You've tackled a WHAT?!

Disclaimer: This was a long roam for me, and the shit hit all kinds of fans later on, so my recall may not be perfect. I am basing the majority of this post on jotted notes I made while flying around and the rest on pure memory, but if anything is glaringly wrong, or I got something in the wrong order, please feel free to comment/message me and I will attempt to fix it. Next time, I'll record it in bursts, so I have a stronger idea of what happened when :P

Yesterday evening, I was chilling in Militia Chat, while messing with cheap fits on EFT and wondering what to spend my LP on in the next few weeks (You know, standard procedure), when I noticed in Militia Chat that some FC called "Dopified" was forming up a T1 Frigate/Destroyer roam in a few minutes, and wanted to get an idea of numbers. Atleast twenty or so people X'd up straight away.

"Well shit" I thought to myself "This guy is either really good, or his fleets are hilarious. Either way, I want in"

I quickly X'd up too, while hopping in one of my cheap, hull-tanking, dual prop Atrons. I was introduced to this fit shortly after joining the Militia, and I love them. They're fun to fly, cheap to lose, and do decent DPS for what they are. A perfect Faction Warfare ship in other words! I started heading to the staging system in Heydieles, while the FC ran through the overall plan for the night on Teamspeak.

GO GO BATTUL ATRON

We would be roaming up some pipe I'd never heard of, which frankly isn't saying much (I still haven't got a proper handle on the local geography yet). Apparently we were going "the back way" tonight however, to avoid both gatecamps and neutral squid alts spotting us before we got some surprise attacks in. There was a fair amount of giggling in fleet at this point.

Aren't FW players so mature? ;P

While we were still forming up, Dopified gave all the new guys a crash course in organising your overview for a roam, which I was glad about because I spent most of my last roam locking my fleetmates by accident, which almost caused some embarrassing blue-on-blue incidents.

We eventually started moving after a good half an hour of messing around with ships to bring, how to act in fleet (e.g do not second guess the FC in the middle of a brawl), not speaking over scouts etc. Pretty obvious stuff, but some of the guys were fairly recent players and I guess it didn't hurt to run through it all. Also I was secretly relieved for a little help, since I'd never been in such a large fleet before (I think we peaked at around 35-40 people). We headed swiftly up the pipe, emphasizing covering ground quickly over rooting out squids who were dug in. If we couldn't get a fight within a minute of our scouts entering the system a jump ahead of us, we simply blazed on through. I enjoyed this approach quite alot, because it meant we were never sitting around getting bored.

After fifteen minutes or so into the roam, during which we missed catching a flashy Pilgrim by nanoseconds when he blundered into us on a gate, one of our scouts two jumps ahead of us called in a flashy Maelstrom landing on his side of the gate. The Maelstrom jumped the gate (towards us) and our scout followed. Dopified called for the Maelstrom to be pointed, and ordered the fleet to blaze to our scout's rescue. Someone shouted over Teamspeak as we landed that the Maelstrom had no guns fitted that he could see, so the FC ordered us to stay atleast 6km from it at all times (maximum T2 smartbomb range) We held at around 7km, and fired long range ammos into his shields. He was dual ancilliary shield booster fitted, so he took a while to die, but we caught him on his reload (both boosters) and he quickly exploded.

I think we only lost one ship and a pod to the smartbombs

We looted the wreck and kept moving. I snagged a Strong Blue Pill booster (which I later lost when my Atron died) and a couple of T2 mods.


Later on we stumbled into a Balkan Express Hurricane sitting on gate, a corp I've seen before around Pananan, where they have a reputation for dropping caps on pretty much everything. We engaged, fully aware he would have friends nearby, and not ten seconds later our scouts reported an enemy mixed Hurricane/Guardian gang coming in. We killed the first Hurricane as they landed on grid. Our FC then ordered us to switch to the nearest Guardian and get in close with high damage ammo (like Void and Hail). We were breaking the reps since he kept dipping into stucture, but our DPS was also getting steadily picked off by the Hurricanes and the reps from friendly Guardians started to hold him up.

SO DAMN CLOSE!   D:

 Also not helping the situation was a good ten or so people were holding range from the Guardian and not applying heavy DPS for some reason, which pissed off the FC no end. I went down in flames, as did most of the fleet, except for our scouts and a few lucky destroyers and frigates who managed to escape the "attention" of the Hurricanes.


We were ordered to reship, and headed back out again. I grabbed a spare Atron, and met up with the fleet in order to catch a squid Tornado gang which had been mentioned in an intel channel. We "stampeded" to where they were last seen, in the hopes of catching them on gate where they were vulnerable. On our way there we burnt past an (apparently) friendly BS armour gang and jumped into Oinasiken...

Right into a fleet brawl, where the very squid Tornado gang we had been looking for was sitting a few hundred kilometres off from gate and taking potshots at those in the fight. There were already carriers on the field, and someone was escalating, because dreadnoughts started dropping in too. It was utter chaos. I took lots of screenshots of course :D

Awesome looking fight!

Unsurprisingly,we were ordered to warp the hell off the gate by our secondary FC (since our main FC was reshipping), and regroup in the next system over (which I think was Nisuwa).

One day Archon... One day...

After some confused milling around from the fleet, Dopified returned and formed a plan. We would jump back in, and warp around the battle while attempting to catch vulnerable targets on the edge of the fight, and those who had warped out to repair/regroup etc. We started by scouting out the nearby planets for those regrouping. We soon found a couple of Tornados, one of which managed to alpha my face off when the fleet landed 60km or so off them. I flew off to reship into another Atron while listening to the fleet catch a fleeing Tornado from the group and melt him. Revenge!

By the time I returned we were wating at a random planet for our scouts to find us another target, which happened to be from the same Tornado gang as before, who had been caught at a customs office. This time I managed to not die horrifically to random artillery fire, and helped burn down the unlucky Tornado pilot. He was soon followed into the void by a Cormorant who landed next to us while we were brawling the Tornado. Of course, he was swiftly pointed by one of our Ares interceptors and bumrushed by everyone who was in range. We assumed he was a latecomer to the gang and got a bit unlucky with his warp-in.


We kept messing around, attempting to catch stragglers, until a scout suddenly reported he had tackled a flashy Vindicator jumping into Nisuwa from Oinasiken. There was a moment of shocked silence before we hit fleet warp so fast I barely realised what was happening. When we landed, we were ordered to jump gate, then close distance to the now tackled Vindicator, and scram/web him with guns blazing. Learning from the Guardian mistake earlier, we did so, with considerable cackling and cheers over Teamspeak.

WOLOLOLOL

He died much faster than I expected, but we had to loot and run incase his friends were incoming, which was done with lots of "WOLOLOL" in Local and suchlike. It was hardly sporting, but a bunch of the fleet was drunk anyway from what I could tell, so I doubt they really cared about "fair fights" and such at this point. I have to admit I was too pleased with a Vindicator kill to really care that it had required pretty much no real skill on our part ;)

(It later turned out the guy who looted everything decided to drop fleet and run, instead of contracting it the the FC, so everyone on the mail could get a share. We were a little pissed)

Not long after that, a second Vindicator was caught apparently attempting to leave or join the fight (seriously it was chaos, I have no idea who was attempting to do what) and we had a go at killing him too, but were quickly forced off the field by his friends coming to save him. It didn't matter though, because he was later caught by the other group of angry people dropping capitals everywhere, and we were still on the mail \o/

Second Vindicator gets blobbed, but his buddies start landing pretty fast :(

After that the fight seemed to die down, so we skirmished around with several squids who'd come to pick over the remains of the field, which had been heavily looted already by whoever had won the brawl, but there were lots of T2 Sentry Drones and suchlike scattered over several hundred kilometres. Of course we wanted the remains of the loot, and fought them off at each turn. We got a smattering of kills here and there, but with our targets spread over a such large distances, I only snuck onto a pod killmail that lots of people were whoring on.

After looting what we could the field, (which included me signing in my alt to grab some fighters and a capital repair mod from a carrier wreck) we jumped into Pynekastoh.

A decent haul methinks

We were engaged by a squid Navy Caracal as we came through, who was exploded in a short time by our rampaging frigates (before I could get there since I burnt in the wrong direction off the gate like a scrub). He soon came back with some friends, with himself in a Hurricane, and his buddies in a Thorax and a Rupture. All were taken down with minimal losses from our side, along with some help from a passing friendly gang. Go go noob blobs!

The fleet kept going, but it was getting late for me, so I thanked the FC for an awesome evening, and wished the fleet luck in getting some more kills before logging off to catch some sleep.

So yeah, that was a pretty epic evening. It's definitely saved my killboard, which up till then seemed doomed to stay on a diet on frigates that attacked me in plexes, and I had a hell of alot of fun skirmishing around the dramatic (and awesome) backdrop of a full blown capital brawl.

If this is a normal occurrence in the Gallente Militia, I doubt I'll be leaving anytime soon ;)

Fly safe!