About a week ago, a COA anti-pirate fleet ran into (and killed) a Loki belonging to a GOD SQUAD director/CEO. How do I know he was a CEO? Because GOD SQUAD had filed a wardec with CONCORD before we could even get the killmail posted. Good Times..
The war progressed as most high security wars do. They ganked young pilots in Rens and industrialists not paying attention. Smack was talked in local and in a few Evemails, pretty standard stuff. About three days in to the war, apparent GOD SQUAD buddies The Devil's Warrior Alliance decided to join in on the war, making things down right interesting.
This brings us to Wednesday night, and another COA anti-pirate roam. The fleet was pretty well varied in ship composition, best described as "shield tanked with nano aspirations." The roam had been largely uneventful, although we did catch one GOD SQUAD Hurricane that blind jumped through a region gate in to our waiting fleet. Needless to say, he died. Shortly after his death, our scouts spotted a GOD SQUAD Proteus sitting on the Osoggur gate in Amamake. Is anyone else spotting the potential problem with this engagement yet? Osoggur is high security space, and the GOD SQUAD have a well earned reputation for using neutral logistics support. It should have stood to reason that this Proteus was a little bit of bait, and the rest of their "Ow, my face" fleet would likely be waiting on the other side of the gate.
The FC sent one of our Tempest's in to Amamake to engage the Proteus and get him to agress so the rest of the fleet could come screaming in to whore on to the killmail...I mean...to assist in the kill.... The point was called and the attack order was given. As soon as our fleet landed and engaged the Proteus... Oh look, local spike. Joy. To call the resulting battle one sided would be an understatement. I never got a clear count myself, but by all accounts the GOD SQUAD brought at least six Logistics cruisers and eight T3 cruisers to the party. When combined with a number of piloting failures by the members of our fleet (myself included) and the half dozen high damage Proteus', we died. Horrible, painful deaths. That pretty much eviscerated that particular fleet, the only action of note after the Amamake fight being when we blind jumped (WTF??) in to the highsec island of Anher, right in to a reformed GOD SQUAD fleet of battlecruisers. Somehow, miraculously, the one other remaining -EM- pilot in the fleet made it back to the gate in his Tempest, and I was easily able to burn back in my replacement Hurricane. After a few minutes bouncing safes in Hagilur, we broke out to highsec and the fleet stood down.
Fast forward to Saturday morning. Our war with the GOD SQUAD is set to end in about 5 hours, and -EM- leadership put out the call to both the Alliance and our allies to form up the mighty Alpha Maelstrom fleet! The plan was to park our fleet 50km off the Rens undock and camp GOD SQUAD in to their favorite station for a few hours before the official war ended. It seems our other Republic wartargets, The Devil's Warrior Alliance (Remember them?), wanted to come play!! We spent the next hour and a half bouncing around near Rens, trying to get an engagement on our terms. There was concern that the Devil's and GOD SQUAD would be teaming up, and might be trying to pincer our long range alpha fleet. Eventually the Devil's forced the issue, jumping their AHAC/Absolution/Guardian fleet in to ours in Sasta. We were in ideal position to pick apart their fleet, when they made a move that was, in my opinion, brilliant. They warped to a close, but off-grid, tactical safe, then immediately turned around and used their out of alliance scouts to warp in directly on top of our fleet. At that close range, they should have been able to tear our fleet apart, but the EXCELLENT work of our logistics pilots was able to keep everyone's shields repped up. Our Maelstroms managed to pull range and began to chew through their fleet, eliminating their in-alliance Guardian support (they had more out of alliance) before tearing in to the HACs and their Falcon support. By the time we were moving on to the Absolutions, Devil's made the wise decision to withdraw, and a lack of sufficient long point capability in our fleet allowed them to escape.
Once we were able to clear the field and sort through our combat records, the battle again looked pretty one-sided, but this time in OUR favor. Now, that battle report is admittedly not 100% accurate. -EM- also lost a Falcon, but that killmail does not appear to have been posted publicly and, in the interest of OpSec, I won't reveal that particular Falcon pilot's name here. Despite the Tempest loss earlier in the week, I'm definitely pleased with the overall result of the past week. I certainly learned some new things about Alpha Fleets, and I was painfully reminded how to properly fly a Nanopest.
I'm still pretty new at this whole blogging thing, and this is my first combat report. I'd love to hear any feedback you all might have in the comments section below.
For The Republic!
The war progressed as most high security wars do. They ganked young pilots in Rens and industrialists not paying attention. Smack was talked in local and in a few Evemails, pretty standard stuff. About three days in to the war, apparent GOD SQUAD buddies The Devil's Warrior Alliance decided to join in on the war, making things down right interesting.
This brings us to Wednesday night, and another COA anti-pirate roam. The fleet was pretty well varied in ship composition, best described as "shield tanked with nano aspirations." The roam had been largely uneventful, although we did catch one GOD SQUAD Hurricane that blind jumped through a region gate in to our waiting fleet. Needless to say, he died. Shortly after his death, our scouts spotted a GOD SQUAD Proteus sitting on the Osoggur gate in Amamake. Is anyone else spotting the potential problem with this engagement yet? Osoggur is high security space, and the GOD SQUAD have a well earned reputation for using neutral logistics support. It should have stood to reason that this Proteus was a little bit of bait, and the rest of their "Ow, my face" fleet would likely be waiting on the other side of the gate.
The FC sent one of our Tempest's in to Amamake to engage the Proteus and get him to agress so the rest of the fleet could come screaming in to whore on to the killmail...I mean...to assist in the kill.... The point was called and the attack order was given. As soon as our fleet landed and engaged the Proteus... Oh look, local spike. Joy. To call the resulting battle one sided would be an understatement. I never got a clear count myself, but by all accounts the GOD SQUAD brought at least six Logistics cruisers and eight T3 cruisers to the party. When combined with a number of piloting failures by the members of our fleet (myself included) and the half dozen high damage Proteus', we died. Horrible, painful deaths. That pretty much eviscerated that particular fleet, the only action of note after the Amamake fight being when we blind jumped (WTF??) in to the highsec island of Anher, right in to a reformed GOD SQUAD fleet of battlecruisers. Somehow, miraculously, the one other remaining -EM- pilot in the fleet made it back to the gate in his Tempest, and I was easily able to burn back in my replacement Hurricane. After a few minutes bouncing safes in Hagilur, we broke out to highsec and the fleet stood down.
Fast forward to Saturday morning. Our war with the GOD SQUAD is set to end in about 5 hours, and -EM- leadership put out the call to both the Alliance and our allies to form up the mighty Alpha Maelstrom fleet! The plan was to park our fleet 50km off the Rens undock and camp GOD SQUAD in to their favorite station for a few hours before the official war ended. It seems our other Republic wartargets, The Devil's Warrior Alliance (Remember them?), wanted to come play!! We spent the next hour and a half bouncing around near Rens, trying to get an engagement on our terms. There was concern that the Devil's and GOD SQUAD would be teaming up, and might be trying to pincer our long range alpha fleet. Eventually the Devil's forced the issue, jumping their AHAC/Absolution/Guardian fleet in to ours in Sasta. We were in ideal position to pick apart their fleet, when they made a move that was, in my opinion, brilliant. They warped to a close, but off-grid, tactical safe, then immediately turned around and used their out of alliance scouts to warp in directly on top of our fleet. At that close range, they should have been able to tear our fleet apart, but the EXCELLENT work of our logistics pilots was able to keep everyone's shields repped up. Our Maelstroms managed to pull range and began to chew through their fleet, eliminating their in-alliance Guardian support (they had more out of alliance) before tearing in to the HACs and their Falcon support. By the time we were moving on to the Absolutions, Devil's made the wise decision to withdraw, and a lack of sufficient long point capability in our fleet allowed them to escape.
Once we were able to clear the field and sort through our combat records, the battle again looked pretty one-sided, but this time in OUR favor. Now, that battle report is admittedly not 100% accurate. -EM- also lost a Falcon, but that killmail does not appear to have been posted publicly and, in the interest of OpSec, I won't reveal that particular Falcon pilot's name here. Despite the Tempest loss earlier in the week, I'm definitely pleased with the overall result of the past week. I certainly learned some new things about Alpha Fleets, and I was painfully reminded how to properly fly a Nanopest.
I'm still pretty new at this whole blogging thing, and this is my first combat report. I'd love to hear any feedback you all might have in the comments section below.
For The Republic!
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