Hi Everyone! There seemed to be at least some interest in a few more posts about the goings on in EVE online after Patrick's recent article. The stories players create vary wildly, and many of them get written up on private forums as an AAR. These serve as training tools, story propaganda, and many other things, and can be written for absolutely any engagement. Depending on interest, I'll transcribe some of the larger/more important (from a KiteCo perspective) ones and remove/explain more of the EVE jargon than we typically have to for internal forums. With that out of the way, lets get started!

KiteCo is a part of the Brave Collective alliance(BRAVE), a very large, very new player focused alliance. Their interests line up well with KiteCo in being newbie friendly and out to have a good time. Skipping some of the back-story, BRAVE and thus KiteCo are at war with an alliance called Usurper. On Friday afternoon BRAVE attacked a very valuable asset, a Usurper Player Owned Structure (POS/moon tower) controlling a very valuable moon. We had attacked this moon several times before, each time it was successfully defended by Usurper with some help from another alliance; TISHU.

When a POS is attacked, it becomes invulnerable for a specified amount of time. The defenders can adjust this timing, making it become vulnerable again at a favorable timezone for them to defend. Usurper chose to have their POS come out of reinforced mode at approx 12:30 AM Sunday morning PST, a terrible hour for US players. Despite this, BRAVE brought approx 500 pilots to the battle, KiteCo brought approx 15 of those. The stage was set for a big battle.

KiteCo had chosen to form up in Stealth Bomber class ships. These ships can remain cloaked, and then attack with one of EVE's few aoe damage weapons, Bombs. Bombs are launched without the need for targeting, fly 30km from your ships current facing, and damage everything within a 15km radius sphere on impact. This makes bombs very dangerous when used in large groups against clustered ships, doing massive damage to everyone around them and forcing Logistics (healer) ships to scramble to catch up with the damage. Approx 1 hour before the fight, KiteCo scouts were in system, marking possible bombing positions to warp to ahead of the battle. During this time we lose one pilot due to an untimely disconnect causing us to de-cloak.

As the POS becomes vulnerable, BRAVE warps the bulk of their fleet in and starts the attack, approx 250 ships land in a big ball right next to the POS shield. KiteCo Bombers take up positions cloaked at a safe spot, ready for the counter-attack. We only have to wait a few minutes, and see Cynos go up (beacon for other ships to jump to) and Usurper and TISHU jump into the fight, about 75 total ships. They're using their typical "Foxcats" doctrine, which are specific battleships with carrier support which are very high HP, very fast repair potential, and have great damage projection. This fleet comp had been very tough for BRAVE to fight in the past, and they landed nearly right on top of the bulk of the BRAVE fleet. Kite bomber fleet commanders have a quick discussion, get a warpin, and land at bombing range. We have to be *very* careful and aim for the back of the Usurper fleet so as not to kill off all the small ships from BRAVE on grid. We make our align, drop bombs, and warp out. Two full waves of bombs go off right on the edge of the Usurper fleet, dealing massive damage, and our spotter reports 3-5 battleships from the opposing side dead within minutes of landing on the field. Kite Bombers regroup to a safe spot.

At this point, BRAVE warps in the rest of their 500 man fleet, the reinforcements consist almost entirely of small frigate class ships which immediately surround the enemy fleet, and Kite bombers stand down and watch the rest of the fight. It's too dangerous to bomb with so many small ships around for fear of massive deaths for our own side. As we observe, it quickly becomes clear something strange is going on. Usurper ships are dying incredibly fast, and within minutes a cease fire is called. All Usurper ships are dead including 3 carriers, TISHU is allowed to warp off. Unknown to us, TISHU had some sort of Beef with Usurper over previous fights, and decided to turn against them for this battle, making it extremely lopsided. The remainder of the night consisted of mopping up the moon tower, and Kite jumped home after a very successful Bomber fleet. BRAVE took a very valuable moon which is now an important asset for the alliance, and everyone got to see some ships blow up, which is always the goal!

While the outcome was great, it would have been very interesting to see if the TISHU Foxcats could have turned away a fleet of that size. We went in looking for a bigger fight than what we got, but in the end the objective was secured, so Op Success!

The Battle Report for those interested: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=21833006

One of our Pilots has some footage of the battle, and will hopefully be posting that soon as well to go along with this AAR.

Awesome. As someone who doesn't play EVE and doesn't understand it well that Battle Report was still pretty interesting to look through. Seems like you guys did pretty well and did a fair amount of damage. Most of your guys "last hit kills" seemed to be capsules, which I would think are pretty easy to destroy, but a KiteCo member was also accredited with destroying a Destroyer which I'm gonna assume is between a Frigate and Cruiser in importance. I'm basing that off my understanding of real world Navy's so I'm probably missing something in terms of the game dynamics. Anyway EVE seems way too intense/involved for me and my short attention span but really interesting all the same.

Goddamnit, I got the skills to fly a manticore with torpedos and bombs and never got the chance to use it. Stop making me want to resuscitate my account.

@camelizer: Correct, capsules are very low HP and ejected from the ship when it explodes. Killing it sends the pilot to a new clone back in their home system. However they are extremely hard to catch. In this case the capsules were stuck in warp disruption bubbles after their ships exploded and thus couldn't get away. Credit for killing blows only gets sent to the person who fired the killing shot, but each individual report will show every pilot that damaged the vessel destroyed. The destroyer was actually from one of my bombs (Teya Ihara), and was a friendly destroyer who got too close before our bomb run. Our bombs hurt pretty much every ship that was on field, and thus we end up "On the killmail" in Evespeak. The bombing runs it turns out were probably inconsequential due to TISHU shooting Usurper, we simply sped up the process by doing a ton of damage very quickly to all of them.

Awesome! I love that twist at the end lol you guys should post more of these, they are very interesting. I wish I had the cash to play EVE consistently, I'd definitely join up with KiteCo

Awesome! Please keep writing these. I'm one of those people who is always on the edge of "about to play EVE". For now I can at least read this. I don't have much meaningful to add, just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed reading and hope you post more stories in the future.

@renahzor: Oh wow I didn't realize you could click on the individual ships and see who damaged them let alone what parts where on each destroyed ship. Excuse me as I spend the next hour or so looking at things I have no understanding of.

Continue doing this

Please continue doing this

I love everything I find about Eve

Nicely done, and a great read. Looking forward to more of these, they're a hell of a lot of fun to read.

Sigh... I really want to get into EVE... About how long would it take a completely new player to reach a point of being useful?

@xeiphyer: Maybe 15 minutes to learn the controls and a couple hours training for equipment. The mindset that you need a ton of time invested to be useful is false, you need some basic equipment and you can be extremely useful in pvp.

Love this, glad you wrote about it, hope to hear more. Good to know KiteCo is representin.

I might give the trial run a go

Excellent AAR! I'd had moved over to Barleguet that weekend and brought a battleship down with the Brave contingent. What with that, and the supercarrier kill we participated in the previous night, it was a pretty damn good weekend.

I demand someone form an EVE alliance called DEFAULT.