It started last night - with a motley fleet of T1 shield cruisers, mainly Vexors and Caracals. We formed up on a lowsec hole and discussed the plan as Khaizim scouted around. He found a Cerberus running an anomaly so we jumped and gave chase. The Cerberus turned out to be faster than Usain Bolt with diarrhea 100 metres from a toilet so we broke off and warped back to the hole, unfortunately we lost a crow in the process.
- 1 to us!
After some more poking around, and extracting some tears from the local plex farmers by sitting in a large plex for some time it was decided we should light up a cyno bait and see what comes. Cyno went up - we waited. As our hope of a fight was fading a Stabber, Stabber, Stabber, Belicose and Vexor appeared on scan. Then on short scan. Then on grid.
Belicose was called primary (I made this decision because of the target painters, I think it was the right call, feel free to disagree but please tell me why!) but it seemed as if their dps was just too much. We started jumping back through the wormhole as we neared death and warped off to reship. Unfortunately, a Vexor didn't make it.
- 2 to us!
This is where things went tits up. In a big way. We reshipped into tech IIs and HACs to continue the fight, but the fleet dribbled back to the hole and we got split up and polarized in all the wrong ways. Perhaps I didn't make my instructions clear enough, or I panicked a little and this reflected in the behavior of the fleet - we live and learn and I can work on thinking logically for a couple of seconds before I speak. Either way, an Oneros went down. We did manage to salvage things slightly and managed to catch a Stabber and a Belicose.
- 3
We composed ourselves, reshipped back into T1 cruisers and set off for a highsec detour to console ourselves and try and grab some easy, cheap kills based on 'reddit intel'. Unfortunately nothing was happening so we turned back and dove back into lowsec
Thanks to some great scouting we soon discovered a Proteus and an Ishtar of the same alliance that owned the stabbers so we headed that way. We jumped into system and were soon joined on grid by an Ishtar. He was sitting 50km away so we aligned towards the gate he had come from and burned towards him.... I decided not to attempt to kill him there, we were strung out and would have difficulty dropping him quickly enough before the inevitable blob of support arrived.
So we entered warp back to the where he came from, but cheekily, on a hunch I decided to land 50km away from the gate. After a second that juicy Ishtar landed right in the middle of out cruiser blob and was blown up pretty quickly, turns out it was worth 500mil!. We scooped the tasty faction loot and ran for the hills.
- 3
+3
As we warped off towards home they ishtars support arrived, so getting out of there was a good shout! We returned home for tea a medals with draw on kills and a positive ISK result (not including the cyno ship we used as bait for 'statistical' reasons).
I took a lot more away from this fleet than the last, and I feel I performed much better as FC. I was sure to keep the ball rolling, never letting coms go quiet to try and keep enthusiasm up and people on the ball. I made some bad calls in getting the fleet split up on the wormhole, so this is something I need to work on and do some thinking about to be better prepared next time we fight on a hole. I also made a couple of good calls and catching that Ishtar so beautifully gave me a warm fuzzy feeling!
I highly recommend stepping up and having ago at FCing, if you have the right bunch of people around you it can be a great experience!
To be continued...!
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