The Night Crew

The Night Crew (TNC) put out one of the best fights last night and very nearly sprayed our guts all over their killboard. I have to give them the credit they're due: don't underestimate these guys!

It all started while I was minding my own business in TNC's home system, a class 4 that I will refer to as c4a. By "minding my own business" I of course mean "watching their POS and plotting destruction," but let's not split hairs, shall we?

Another Cold Moon Destruction (CLMDN) pilot, Fischey, was sitting in our static, c4s, with his scout alt and a fail-cloak Legion (he's new; blame me instead). There were a few other pilots online, but they were semi-afk.

Just as I was about to give up on these two TNC pilots there was finally some activity. One of them arrived back at their POS and if memory serves he switched into a Legion. At this point I'd counted three online pilots, two of which had shown no signs of life whatsoever.

Soon after an Archon was logged in and the pilot switched to a covert scanning Proteus complete with the interdiction-nullifying spoiler. As far as we could make out the Legion and Prot both jumped into the c4s and proceeded to chill out.

At this point I'm assuming they're waiting for us to do something stupid, so we began to try to think up ways to accommodate their expectation. Fischey scanned down the Gas site in c4a and then warped in his Venture.

This was intended to give TNC the impression that we either didn't know of their presence or were too stupid to care and lure them into doing something stupid themselves. What actually happened was that Fischey's Venture got blown up by the five Sleeper turrets he didn't see when scanning down the site.

Naturally, being such professional mentors as one might expect to find in CLDMN, we laughed, pointed fingers and assaulted him with scathing mockery.

Still, all was not lost. In addition to appearing unaware I was hoping we also now appeared incompetent, so I jumped my Helios into c4s and warped to our home hole without bothering to cloak.

I was told a stealth bomber had jumped in behind me and really started to believe we were going to get a fight at this point. These guys were on the hunt and had no idea that their paltry gang was about to get monkey-stomped by our superior numbers (I'll come back to this later, so keep it in mind).

After waiting a few seconds uncloaked on the wormhole back to our home system, Swagshack, I jumped back in and switched out to a Proteus then warped back to the wormhole and waited for their move.

At this point our guys who were AFK had now joined the fleet. We had a Legion, Proteus (x2), a Typhoon, a covops scout and a Drake.

I didn't have to wait long before our scout in c4s sounded off that the Proteus and Legion were jumping into Swagshack. I acknowledged and engaged the Proteus first.

While our forces were en route the scout called a TNC Hound and two Drakes were jumping through from c4s to the shack.

Hmmm. That wasn't expected, but even so, I knew my tank wasn't going to suffer any catastrophic collapse under the added pressure. I was, however, a little more interested as to when back-up was going to land.

As soon as they did I jumped over to c4s in order to save my armor and be able to tackle these guys when they fled, as they most certainly would. We now had a fresh Proteus, a Sleipnir, Drake and Typhoon on the Shack side of the wormhole and a Legion and my Proteus on the c4s side.

The fight quickly migrated into c4s as the TNC guys jumped over, but someone on CLMDN comms called out that more TNC guys were coming in. My overview which shows only targets was nearly full and I knew I'd very severely underestimated these guys.

The ships they were bringing in weren't covert ships, but somehow they'd managed to hide them. So be warned: TNC will surprise buttsex you without a second thought.

There was a Curse (these things always make me nervous), Domi, Tengu and another Proteus and more landing on grid. If we didn't unscrew this situation CLDMN would soon be covered in TNC dps. We'd already lost a Legion.

Two of us jumped back into shack and picked up whatever logi was closest at hand. We came back with a Guardian and Oneiros and managed to stave off total disaster, but not before our Typhoon went down. That pilot jumped back to shack and brought back an Astarte.

At this point the CLDMN fleet consisted of Zealot, Oneiros, Proteus, Astarte, Sleipnir, Drake and Guardian. TNC's fleet was substantially larger: Falcon, Legion, Proteus (x2), Tengu, Curse, Drake (x2) and Dominix.

The Curse was still a pain and made sustained reps difficult, but dual cap boosters on my Oneiros let me stay just far enough ahead of the neuts to rep our Guardian which was doing a phenomenal job mitigating the TNC dps.

At this point the tables were turning dramatically in our favor. We couldn't match their dps, but without reps they had no way to mitigate ours and began losing ships in quick succession.

Wisely deciding to cut their losses, they burned off the hole and left the field. "GF's" were had in local and I think everyone had a good time. It was definitely a learning experience for me.

Battle Report

After the fight I spent a lot of time thinking about how we came out on top of this brawl. Ultimately it came down to positioning on the existing terrain. The fight largely took place just outside our front door and when it started to go bad that allowed us to change tactics.

With no form of tackle on the Swagshack side of the wormhole TNC had no way to prevent us from leaving the field and stopping us from reshipping, whereas we were able to prevent them from doing so and even if they could've reshipped it would've taken them twice as long to do so because the fight took place on our wormhole, not theirs.

Ultimately, I take two lessons from this fight: 1) TNC are very cool guys, but they will rape you and 2) the ability to rapidly shift tactics enables you to move from the narrowest ledge of certain destruction to solid victory!