Starting to Get Somewhere

OK, I'm in Deklein. Got my PvP frigs here and ready to go. All I need is the rest of my mods and I'll be ready to party. Except I'm on vacation next week. DOH!

This morning we got our POS setup so we have a home for Black Lotus operatives. If nothing else, that is cool. Its nice to be doing things with others again even if it has not been very profitable for me. Can't wait to actually do some ratting though. Damn I need my mods.

This highlights the one thing I hate about working with other people: having to communicate with them and depend on them to do what I expect. If I had know it was going to take weeks to get all my stuff up to Deklein, I might have made different plans to sneak some of the more important stuff up myself. Ah well, live and learn.

Finally Get Some 0.0 PvP Action Again

My 5 raptors and 1 manticore made it up to Deklein last night through carrier jumping so I have some PvP ships ready to rock and roll. I was also able to purchase a Scorpion up there so I'm almost all set. All I need is my badger full of mods and ammo and I'll be living in 0.0 baby!

Of course, there is the small issue of almost being broke now. Between getting the scorpion, outfitting all those raptors, and getting a new covert ops ship, I'm down around 14 million ISK. Not pleasant. :/

Frustration Tripled

Frustration #1 - Trying to find out how to get my stuff carrier jumped to Deklien. Finally contracted it to a guy, not sure if it got to where its supposed to go.

Frustration #2 - Trying to get Team Speak working. Pain in the ass but my friend finally helped me.

Frustration #3 - Trying to get to Deklien myself. At first I was going to try and fly a battleship up, but upon advice of a friend decided to fly up in an interceptor and simply buy one up there. SO now I have arrange for another carrier jump for some more stuff.

To makes all this frustration even worse, I lost my buzzard when I tried to sneak into Syndicate to sell some stuff I had lying around there. I jumped through and moved and activated my cloak, but a vagabond came flying over from 24 km away in seconds to decloak me and I was dead from that moment on. Saved my pod though. Bastards.

Damn, I need to get to Deklien soon.

Whoa Nelly!

Earlier in the week we (the Black Lotus gang) were talking about an offer to merge into a corp in a big 0.0 alliance and what we would have to gather (POS parts and fuel) in order to be accepted, etc. Tuesday night we were still in discussions so I thought it would be at least a week before anything happened.

I didn't get on much Wednesday night.

Thursday night I get on and the deal is signed, people are applying to the new corp and as of this morning I am a member of Omen Incorporated, a part of Storm Alliance! Holy crap!

Needless to say I'm disorganized as hell right now, moving my ships and trying to figure out what I need to buy to outfit the ships I'm taking up to the 0.0 base. I'll be flying my Scorpion BS up in a gang sometime, but the real question is whether or not I'll try to fly the Rokh up for ratting. Which brings up the eternal question of: am I going to live in 0.0 or just visit?

My big mistake with NoQ was pushing into 0.0 when I wasn't ready. I believe I am ready now, but time will tell.

Still Waiting

The Senior GMs still haven't addressed my CEO bug issue with Razor Tech. Its very frustrating especially since Derranna has a lot of free lab slots now and I have to do research in NPC stations with queues and the such. Gah.

WTB: PvP Battleship

As plans move forward and ISK is gathered, I’m planning how my contribution to corp PvP will take shape. While my plan to be an interceptor pilot and do some serious tackling is in place and ready to go, the fact remains I’ll need some sort of PvP battleship at some point. There are many options.

1) Rokh – This is my current mission running ship so outfitting a new one for PvP would be fairly straightforward. There are problems however. The Rokh is basically built for ranged sniping and the PvP I plan to participate in is often the up close and personal knifefights where the Rokh definitely is not ideal. I’ve considered a Rokh outfitted with blasters but its not built for that purpose and its awfully expensive to outfit incorrectly.

2) Hyperion – A peer of the Rokh, this ship is more designed for blaster fighting and is one of the most feared ships for small gang PvP right now. Damage bonus, decent drone bay, powerful armour tank; it does up close what the Rokh does from a distance. However, a few problems. I’d need 6 days of training just to sit in the sucker and I have the armour tanking skills of a wet paper towel. And its just as expensive as the Rokh.

3) Raven – Less expensive than a Rokh or Hyperion, decent shield tank, and I can outfit it pretty nicely. Not super impressive in the damage or speed department, but an all-round adequate ship for PvP or ratting.

4) Megathron – The mega is a downstep from the Hyperion so has similar advantages and disadvantages: has damage and tracking bonus, is cheaper, but is mainly an armour tanker once again and requires significant training.

5) Dominix – A favourite for small gang PvP due to its very cheap price, flexibility due to massive drone bay (375m3!) and drone damage bonus, and easy to tank since it doesn’t rely on its turrets to do damage as much as other options. Downside is that again it requires training to Gallente BS and I don’t have armour tanking skills either. And its ugly as sin.

6) Ammar/Minmatar Battleships – Even more training required as I don’t have cruiser skills there yet for these races, and Ammar ships also armour tank. As well they use different weapon systems altogether. So out.

7) Scorpion – For the first time, a battleship that is not about direct damage. This vessel is cheap and has huge boni to ECM skills. I’d need about 13 days to make my EWAR skills uber but I can get into this ship and start jamming people today. Damage is not great with 4 cruise launcher or 4 heavy rails, but in small gangs damage can be dealt by others. This ship is all about the lockdown. With a 75m3 drone bay I can fit some nice ECM drones to assist the lockdown.

In the end I settled on going the EWAR route for the Scorpion. The price and capabilities combine to make it perfect for what I want. And the EWAR skills I train up are also going to be useful in Blackbirds and Recon ships.

UPDATE: I wrote this yesterday but an internet outage prevented me from posting it. Last night I went out and purchased my scorpion and outfitted it with ECM and Cruise Missile Launchers.

Crushed!

The unbeaten streak is over. It was fun while it lasted, but Marty made sure it ended with a bang.

We met at the Bunker with 2000 pts each. I was stretching it since I haven't painted anything in a while, so a couple extra Dark Reapers and warlock along with some questionable upgrades to my dependable 1700 pt list and I was ready to go. Marty took what I consider to be one of the best 2000 pt Marine lists around:

Commander in terminator armour with bodyguard with 2 assault cannons
Librabrian with terminator armour
2 land speeders with assault cannon and heavy bolter each
Venerable dreadnought, fire support pattern
3 Tactical squads, 10 men, las-plas combo
1 Assault squad
2 Dev squads with 4 missile launcher

Some mobility, tons of firepower. He deployed in an excellent defensive position with lanes of fire covering all approaches and sat back and shot anything he could see.

I on the other hand made lots of little mistakes that doomed me not only to defeat, but utter destruction:
- suggested 2000 pt game that I don't have the models for
- forgot to deploy pathfinders so they had to walk on the table from reserves
- decided to attack wrong flank with vehicles
- split my forces
- deployed dark reapers such that they were in range of assault cannons turn 1

By the end of turn 2 things were grim and by the turn 3-4 it was obvious it was a lost cause, so I made it my mission to try and kill the space marine commander, but the fates were against me and I failed to do that even.

By the end of the game, I had killed 6 infantry and 2 land speeders. In exchange my entire army was dead except the two warp spiders and one pathfinder that ran off the board.

Ouch.

Side note: Fury of the Ancients causes pinning on any squad it hits even if it fails to kill a model?! WTF? Not even indirect fire from a Basilisk or Defiler has that ability, but if some stupid D3 shot psychic power fries a plant beside my squad they must do a pinning check? Give me a f***ing break. No I'm not bitter, not at all.

Analysis:
What more is there to say that I didn't say above? In hindsight flanking around the other side such that one of his fire positions (dev, tac squad, and dreadnought) was in the way blocking line of sight of the other (dev, tac squad, assault marines) might have given me a chance to actually get units into combat where I might have been able to swing the battle more to my favour.

Also, I should have vetoed Cleanse. Its one mission that allows the enemy to really get in great position for shooting and unlike Cityfight, there was not enough terrain to advance behind to negate the firing lanes effectively. Take and Hold, which we rolled first but Marty vetoed, would have been more to my favour. Smart move on his part.

Ah well, I knew the streak was going to end someday. Better to lose to an awesome general than in some close game where the dice betray me.

Road Block

OK, small road block.

The bug that prevented me from becoming CEO in the first place of Razor Technologies has also prevented me from successfully running for CEO as well. I didn't think that would be too big of a deal because as Director I can do pretty much everything I need to. However, since the corp was created by a character with no Ethnic Relations skills and I can't update with my own CEO with great Ethnic Relations skills, only Gallente characters can join Razor Tech and thus all my other characters are barred from Razor until I can get my CEO in and update with his skills.

Sigh.

Essentially I'm back to waiting for the Senior GMs to come along and make me CEO which could be another week or more of waiting.

Woo hoo!

Much to my astonishment, my petition for the CEO problem received a response today and I'm now director of my new corp which will allow me to start moving operations over. Woohoo! Also, I was able to kick off a vote to make me CEO and so tomorrow afternoon at this time I should know if it works.

Finally progress! Now I can start planning on getting the POS up and running and moving my R&D operations over. Muhahahah!

In other news, today at lunch I took my module stockpile up to Rens and sold it all. You see, I decided that since I upgraded my abilities most of these mods I don't need anymore since I can use the T2 variants and I had a whack load that I didn't feel like hauling wherever it is that my new corp decides to go. So I filled up my hauler (and then some), took it to Rens, and sold it all. I got 100 MILLION isk! Holy crap! That was unexpected and a pleasant surprise. I celebrated by buying 4 raptors cheap at 3.8 mil each.

The raptor interceptor is going to be my main gang PvP ship in the new corp, acting as a suicide tackler / scout. At 4-6 million per ship it doesn't hurt to lose it and its as fast (both in real-space and warp) as other interceptors. I'm also considering becoming an EWar junkie in a Blackbird and Scorpion later in the summer as I only need a couple weeks of training to get the skills up to decent levels. That will be very useful in gang situations as well.

As for solo PvP, still looking at the Myrmidon as my weapon of choice, or perhaps the cheaper Thorax.

Path Chosen

I found out on the weekend that some old corpmates are joining a corp with the goal to move into 0.0 and make a home. I asked if I could tag along with Kirith and was told that would be great.

The question is, am I ready for 0.0 now? Last time with No Quarter I had a rough go losing a Raven battleship and generally feeling out of place in that large organization. But now I've got a replenished wallet, access to Covert Ops, Stealth Bombers, and Interceptors, and a lot more T2 mods available to me. Just finished training for T2 Tracking Computers last night so my Rokh is T2 outfitted in the mids and lows. I feel ready.

On the industrial side of things, my lab slots are finally finishing that ME research on the rigs and as soon as the first one opened up I got that cloaking BPO in for two max run copies. That will take a month (damn POS not ready!). I've got one slot free now and I'm waiting another four to five days for more to come free so I can run multiple invention jobs at once for Large Shield Extenders and Shield Rechargers.