In hindsight, it was probably a pretty sure thing that an alliance prone to dropping capitals without sufficient force auxiliary support would end up paying for it. Faxes aren’t that expensive as far as capitals go and enough of them will save your supers.
And so it happened to Circle of Two when they collided with Pandemic Legion and Goonswarm yesterday in FR-B1H in Impass. There is a report about the fight up at EN24 by a member of PL that details how things played out. But the net result was five CO2 titans down and about 870 billion ISK in losses overall for the alliance.
Battle Report divided into the usual sides
This all happened while I was at work, as these things tend to. Even B-R5RB started while I was at the office, it just carried on long enough for me to finish work, go home, eat dinner, and then join in. But it was all over Reddit and the topic of the day on coalition coms last night. I’ve already heard/read a few variations of the fight and how it escalated, but the main items seem to agree and from that a couple of items stand out.
The first is the use of force auxiliaries, or faxes, and CO2’s lack of them as they jumped into the fight. This allowed the CO2 supers to be destroyed as there were not enough repair reps on field to save them. CO2 seemed to be following a policy of “jump first, organize later” in order to first save the initial Rorqual and then to counter the growing PL capital fleet.
And I compare this to my own experience with this sort of situation. In fact, not that many hours before the events in Impass the Imperium faced a similar situation in Y-OMTZ in Delve. Again, Pandemic Legion was dropping dreads, this time on a Rorqual in our space. A Ping went out for an fast fleet form with an emphasis on faxes. The coalition has been pushing for everybody to train into and have a fax on hand. We formed up, got undocked, and once a critical mass had been met… and the cyno inhibitor that PL dropped was destroyed… we jumped in as a mass. That led to a less out-of-balance battle report result.
The drop at Y-OMTZ
We were even able to save a Leviathan that jumped in on its own and looked to done for until we landed and were able to rep it with the faxes on grid. Coming in mass with lots of reps changed the result. PL came out ahead, but the exchange hit both sides about the same. If we had been able to save the single Hel we lost, the ratio would have been in our favor.
The counter drop on the field in Y-OMTZ
The second item that stands out from what I heard was how fighters were deployed on both sides. PL came armed with space superiority fighters, the fighters meant to shoot down opposing fighters. On the CO2 side of things it is alleged that, when asked whether or not his carrier pilots should bring space superiority fighters, GigX responded that they should not because he would not be calling fighters as targets.
This led to CO2’s carriers and super carriers losing almost 400 squadrons of fighters, adding 5 billion ISK to their loss total and rendering many of their carriers impotent as they ran out of fighters to deploy. That couldn’t have helped out the CO2 cause. Having counters to fighters ought to be another lesson learned here.
Another day in New Eden.
I haven’t been keeping close count of titan kills for a while, but adding FR-B1H to the last list I made sorts events out as such:
- B-R5RB – 74 titans down (plus one on the way to the fight)
- FR-B1H – 5 titans down
- Okagaiken – 4 titans down
- Asakai – 3 titans down
- KVN-36 – 2 titans down
Have there been any other multi-titan loss events to add to that list.
Finally, I guess I have to give credit to CO2 for one thing. In our battle we failed to save two of the three Rorquals that got dropped. CO2 saved theirs. So they have that going for them.
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