A most enjoyable engagement last night in Aridia Lowsec.
A large Northern Coalition POS had been attacked earlier and was coming out of reinforced mode. Knowing when and where a tower is about to be vulnerable usually means you can force and engagement, or more often than not, take a look or poke a few shots and run away when/if serious resistance is detected.
Usually in these situations we hope that our targets think we aren't around and land a carrier or two to repair their POS, where we might get a chance to catch a big slow ship unawares, and ninja vanish before they bring down the wrath of god on us.
JIHAD is usually more 'hit and run' sort of attacks of this nature, and while we have a good capability we can't possibly stick around against people like NC who have generally overwhelming resources.
Our scouts spot the tower coming out of reinforcement with a few enemy carriers on grid repairing the tower, along with a handful of Tornados and other ships.
We form up a BS Armor gang with a few sacrificial dreads and a few logis and prepare to strike.
It's important to note that most of the time when people are repairing or expecting to fight off of a POS, they often 'hover' at the edge of the forcefield. They can stick part of their ship out to fight or repair, and if things get crazy they can just scoot in and be safe. Generally this is the way to go if you are expecting trouble.
Enemy carriers were close to their shield, but not quite close enough. We decloak and light cyno on top of them and bridge in our BS gang + 2 dreads, and manage to tackle the slowest carrier while the rest of them make it back into the tower shield. One dead carrier!
We stay on field and start shooting the tower, basically thumbing our noses at them while they regrouped. They take about 5-10 minutes, get all of their people into carriers in the station, and prepare to whelp us.
Carrier blob lands on the other side of the tower from us, about 100km away. These are 'slowcats' which for those of you unfamiliar are carriers kitted out to be giant sentry drone death squads. All the carriers unleash all of their t2 sentries and start lighting us up. The damage is too much so we need to pull off field and regroup, but we've got a warp-in on their location. We scoot off and come back but the carriers are already gone. Luckily they left their entire sentry drone blob on field, so we get to sit there for a few minutes and clear a small armada of unattached sentry drones.
Carrier Blob returns opposite the POS field from us, and launches fighter armada. 12 or 13 carriers worth of fighters is pretty nasty, and we start taking losses; no chance of reps keeping up with the damage. We soak it up for a while and bug off again.
The enemy FC at this point is making a huge tactical error, which is to return to the same bookmark on grid more than once. IE if your fleet is coming on and off grid to shoot people, its always a very very bad idea to come back to the same exact spot more than once. If they've been there, then we've been there, and we now have an exact point we know they will return to. What's worse is on their last warp in, they all decide to align for the station rather than hug the POS shield. Normally not a problem for a short fight but remember the longer you drag it out the further these carriers get from the safety of their POS shield.
The carriers return to one of their previous bookmarks, and we are ready for them. We get a warp in right on top of them, our little BS fleet and a few HICs. We land, tackle everything in sight, and then the batphone kicks in.
Black Legion "deus ex machina" style enters onto our cyno with about 50 capital ships right on top of the out of position and now extremely vulnerable NC carrier gang. They are tackled, bumped, and out of luck. Complete bloodbath follows, I think the final count is 10 dead capitals and assorted tower modules. We lost a few battleships.
http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=20107772Super enjoyable. The moral of the story is that if it looks like bait, it likely is. If a 15 man battleship group is staying on field with you and you have ridiculously overwhelming odds, they are either very suicidal or you are getting played.
Might have video up sometime soon.
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Topic: Battle Report: A Most Delicious Slaughter (Read 1146 times)