I'm a bit rusty at my FCing but recently I have tried to make a more concious effort to get back into it. Not only does it add another level of challenge to the game, but it helps to focus any mistakes you made because after the fight seemingly everyone will notice.
Our alliance operated pretty silky smooth when it comes to roams and fleet ops through the direction of our stellar list of FC's. In fact there are so many of them that are good it's a little rediculous because no one dying significantly drops our target calling abilities as so many people can fill in.
Saturday night was an excellent example of this as we roamed through much of Syndicate looking for a fight and found only a few ganks, and no comparable sized gangs that wanted to engage us. It was fun cruising around in my Broadsword in that gang, just the smoothness of operation speaks volumes about our Alliance level coordination.
Anywho...
On Sunday, I was able to scrounge up some "eve time" and had just made it back to TXW from doing some escalation sites, gotta make money somehow!
I undocked in my probing ship just as a Ronin gang of tenish frigates jumped into local. Stugh had about 5 pilots in TXW at the time so I spent some of my time sharpening my combat probing skills trying to track down the frigates. Shortly after the Ronin gang, a DIE/MORTS, aka Death Is Everywhere Alliance and Ius Prima Noctis Alliance, mixed gang of about 14 jumped in as well. For a few minutes they tried to pin down the Ronin frig gang and I wondered if the now six of us Stuggies could get a fight against the heavier (in compisition) gang of IUS.
I jumped on vent and called for a RR BS gang, with 2 Guardian's for support to hopefully equal the fire from their fleet as they had something like 2 Drakes, 2 Vaga, sleipnir, Ferox, Hound, Arazu and a few others. Anywho I undocked in one of the Guardian's, with 4 RR BS to our little fleet.
The gang we were trying to engage were somewhere around Planet 10, but not at a gate or celestial so the trick was trying to find them or get them to engage. I had the BS warp to the NG- Gate and try to get them to engage there because we intially thought they were over there.
Well during the attempt to get them to engage I had the BS at the NG- Gate align to the 5-F gate at speed so they could warp there if needed since it looked as if the gang was closer to that gate.
Time passed with no engagement. During this time the BS on the NG- gate were spacing themselved away from the gate, ended up being around 30km from the gate at the start of the fight, and me being the moron I am, forgot to tell them to stay closish to the gate. One of them was moving between there and 5-F trying to provoke a response as I docked my guardian to change into a prober to force the fight. Indeed this seemed to work because as soon as I docked and changed ships, in fact right as I was undocking, one of their Vaga engaged our already exposed BSes on the NG- gate. However I failed to undock the alt(now in the Guardian) at the same time as the prober and of course, murphy at his best, they engaged, in force, the BS right at that moment. The lone guardian warped out there, but, while in warp, another surprise, a Falcon, uncloaked and engaged, effectively putting all our RR out of the fight. Props to the Falcon pilot, he had most of us jammed out 90% of the time after he uncloaked. Either skill or luck. In the end...
Battle
I ordered everyone to disengage, and jumped into NG- hiding at a safe where the two guardians were able to get what was left (2 other ships besides the Guardians) back to 100 percent. After a bit their fleet moved on and we jumped back in and docked up.
Hindsight is easily 20/20.
Negatives...
A. I failed to establish myself properly as the FC of the fleet, and it led to some confusion at the start of the engagement.
B. I should not have docked up to trade ships, doing so gave them a window for engagement.
C. Splitting the fleet as usual proved costly. I will not make that mistake again.
D. Always expect the Falcon.
Positives...
A. People willing followed me into a fight
B. We didn't just sit in the station like everyone else when faced with a fight.
C. I gave it a shot, I will know better next time.
I offered to help people with their losses but nobody took me up on it, once again confirming how good(or rich) the pilots in this alliance are.
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