Friday, September 7, 2012

Hashu Blog: Smartbomb Ratting Part 2:Solo

When your going to try smartbomb ratting solo you need to be very careful which anomalies you try to run.  Several important keys to the right anomaly include distance to the spawn from your warp in, location of subsequent spawns, and the number of battleships that appear in each spawn.

 If the warp in is 50 km from the spawn, your going to waste a lot of time traveling.  During that same time your taking damage, your not set-up to be an uber tank, and this can lead to some harry situations as you travel through the rat optimals to get to them.  Different spawn locations for each wave can also be an issue.  First your wasting time traveling between the spawns, your also providing time for the rats to move around so they are not going to be at the same spot but will try to stay at their optimals to you, forcing you to chase them down or use drones to kill them, which is something you only want to do as a last resort.

Finally you don't want more than two battleships spawning in any specific wave.  While working with someone else this isn't an issue as the other person is blapping the battleships with guns, but when your main weapon is smartbombs, killing a battleship before they get out of smartbombing range can be problematic.  With just one battleship in the spawn it is less of an issue as you can potentially follow them a bit without wandering off the spawn.  With more than one battleship it becomes more difficult, which makes that web on the smartbombing battleship important as it allows you to control hostile bs speeds, providing you more time for your smartbombs to apply damage.  Smartbombs themselves don't do a lot of dps, but they do it to a lot of hostiles at the same time, so keeping the rats within range of your smartbombs is key to ratting with them.

In Providence, two anomalies stand out.  The preferred anomaly to smartbomb in solo is Sansha's Rally Point.  The main reason for this is the warp in is within 2 kilometers of the spawn for this anomaly.  Rally Points are also nice as they are predominately frigates and cruisers which die quickly to smartbombs.  They also have either a single or duel battleship spawn in their last wave.  The finishing touch is their escalation.  Sansha's Rally Points escalate into 6/10 plexes, which have the possibility of dropping Centum A-type loot including A-type EANMs which run up to a billion isk.  While your generally going to make between 12-16 mil a tick running theses solos, when you get several 6/10 escalations a week with up to a bil drops in faction loot, the isk quickly adds up.

The other option is Sansha Rally Point (notice the small title difference).  While very similar to Sansha's Rally Point, Sansha Rally Points have a few quirks.  The biggest one is the respawn is roughly 20 km away from the warp in.  This can slow your attempts to clear the site down as you need to travel to the spawn.  It also has a slightly heavier initial spawn (Sansha's Rally Point is all frigates while Sansha Rally Points have a mix of cruisers and frigates).  If your lucky you can afterburn to the 'clump fast enough and get at least the frigs with your smartbombs.  However if they aggress and move to their optimals quick enough, you'll likely find it easier to kill them with drones and focus on deploying on the spawn to use smarties for the next wave.  Once your on top of the spawn and the initial wave has been killed the remaining waves will play out the same with either a single or duel bs spawn in the final wave.

Initial Sansha's Rally Point Spawn

Final Dual BS Rally Point Wave
Inital Sansha Rally Point Spawn, note this spawn is near the right tower.
Had to use drones to finish the last part of the initial wave.
Final Sansha Rally Point Wave
In the initial tick I ran two Sansha's rally Points and part of a Sansha Rally Point and earned over 13 million isk.  Note this wasn't efficient as I was taking screenshots and waiting between warping to anomalies to do other things.  I've made 15-16 million ISK a tick off of bounties when actually paying attention.  The nice think about smartbomb ratting, especially when running Sansha's is that it is very simple and doesn't require too much attention.  After your initial warp in and F1-F8 of your smartbombs you theoretically don't need to do anything till the final spawn as you should be able to kill everything before they get out of range except the battleships.

Hashu Blog's

I would like to introduce a new segment on Providence news titled Hashu's Blog.  Till now Providence News posts have been just that, simple informative news briefs.  Hashu's Blog will be slightly different, including things such as guides, personal stories, and other segments that may be less focused on the bare facts or announcements and more about stories, opinions, and guides, etc.  Basically non-news posts.

The first segment will be a simple guide to the form of smartbomb anomaly running with Battleships that Imperial Dreams corporation pilots have developed.  This technique was pioneered within Imperial Dreams by Wariak but we've seen other groups and corporations use similar set-ups throught Providence and New Eden.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Ratting Carriers and Why They Are Banned In Providence


CVA doesn't have very many rules when it comes to making money or extracting resources from providence.  We are generally pretty open to letting people come in and do what they will as long as they don't bother anyone else.  One exception that we enforce however is a ban on the use of capitals when it comes to ratting in belts or anomalies.

This rule has created a large amount of debate and even some resentment among Providence residents of late, resulting in several threadnaughts within theCitadel forums and several diplomatic incidents within intel and other channels.  However Equinox Daedalus, CVA executor, spoke on the issue in a recent forum debate ...

1. The rule is that there is no ratting capitals allowed.
2. If you do not like this rule there is thousands of systems in eve that do not have this rule, so you are free to go there, and rat in carrier to your hearts delight.
3. No one has given a single reason WHY carrier ratting is better which is what the title of this thread seems to be about, it is only a place where people complain because they are "not" allowed to do something.
4. Faction/Pimp fittings are allowed (although quite useless most of the time)....i'd perfer people use common sense but well, when we have 7 pages of thread about ratting carriers i guess that is in short supply.
5. If you do not like this policy you have 3 options, convinve me personally why they are better, and thus should be allowed, kick cva out of providence and establish your own policies, or find a place to go rat in carrier unmolested.
~ Equinox Daedalus


There are a number of reasons behind the ban.

1) Carriers aren't efficient, BS can easily out earn carriers when it comes to running anomalies.
2) Capital Kills carry significant trophy value to roaming hostiles, even beyond expensive faction ships.  Their loss also tends to affect the general morale of the area.  The loss goes beyond just the financial loss of the pilot but includes the morale loss to the organization that the pilot belongs to.
3) Ratting capitals attract attention.  Hostiles will camp systems which routinely have capitals ratting in them.  This affects not only the capital pilot but all the other pilots in the region who use that system to rat..
4) Tackled capitals attract lemmings.  When capitals get tackled often people will charge into attempt to save it, unorganized and unequipped to deal with what is holding the capital down.  Many experienced roaming commanders will tell of their favorite fights where they tackled a few carriers and managed to kill several times the carriers value of people trying to rescue them.

Some people have asked about sitting on POS shields and assigning fighters, claiming they are perfectly safe.  Potentially they are, assuming they can react and get within the shields in under ten seconds.  DDs have been reported to follow capitals inside pos shields of the doomsday has spooled up before they enter, which can take as little as ten seconds.

So what happens when we catch capitals ratting in Providence?  Generally we tell them to stop and dock up.  We also will inform their CEO.  If they refuse or it becomes a habit we may be forced to ask the person or corporation to leave the area.  Attacking the ratting capitals ourselves remains a final but potentially valid option.

In Short, ratting in capitals is inefficent and attracts attention we don't want, as a result the practice is banned.  Despite the ban it still happens.  While we generally use diplomacy to stop it we are not above using force as a deterent or punishment for the continued practice.  Assuming hostiles don't beat us to the punch.  Providence tends to lose at least three to four ratting carriers a month.  While people man not like this rule, it will not be changing anytime soon.

This Article brought to you by CVA Leadership, written by Rovern Hashu

Sunday, August 26, 2012

#58


Outpost #58 was built today by TSOE Consortium in the starsystem TXJ-II deep in the 2V pocket.  As the second factory outpost in the pocket, "Tress Punto's" will greatly boost the production capabilities of the pocket and will be a shining beacon of the prosperity that Providence residences have been experiencing over the past several months.  After this construction only two systems in the 2v pocket lack outposts, C1-HAB owned by CVA, and 2V-CS5 owned by TSOE Consortium.  At present there are no publicly known plans for more outposts in the area.

http://evemaps.dotlan.net/outpost/TXJ-II

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Equi has decided to quit . . .


letting new corporations into CVA.  According to the re-welcoming thread for Polaris Project who have rejoined CVA today.  CVA will not be letting in new corporations for the immediate future.  As always welcome back, its about time you were flying in CVA again Arthur!

Friday, August 24, 2012

EVE Video: PL Armor Hacs in Providence

Normally I don't share non-provi bloc related videos but as the fight happened in the region I felt I might as well.