below). That's not a huge amount and it only counts every 15 minutes. So 0.04 an hour. Kill a pod and I lost 0.8 in one go. So 20 hours of dedicated belt ratting. Per pod. Oops.

A security status gain occurs for the HIGHEST value outlaw NPC you kill within a 15 minute time period PER SYSTEM. So the bigger the ships you kill the better your increase.

Now I believe that if you are in Factional Warfare, you can shoot the other side without this loss, as technically you are at war. However, you tend to get a lot of non Factional Warfare corps and players trying to shoot you. So to avoid the security loss you almost have to give them the first shot, and hope your defenses can hold while you lock and shoot or run. Consequently you see a lot of players running around low sec systems that are a solid red colour. Basically a neon sign saying shoot me! Something that in High Sec the various Police forces do quite capably.

Where You can be shot freely depending on Security status:-

-2.0 or lower will be attacked in 1.0 space
-2.5 or lower will be attacked in 0.9 and above
-3.0 or lower will be attacked in 0.8 and above
-3.5 or lower will be attacked in 0.7 and above
-4.0 or lower will be attacked in 0.6 and above
-4.5 or lower will be attacked in 0.5 and above (all of highsec)

So John is just that one or 2 kills from being barred from High Sec.

Interestingly enough the various Police forces will not shoot a pod. Any player however can pod you in high sec freely once below -0.5. So as long as you do not get caught by an armed player you are fine. There are no armed players of course in Oulley. Come and visit. Bring a freighter....

How to repair the status

1. Stop shooting Pods. These have the highest negative impact.
2. Stop shooting other players. (unless they are Pirates or war targets) (Or your bored)
3. Rat a belt in system every 15 minutes.
4. Change systems and back to point 3.
5. Do missions, Shoot the rats in these missions. 
6. Scan out anomalies and do these.
7. Find the elusive clone soldiers that drop tags. These can be traded for an increase in status at a concord station. Best systems are those that are 0.2 and below.
8. Continue to be good and polish your halo.

Remember be good....

John



  

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

A Pirates idea of Camping

Now in Oulley, there is not a lot to do. There are only 6 belts, 6 moons and a few anomalies.

There are two gates however. One leads to the Hi Sec system, Orvolle the other to a long chain of Low sec systems.
As such its a conduit to and from safe space, and sees a lot of passing traffic.

As such, its gate camped, often one or both, depending on the amount of people available.

You may be lucky however, so bring that Freighter along, any prime time you fancy. We will make you welcome. Honest. There may be cake.

Now, I log in and join some others on the Orvolle gate in my new shiny Proteus... I immediately get told to go away, and come back in a battle cruiser. It was not however that polite, everyone in the alliance is an adult and from about a dozen different countries. Some of the comments are quite inventive. This is after all EVE.

Now this is, apparently very sensible, as me being in a ship that costs the same as any 4 of theirs makes the gate camp a good target for a hot drop. and a hot drop is bad.

Hot Drop ---

If you are going to do one....

Fit a ship with a cyno field and tackle and some tank and drive around dumbly until you find a nice big target. Tackle them and activate (light) the cyno beacon. All your mates then appear and kill everything around. Nearly always will you lose the cyno ship, as once the beacon is lit then you cannot move or anything. Very dangerous for the cyno pilot. Use a throw away newbie frigate or a brick tanked cruiser or above.

If you have it done to you....
1. Die messily.
2. Kill the cyno pilot before it can activate.
3. Scatter at the first sight of one. They then have wasted the fuel. Then hide like quivering jellies in the station until they go.
4. Re-ship into a fighting ship and maybe die.
5. Wake up in a goo vat.
6. If not 1 or 5 then offer suitable praise to Bob.

Option 2 is preferred, but option 3 more normal.

So I nip back to station where one of the older and wiser members gives me a Gnosis. A 60 million ship, to play with. Free. Christmas. Early.Wow.

The beauty of this ship is that anyone can fly it, its easy to fit, any weapon system (except drones) works as well as any others, and its versatile.

Now i opted for
High Slots
5x 250mm Railgun II's with Fed Navy Antimatter (its cheaper out this way than the other variants)
Empty slot.

Medium
Tracking Computer II (Tracking Speed Script)
Faint Warp Disruptor
3x Sensor Booster II (Scan resolution script)
10mn Afterburner II

Low
800mm Reinforced Steel plates II
2 x Magnetic Field Stabiliser II
Damage Control II
2 x Energised Adaptive Nano Membrane

Trimarks in the rig Slots

and Hammerhead II's in the drone bay.

Now This is armour tanked, makes complete sense on a gate camp in low sec. In a fleet or for solo pvp or missions this I suspect would die fairly fast. Any damage is repaired in station.

Gate camps Oulley style often consist of 2-10 ships. Normally all Gnosis, but other battle cruisers are welcome. The idea is to sit at roughly zero on gate, and anyone who jumps into system gets targeted and shot. Then everyone has to warp out to avoid the gate guns fire, and return for the next one.
Rules
1. Do not shoot Blues.
2. Be on voice communication.
3. See 1.

Very simple.

Saying that it took me a while to hit anything.
The third target had just been killed when I realised that my safety interlocks were on green... I was stopping myself shooting. I was not impressed, and like all good workmen, promptly blamed my tools. Then threw them out of the pram and had a cup of tea.

Once fixed, I managed to hit and damage a Punisher, a Tristan, and two pods. I still missed several ships that I really should have been able to hit. This was still more kills than I had had for the last 6 months.

Overview issues again.
Gate Camps call for a specialised set up. So specialised that it warrants its own tab. Basically create a new tab with a right click. Call it Gate Camp or whatever floats your boat.
Then open overview options and uncheck everything. So nothing shows. Then check every ship in the ship section.
Then importantly on the next tab, exclude fleet and blue (so Corp and Alliance).
This will give you a blank sheet until something jumps in, and then the deceased is the only one to select from.... no messing with celestial's, drones, wrecks and other clutter to find your target. Seconds count.

Also pre activate your modules. Have the sensor boosters, tracking modules, damage control + any other active modules active. You will not have time to manually activate, and if you are at all cap stable there is no downside.

Now a trick.
Click on your weapons, your point/scram, web, ECM, whatever else you have that targets the hostiles. All these modules will flash and do nothing else.
When the target appears on your overview you mouse click it or hit the control key(depending on keyboard setup). This then auto targets and activates the modules as soon as they can be....

This is powerful, as you do not need to target, click weapons, click point, click web etc. (or key equivalents), one action does the lot.
Very good.
HOWEVER
It does this WHATEVER you click on. If on screen, you mouse over the gate to check distance, or a college to check you are out of smart bomb range and accidentally click on them? Well then they are then targeted, pointed, webbed and shot.
Its a way to win friends I suppose....

I did shoot the gate that way. Gate guns had me into armour before I could warp off.


Gate guns are the reason that you have to have a bigger ship and a tank. They seem to do about 350 dps (damage per second) to me. If your combat time and warp time is 10 seconds that's 3500 damage, so most frigates and destroyers will pop.

More later

And thank you for the comments via both the blog and eve mail. Its good to know people actually read this.

John



Monday, June 23, 2014

Recovering and Reflections

EVE....Am I addicted?

Its a game, it can be left alone and real life goes on....Its only pixels.

Except need to reset PI, or fuel that POS, or defend a timer, or trade your way to the next million or gank some poor soul.....

Now I have always (well its a year now) regarded Eve as a method of relaxation, and aim to limit my game to an hour a day.

Well that hasn't worked.

I am often on for 2 hours plus, I write this, I have tried coding market data into spread sheets (badly), I even think about the game, (mainly on the train), and usually along the lines of should do this.... However, I can never remember when I log on.

I still have time for work and the children, I never log on while they are up, and always have a couple of hours of chores or TV as well.....

I still cannot wait to log on, I spent all day in the garden on Sunday, sorting out stuff, was thinking about EVE on and off.....


Anyway.

After loosing the Proteus, I went and bought another. But different. Living in Low Sec, I no longer needed the interdiction nullifier for example.... and then brought it up to the Island.

I knew for the next week or two my time would be limited as I had three evenings a week out for the next several weeks.

I early on said I would not log on after a session in the pub, as once did this and thought it was a good idea to put some BPO's in a ship and auto pilot across the universe and leave them there. The next days play was wasted bringing them back. So only a few days play.

So did some more level 2 missions, and the alliance asked us to evacuate all assets from the southern base. That was my PI stuffed again.

I had some BPs in research which I had to leave but otherwise moved most out to high stations.

After some days, I got the bonus mission (after every 16) and had to go to Osmallanais and deliver about 8000 Scordite.

So undocked my Procurer and mined 10000 scordite, then jumped into Osmallanais.

On jumping in, I admit not paying much attention as it was a route I was doing daily to look for ghost sites, Three Red war targets on the gate.
All were Proteus....

Several things entered my mind at once. I immediately gave up on system and tried burning back to the gate. It took them 6 seconds to lock and point me. Still the Procurer is a tanky old beast. I debated about releasing my drones, but to be honest Hobgoblin II's vs Proteus, why bother. Best hope was the gate and jump though while they had aggression timers.

It was not to be, and went bang very fast. warped in pod to station.

Had a chat to them in local. seemed quite nice. The war dec had been active for 7 months, but this was their first day on the island. They to be honest seemed decent enough. So I put in a buy order for Scordite, warned the alliance that the war targets were in high in T3's and went to bed.

Early in the morning I got up, filled the mission from the bought Scordite, filled a ship with as much as I could carry and moved to Oulley.

The next few days I spent playing cat and mouse and moving as much as I could out to Oulley without getting shot.
I had to leave the Dominix, several haulers and a couple of scanning ships.

Such was life, I had all the important bits and the rest could wait until they moved out or moved on to other targets. To be honest I assumed that Low sec is a different beast and that it would be best to go in with cash and ask advice of what to fit and run with.

I also brought Oliver up to Orvolle, 1 jump from Oulley with a Retriever for mining support.

This took the rest of the week...

I also made all the bookmarks I may need in Oulley.



Gank = Attacking a target with no reason or warning. Often in High Sec and bringing down the wrath of Concord.
The reason that this is done, is the mechanics that allow, for example, 3 catalysts, fit a certain way in a certain security system to kill a mining barge before concord kills them.
In fact, does not matter what ship, there is something cheaper that can kill it, and enough people that will try.

Why? well several reasons. People do it to expensive ships in the hope that their alts can collect the loot drop from their target and the concorded wrecks and that this covers the cost of their ships.
People also do it because they can. This is EVE.
People also do it because it looks good on their kill board. They kill 30+ million ship for the loss of something that costs them 8-9 million.
Also its done to collect the abuse that will come there way from miners.


Tank = Defense. Basically how well your ship can survive the attacks that will come from others.
Your ship has natural resists in armour, shields and hull, and hit points for each. Naturally these can be altered depending on both skills and modules that can be fitted. But there are choices...
Armours enhancements can be fitted in low slots, which is also where damage enhancers go. So with a limited amount of slots then do you opt to have more armour or do more damage?

All gank no tank is an eve expression suggesting that the ship has enough armour to stop a pea shooter but can put out a fantastic amount of damage.

Ships are usually either Shield Tanked or Armour tanked, or if you have an Orca Hull tanked. There is no sane reason to hull tank another ship, and those that try should try listening to the trees when they are speaking....

As a rule of thumb, a ship with more mid slots than low is shield tanked and the other way around is armour tanked.

There are exceptions, for instance ratting drone boats often fill the low slots with drone damage amplifiers and shield tank...

The other exception is by and large, if you want to..... Its your ship, paid for by you and you have to fly it and accept its loss.

Remember in Eve, if you like a ship and wish to keep it, never undock.
If you do undock, start planning its replacement as sooner or later it will be shot from under you.

John

Moving, and another Proteus down

Now the new corp had two main locations and a couple of high sec offices on the Island.
Oulley is no secret, the home of the Harlequins, but there was a mission base south of the Island as well.

Optimistically I thought that I would set up to the south and start running missions, So I moved roughly half my items and ships out of High Island to a Low sec system.

I also set up PI in this system - should have realised my jinx effect.

Now, I wandered around the belts killing rats, and started on level 2 missions in Vivanier
Pretty boring really. I had some chats with my new corp members and decided that I was happy enough doing circuits of the island to check for ghost sites and level two missions.

Now I went in for overkill on the missions, Fitted a Dominix with Curators and a Mobile Tractor Unit (MTU) and warped in at 70km, Dropped drones and targeted the red crosses, one by one and pressed the F key. It turns out that the sentry drones could kill the rats faster than I could lock them. 
I would then bookmark the MTU, go for another mission, do the same, and bookmark that MTU as well. By the time the second set of rats were dead, warp back to the first site, scoop the loot and tractor, salvage the wrecks with drones and a salvager and back to the second site.

I found that in my daily playing time I could jump once around the island, reset my PI and do 2 missions.
In all dull existence.

One day I was bored and in Grispire, which for some reason was always good for harvesting loose drones, and a relic site appeared and was scanned down as a by product of the combat drones. Looked at system and only 3 blue present. So nipped into station, re fitted a relic analyser  and popped back to the site.

There looked to be 8 cans in the site, and I was feeling paranoid, so remained cloaked right up to the first can, hacked it, collected the spew and re-cloaked on the way to the next. After the second can, two reds jumped in system. They were Filthy Peasants (Alliance name, not description!), and I had been warned about them. So I stayed cloaked and waited. Less than 2 minutes later, after not even appearing on D-scan they left.

Hacked 5 more containers with no issue.
Just as I arrived at the last the two reds jumped back in system, only other people were Blue. So I thought the minute that it takes to hack, they will never find me and I will be off.

Not even half way through the hacking game, about 20 seconds, and one of the reds, a Crusader was 9k off and locking and scramming me....

First thing that came to mind was warp.... and scrambled, then drones started hitting me and I locked up the Crusader, tried scramming it and shooting while dropping Hobgoblins. Then a Pilgrim landed, while I was targeting and killing the Hammerhead II's that were eating me.
10 seconds later I had no cap, and scram and guns shut down. The crusader was at this point entering structure, or nearly so, and my drones, now I could not fight were killed....

Now it was just the wait to die. I tried good fight in local while screaming for help on alliance channels/comms.
Unfortunately the Blues in system were probably AFK, and the people on comms were 10 jumps away as could not go though high sec.

So I zoomed out to better watch my demise, and saw a blue on field... Hooray I thought, a Rapier would be my savior... I became all excited, then noticed he was shooting me with a Hammerhead II....

12 mins later my tank failed and I died rather quickly, whilst typing, so did not get the pod out either. Such is life.

Dead Proteus

Not waking up in goo, I thought and reflected on the fight. I also passed the kill mail onto corp and alliance leaders as a Blue on your kill mail is never good.

Some reflections.

1. The can I was hacking was 40km from warp in point.
2. Even if they had pre bookmarked the site, they could not have landed that close to me.
3. The Rapier must have provided a warp in point while sitting cloaked, and the last can was an obvious pinch point.
4. A Crusader does not have Hammerhead II's, so initially the drones that shot me (and I killed were from the Rapier)
5. I never saw the rapier on grid, as I was zoomed in and the overhead excludes Blue and Fleet members to stop me shooting them. I quite literally did not know he was there until the end.
6. Neuts are painful, and once the cap has gone, you are dead.
7. I was fit poorly. In hindsight taking the scram out and leaving the web in may just have been better. Also putting on the Rail mixed with the blasters was wrong. Now I did this for two reasons. 1. I wanted to blap belt rats from afar, rather than get mixed up and stuck on rocks, and 2, I found I did not have the power grid to fit a whole rack of them.
8. If the Blue chap had not warped them in I would be safe.
9. If I had cloaked and warped as soon as reds landed in system the same would be true.
10. I am bad at PVP

So well done for a good trap, and Blues are now back on my overview.....

Fly safe

John




Wednesday, June 11, 2014

New Corp for John

Talking To the CEO of Back-Water on team speak did not fill me full of confidence. All the directors were taking a break due to real life issues or playing other games. They all intended to come back at a point in the future.
Other big names in the corp had just gone dark or left to join other corps that fit them better.

Looking around I decided to do the same, with John at least.

Now home was a High Sec island, with at least 2 jumps to the nearest main high security space, the choices were a island based corp or one of the Low Sec based ones.

The Island based corps all seemed small and mining based, there not being much else to do there without venturing into Low sec.

So I went into low security space to the south of the island, to see what was what. Picked up a whole load more spare drones, and killed a mobile Tractor unit or two.

First MTU

Second MTU

Both belonged to the same corp, and I saw quite a few around running missions. The also belonged to The Harlequins alliance. The same that camped me in Oulley....

A bit of investigation lead me to an impressive kill board and the fact that they were basically a bunch of Low Sec pirates.....

So I signed on to their public channel and had a chat. The added bonus is that a large number are EU based, but the alliance is made up of all different time zones.

In short I handed over a full API key, declared my alt and joined.

So Space Mutts are my new home. Oliver stays in Back Water to keep doors open.

More later

John