I think it’s about time we look at a specific fleet, and learn what we can from it. This is the first segment on truly trying to analyse the specific mistakes in a fight and learning from it, so let’s see how it goes. Thankfully (and to my eternal embarrassment) a Unista recorded the whole thing, so we can use it as reference:

Yes, I hate my voice too, here’s the battle report.

So, let’s start with the basics:

UNI:

DD: 31 Close range Battlecruisers

Logistics: 10 Ospreys

EWar: 2 Celestis 1 Bellicose

+ assorted tackle

Fweddit:

DD: 5 Battleships (3 of which were faction), 8 Battlecruisers and a few cruisers

Logistics: At least 6 Augorors + Nidhoggur

EWAR: 2 Scorpions, 1 Blackbird, 1 Arbitrator, 1 Griffin

+ assorted tackle

I had given Fweddit 2 hours notice that we would be passing through and if they fancied a brawl we would happily engage, so mad props to them for putting something together for us. At first glance, this looks like a pretty even fight. If the insane number of battlecruisers can apply their damage well, without the Nid we slaughter them and with it’s somewhat more even. Given that our Celestis are the perfect way to deal with the Scorpions and the Blackbird the UNI wins right? Evidently not.

Blapping the scorpion straight off was a lovely pick off fore us, but then things went wrong:

1) I was being yammered at in the command channel which affected my target calling, notice the silences in comms during. Before the video starts I had given a quick run down of how we were going to engage, who needed to do what to what and when etc, which was met with multiple people arguing over comms that other options were better (in most cases without all the intel, or were just wrong),, or that we should just go home. Going into a fight frustrated also added to this problem, I’m not attempting to pass blame but pointing out that I needed to clear my head and get on with it.

2) Our first Celestis went down fairly quickly, and the second could not find either the remaining Scorpion or the Blackbird on his overview.

3) The primary was never target painted and rarely scram/webbed, making our largely missile based attacks drop to a fraction of their potential. The sig tank on the Augorors were fantastic and if you look carefully the primary would on many occasions burn away from the DD.

4) Many of our DD failed to Anchor up and burnt off randomly, drastically reducing the amount of DPS we could apply

5) I called a Drake as a primary well after realising we couldn’t break their reps, should have gone for one of the canes or just straight up scattered earlier. Derp.

Anyway, now that we’ve discovered the main things that went wrong, how do we fix them?

1) More experience is better for me. Each time I take a fight of this magnitude my composure and awareness improves noticeably. I went over the battle report and spoke with the Fweddit FC after the fight who gave some very useful pointers, as well as many of the experienced Unistas who were in command positions. This was a great learning experience for me. I should have called the second scorpion to be killed straight after the first, or at least after the tempest.

2) I believe that both Celestis pilots were first-time EWar-ers, possibly in their first large engagement with a full overview. Hopefully this was a great learning experience for them too.

3) More bellicoses, possibly target painters in utility mids on a few of the BCs, 1 does not leave enough redundancy and I failed to tell him to specifically paint the primary.

4) Remind DD to anchor up during fights and add it to my opening shpeel at the beginning of every fleet.

5) Don’t call bad primaries, see point 1.

Not the best fleet I’ve ever done, but certainly excellent for learning purposes for everyone involved and despite losing a lot of ships we gave a lot of newbros (especially new logistics pilots, gogo T1 cruisers!) a great amount of experience that day, and we all had a hell of a lot of fun!

On some of my fleets I run a screenshot competition, I’ll leave you with the winning submission for this fleet:

Apoth ♥