Header art by: Empanada
In the early hours of May 29, explosions rocked the system of Y-MPWL in Providence, where Legacy coalition has been fighting to capture the region from Pandemic Legion. Surprisingly though, it was not Pandemic Legion who started off this fight, but noted long-term Providence harassers, Honorable Third Party [THIRD].
The fight happened at a Fortizar belonging to THIRD, but the events were set in motion well before that. I sat down with Seddow’s Mom, the Legacy FC for the fight. He was FCing and coordinating up until the fight went badly south, at which point Vily stepped in to take over capitals. I also asked Meiqur Orez from THIRD for his perspective.
Honorable Third Party
We start off with Meiqur’s view on the build-up to the fight, as well as the flaws from each side. This has been posted as is, with minor editorial fixes:
Ok so first there is a bit of history to the system. We are the long-time spooky ghost of Y-M and claim it as our rightful home. Literally, our alliance was created as a joke in Spectre Fleet years ago so that Spectre Fleet could plant SBU’s in y-m, since then we have evolved into our own entity completely disconnected from SF but the system itself is still where we spend most of our time.
Regarding the idea to bait them, the super pilots in legacy have been allowing their hubris to go to their head. There have been many many opportunities for us to dunk 1 or 2 supers at the expense of a dread fleet but I’ve been waiting for a moment where we could try and maximize the targets. So there was a couple factors that made yesterdays fight take place.
1. Their subcaps were deployed and that meant they couldn’t be used to clear the Legacy undock
2. We knew that they would have to bring in titans to clear our bait since supers would have been defanged by our fortizar
3. We wanted a last stand type of thing where we could make a play while our citadel died
The bait dread was max tanked against the Rokhs so it could reliably sustain something like 200 battleships of KIN/Therm damage which is what we expected they would be able to field.
Ideally, we would have used multiple bait dreads to lure in more titans but it came down to lack of actual humans in play (we are a very very small group); we only had one dread ready to go so we got one target. I’m fairly confident we gave ourselves enough time with our move in ERVK that if 5 titans had come, in we’d have killed all 5.
I’m also confident that in the minds of the Legacy pilots that they felt there was no possible opposition that we could put in the way that could stop them which led the FC to make a critical mistake of bringing supers within DPS range of a Fortizar since their group subscribes to the numbers game of winning Eve fights.
Anyway, the actual bait was pretty straightforward. Undock dread, siege it, they took the bait and jumped in a rag. The only thing that was special was that we had our HICs land on their fort simultaneously with their titan landing in Y-M which meant no help was coming until they cleared the undock. It was important that we sent in HIC’s instead of dictors since the PDS of a fort will one-shot dictor bubbles, but HIC bubbles require that the hic actually die, be neuted off etc etc. Also this is why we scheduled the bait for when they were occupied elsewhere with their subcaps, to maximize the time the hics could stay on grid.
Other than the trick to hold down their triage, in most respects, it was just a standard dread bomb.
As you probably know, shield supers have to use capacitor mods to keep their hardners running. Without a mechanism to maintain their cap, they die very very quickly under neut pressure.
We definitely over-committed dreads on our part. With the amount of time we gave ourselves, 10 dreads would have been more than enough to kill the single titan. People were excited though and I had made no plans to hold back dreads so everything went in and we ended up with more losses than were strictly necessary.
So anyway criticisms of our side:
1. We had only one bait dread
2. We overcommitted for what they fielded
Criticisms of legacy
1. Bringing supers into the range of a Fortizar is a terrible idea
2. Not jumping triage simultaneous with your supers is also terrible
3. Hubris Hubris Hubris
4. Shield supers are a terrible choice given the capital meta.
Legacy
Seddow’s Mom gave us this take on the fight, again, edited for grammar and clarity:
A THIRD fort in the system of Y-MP Providence was in final timer. We had put it into armor a week ago. We knew THIRD/PHEW had a keepstar in Camal in range of the fight, so we had eyes on that. But basically, we formed Rokhs to go kill it, and expected like bombers and some simple resistance.
On a previous armor timer in YQB, [THIRD] undocked two Nagalfars that were fitted to tank Kinetic, so they could tank the Rokhs. We did not know this at the time, so we were surprised when my 150-man Rokh fleet couldn’t break them. We quickly figured it out when the Nags undocked and started shooting my Rokhs. We dropped 1 Ragnarok to Doomsday(DD) one and a Leviathan to DD the other. The one that was DD by the Levi survived the DD, that’s how we knew they were fit to tank Rokh damage because the kinetic Doomsday did not kill it. We ended up killing both Nagalfars, and at the same time, let the supers hit the POS on-grid. This is the armor timer battle report from the Fort in YQB. We ended up killing that fort no problem.
So this was the final timer for the Y-MP fort and I thought they would do the same thing. I got about 20 FAX in fleet and Rage Pings on standby. Sure enough, they undock a Naglfar and start shooting my Rokhs which are 50km off shooting the fort. We dropped a titan 80km above our fleet out of bubbles and have him DD the Naglfar. Turns out he had the wrong DD fit he had the lance, so he put his Artys on the Naglfar as well as the Lance (He missed the Lance) we ended up killing that Nag. Right as the Naglfar died, we saw a hostile cyno light 15km off the titan. Sabres started undocking from the fort and I told FAX to undock. about 30-40 dreads jumped onto the titan and sieged.
I told titan to light cyno and FAX jump, sent rage pings out for supers and caps to log in and join the fleet and shoot everything. Right as I told FAX to jump they said a cyno was lit at the capital undock of our ERVK Fortizar and 10 Devoters with a MR Apostle bridged in, making it to where our FAXx could not jump. The apostle Triaged and repped the Devoters. At that point comms went a little hectic, the supers started logging on and killing the devoters, which would allow our FAX to jump, but it delayed us by about 2-3 minutes in which the titan died. We got a new fleet sorted and jumped supers in killing the dreads. [Here is a] battle report including the Devoters. I had never seen this done before, bridging in Devoters on the Capital undock, and it was very smart on THIRD/PHEWS part.
I had never seen this done before in which you bridge in HICs to stop FAX undocking from the fort. If we had a Fortizar gunner around, or the supers already logged in which could have killed the Devoters, I think things would have been different.
In the end, the fort died, we lost a titan and killed their dreads.
