The Stage
On March 11, Imperium forces answered the call to defend a reinforced R64 in the Lonetrek system of Hakonen. The 260B ISK engagement occurred just two days after a nearly 500B ISK brawl in the same system. During the fight on March 9, forces from Voltron assaulted the R64 and in turn, destroyed three CO2 titans as well as successfully pushed the tower into reinforced mode. In an attempt to save the high-valued moon, The Imperium sent massive fleets, but would ultimately be beat in the gunfight.
EVE Online – Hakonen 245B Destroyed over R64 moon – FULL FITE
The fight for the R64 pushed over into two other systems: Taisy and M-OEE8, where The Imperium would stand their ground.
The Fleets and The Cost
The Imperium sent 710 pilots to defend the timer, fielding several massive Machariel and T3 strategic cruiser fleets with support from dreadnoughts and at least thirty stealth bombers. Voltron and friends brought 699 fighters to the cause, attacking with over 350 Machariels, Maelstroms and Rokhs supported by four carriers and ten stealth bombers. The bombers would not come into play in lowsec, though they were fielded in M-OEE8.
Defending forces would eventually be pushed too far by the heavy gunfire and incoming bombs from the combined Voltron fleet and would be forced to flee the system, leaving the R64 open to attack. Abandoning the tower, Imperium forces retreated to home, while Voltron successfully destroyed and took the moon. In total The Imperium lost 151.2B ISK in the form of 185 battleships and nearly two dozen T3 strategic cruisers, while the aggressors took 108.1B ISK in damages, losing just over 100 battleships. The Imperium lost both the strategic objective and the ISK war for the second time in a row in the system of Hakonen. Now that the R64 is in the hands of Voltron, when will The Imperium makes its move to take the tower back?
FC, TiDi!
As far as server and game issues go, this was possibly the first time a non-reinforced T3 node was used during such a large fight and CCP should have loads of data do go over and analyze. TiDi was present for the fight, but very little lag was noted during the fight. A camera bug was mentioned by several players. One Pandemic Horde pilot on reddit stated, “don’t even try to spin your camera unless you want to go on Mr CCP’s wild ride.” He is referring to the spinning seen in the video below at about the 23 seconds mark:
New camra sooo GOOOD?
GSF FC Jay Amazingness submitted his report on the fight:
“GSF formed a Yacht fleet to help CO2 out with an R64 that was coming out of RF in Hakonen (the same R64 CO2 lost those titans on the other day). I had a fleet of 200 consisting of about 80 machs and 40 T3s. We landed on grid with the tower and I decided to go at range due to lower numbers than the CO2 fleet. We were artillery fit and and tried to headshot one of the hostile FCs however some of our shots missed and he tanked in half armor. I then switched to the Maelstrom fleet (PL) that was about 70km from my fleet. We took out a few maels then went for the headshot of all their FCs. Killah Bee’s tengu was primed by both my mach fleet and LAWN/BASTION’s T3 fleet, he died. We then went back to killing maels and triage. This continued in 10% tidi for about 45 minutes.
CO2 needed to bounce out as they were taking heavy fire from the Voltron mach fleet and NC.’s mach fleet. With CO2 off grid Voltron and NC machs both burned for my fleet. After not being able to break their tanks (due to lower numbers of machs than the CO2 fleet) I decided to cut my losses and extract my fleet. 10-15 people were left behind as they were tackled but that was the price I paid for extracting.
I was heading my fleet back home in to M-O when scouts reported NC. machs landing on the gate behind us. I knew lowsec Voltron would not help them because of their slave pods~ I told my fleet to anchor and we began brawling with NC. machs. At the start we were both trading machs for machs this continued for 10 minutes however due to my lower mach numbers than NC the trade was worse for me than NC. With PL maelstroms joining the fight I requested reinforcements to start moving and LAWN/BASTION to come and help with their T3 fleet. Together with the T3 fleet we continued to kill machs and logistics from NC.
I had lost most of my machs by this point and was just down to 2 machs and my AS legions however we kept fighting knowing reinforcments were coming and this was a great chance to kill NC machs. CO2 had also had a bomber fleet come into system consisting of 30-40 bombers. Local spiked with my reinforcements and NC/PL started to reappraoch the Taisy gate in hopes of extracting it was at this moment CO2 bombed them and killed a lot of them or left them in low armor for my reinforcements/T3 fleet to clean up.”
UPDATE: A report from an Imperium FC has been added, and the article has been amended to reflect that the bombers were not used in the lowsec systems. The battle extended into the nullsec system of M-OEE8. We apologise for the lack of clarification.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lemba.
