Another random Discord ping in Amarr faction warfare militia; another tens of billions of ISK gone.
In our neighborhood of low security space, we are one of the small fish in the pond ([EDICT] alliance, in the regions of Devoid, The Bleak Lands, Hemaitar and Metropolis). Random faction warfare skirmishing works out in our favor as much as it does for anyone else, but when strategic fights are happening in our area, we can expect to be outgunned and outmanned. We can score the occasional upset win, but if we want to try and compete on a strategic level, we coordinate with the rest of the Amarr militia (and friends).
On this night, a militia Discord ping warned of an opportunity to drop some black ops ships onto an unsuspecting target. We’re usually on the receiving end of black ops fleets so I was excited to join with my shiny new Arazu. It not being a planned fleet, militia pilots from all over the Amarr/Minmatar warzone scrambled to get into fleet and get to our staging point. We were too slow though, and the original target wandered off. However we didn’t want to waste the team we’d pulled together so we sent out more hunting pilots while the rest of us entertained ourselves with ship spinning and storytelling.
In faction warfare, dropping a propaganda post is one way to gain significant progress capturing an enemy system or securing a friendly one. It’s also a giant beacon that draws attention and often pulls in beefier, juicier targets, so one of our hunters decided to drop one in Auga and see what showed up to investigate. Discord comms started to pick up as hunters watched Minmatar militia pilots arrive at the beacon. Our black ops fleet undocked and hugged our bridging battleship close, ready for the lightyears long leap on to our Minmatar frienemies.
One of our favorite Minmatar bad guys, Ninlarra, was the largest target on grid in a Typhoon battleship. The covert ops cyno beacon was lit on top of him and he was tackled – a roaming Tengu landed on grid too and started shooting. These would be the first of our fellow Amarr militia pilots to die tonight.
The rest of our militia gang jumped to the covert ops cyno and immediately spread tackle and damage across the grid. The Typhoon was the only significant target on grid to begin with so I added my scram and web to him and put my drones on smaller tackle ships. Ninlarra’s Typhoon died just after he started targeting my Arazu, but we traded our cyno beacon ship – a Pilgrim – and the Tengu that had landed early on the target, for his battleship. A handful of smaller Minmatar militia ships were killed as we cleared tackle, and then we cloaked up and warped away to continue hunting.
Losing those black ops cruisers for a single Typhoon and some tackle was a horrible trade, ISK-wise. But what I’ve enjoyed most about moving to low sec faction warfare is the complete mental flip from risk-averse flying I’d always had in other areas of the game, to the “we measure our fun by the number of our corpses” mentality 90% of the people in faction warfare have. Technically, we’d just screwed up a black ops drop and lost over 1 billion ISK killing under 400 million ISK worth of bad guys. And yet the fleet wasn’t demoralized, they were in fact racing to get back to our staging point and keep hunting.
We reformed and had a short interlude where a hunter grabbed a traveling [INIT] Abaddon with a squishy Prospect covert ops frigate. The frigate couldn’t stay alive long enough for the fleet to get through and add their own tackle so we had to watch the battleship warp away while we were still locking him up. And then watch him warp straight back into the fleet??? Surprised, we grabbed tackle again and burned him down quickly.
Amarr militia’s rabid black ops gang regrouped in our staging system again and kept hunting, but now we had a problem. Faction warfare activity is mostly condensed into a couple frontline systems that the two militias are actively fighting over, and we’d been dropping black ops ships in that tiny neighborhood for about 30 minutes. Anyone who wanted to counter us had ample warning that we were out hunting and could easily prepare an ambush for us. This is the point where you’re supposed to disband the fleet and call it a day.
But Dak Rattler logged on so we didn’t (:P).
Dak usually logs in with one foot into his ship already and is three jumps down range before his client fully loads up. When we were a baby alliance a few years ago, he was one of the local pirates that clubbed us like seals until his hard heart softened to our plight. Now he flies with us and teaches us how to club.
Today he had hopped in a Prophecy Navy Issue battlecruiser and was marching his way straight to the Amamake gate in the Auga system. The rest of the fleet was still restaging or otherwise located nearby and starting to collect in the direction of Amamake.
Amamake is the Mos Eisley of faction warfare lowsec. It’s got a fancy freeport Keepstar station to hold it’s hive of scum and villainy. Jump freighters are built here or stop by on their shipping routes to militia staging systems; Minmatar militia pilots are docked next to Amarr militia pilots; [BIGAB] black ops hunters stop over for a bio-break; BearThatCares has an office in the pleasure district where he writes Reddit posts for [FL33T]; [FRAT] and [INIT] scouts zoom through on their way to fight over moon drills. Of all places in the warzone, it is the most “undock and immediately fight someone” spots in the entire area.
So yes, the perfect spot to drop your very obvious, very green, black ops fleet with zero consequence. Very bait-looking bait is on the opposite side of the gate from Dak but everyone decides to go for it.
Dak jumps his battlecruiser through the Amamake gate and the fight is on.
‘Twas ineed bait! As our expensive black ops ships decloak, the Minmil swarm descends (yes, 20 dudes is a swarm in lowsec). The handful of cuddly smallish bait gives way to a beehive of battleships, T2 cruisers, battlecruisers, Vargur’s and a Kronos (the timeline is fuzzy and I pressed the wrong button so my recording didn’t record). I have a moment of panic as I see Bixtarqi’s name on grid but then I remember I’m not in a pod warping to a gate so he’s not smartbombing me; he’s just a normy today, flying a Kronos marauder. Or he was until that died and he brought out a Phoenix Navy Issue dreadnaught to help put down our merry band of Amarrian’s.
Very quickly, our fleet is very dead. Blacks op battleships, T3 cruisers, most of them deleted off the grid and a few stragglers warping away to safety.
An after-action report is filed on Discord with an honest battle report and a rough timeline of the rough events. The response? “AND WE GOT BIXTARQI’S KRONOS!”
It was a rough fleet in the eyes of the ISK war – about 12 billion lost to kill 3 billion in the course of an hour. It was also fun to be a small fish, donning night-vision goggles and a suppressed Uzi, to rampage across the warzone dropping on some of the bigger fish for a change. Pulling a random black ops fleet together across multiple alliances and being hip deep in internet spaceship combat minutes later is just another peak lowsec moment.
We always want more friends, to either shoot or fly with in our warzone. Forget the ISK Positive battlefield mindset wherever you are; become Rizz Positive and yeet yourself to glory with the militias! FOR THE EMPRESS!
(Thanks specifically to [D-N-G] alliance for shepherding the cats on this fleet.)
