40 Jumps and a Bang

Fuelled by our successes in the Tenerifis region, Goonfleet and our allies have been pushing into Omist, to our south. Unfortunately, the route from our strategic base in the 77s system to our target system in D2-EZ is a long one, of about 15 jumps. To make matters worse, BoB has their allies sit astride this route: last night there was a fleet of around 115 ships at a bottleneck system, the destruction of whom would have diverted us from the task at hand.

The task in question was the destruction of some BoB POSes that were coming out of reinforced (ie becoming vulnerable to being finished off after we seiged them successfully a couple of days ago). This needed numbers to do, so I joined a convoy from 77s to D2, going the long way round: a distance of almost 40-odd jumps.

The journey itself was pretty safe: we stumbled across a member of our enemies RISE in a vagabond sitting on a gate a few jumps from the end of our journey, but he saw local spike as 20 or so Goons jumped in in battleships, battlecruisers, frigates and a couple of covert-ops ships, and decided to scarper. A shame for him as RoyOfCA, our man in Iraq, was stumbling along five jumps behind and vulnerable over his laggy, satellite connection. Having him in teamspeak is always strange: "F**kin' mortars... If I get disconnected I'll be back in a while, unless they take out the dish."

One glorious moment, as our 2-man reinforcement gang reached the gate into D2, was that a huge French battleship fleet warped up. TCF are our allies, and they do like their Gallente battleships, so there was a wonderfully homogenous feel to their squadrons as they loomed all around us before jumping through. Then, as we gave them time to clear the gate, our Russian allies of Red Alliance jumped in as well: it was like heading off into a battle, knowing you were outnumbered two-to-one and then having massed ranks of solid-looking infantry and dashing cavalry ride past you. Our allies are awesome.

Anyway, we reached the target system, and warped to the first target POS just in time for some of us to see it blow up. Mission accomplished! Unfortunately, the rest of us saw nothing: Eve Online can't really deal with battles of 200vs250 at the moment, especially when BoB uses jumpbridges to bring ships into a system. Most of us desynched or lagged out, and we took a pounding at the hands of the bigger BoB fleet. The repeated lagwarps kept me alive until the end of the battle, ironically enough, but prevented my escape. In the end, I was primaried by the whole fleet. The result was tremendous sense of anticlimax in the non-existent battle, but we were there to do a job, and that job was the strategic one of killing POSes.

I find it odd that BoB, who have played this game longer than anyone, don't properly defend their POSes: they fight us at them as or after we destroy them, sure, and inflict substantial losses. But those are tactical successes. Like the Germans on the eastern front, they inflict disproportionate losses upon us, but lose ground as they do so.

They must know that against LV and against V, two dead alliances who fought us, we lost huge numbers of ships, but won. That is how we work: we swarm, and we keep coming back relentlessly.

Also, they are training us: we and our fleet commanders alike make mistakes. But we learn from them - sometimes immediately, sometimes after a few examples - and we get better each time. Both in terms of skill-points and of personal learning, we improve far faster than them, since we start from such a low base.

Anyway: we lost a skirmish and won the day's battle: we destroyed the target POSes and cotinue to edge towards sovereignty in the station system, just as we did with 9-9. Our losses were mitigated by a large number of ship reimbursements, due to the effects of lag. Roll on tonight.