For me, the battle started badly. The Morsus Mihi fleet met up with another Northern Coalition fleet at a staging POS populated with friendly Titans. After getting lectured by the Fleet Commander (FC) about how to prepare our computers for the fight to come (turn down all your graphics settings), word came that our jump bridge was about to open. Of course, that meant EVE crashed for me. By the time I got my connection back up, the jump bridge had closed.
I dawdled for a while, not really realizing that I could just fly to P2-TTL on my own. I was in an interceptor, after all — the one thing my ship was exceptionally good at is getting places quickly.
When I arrived on-grid in P2, the battle was well underway. I had literally never seen this many ships before in my life. I hadn’t really been shot at, outside of a few controlled circumstances. I half expected to die as soon as I arrived. Surely someone’s job in this 300 person enemy fleet was to shoot at me, right? I fired up my microwarp drive and ran very high speed circles around the enemy fleet, relieved to discover that, in fact, no one really cared about me at all.
Getting noticed is actually kind of tricky. With this many people, you don’t actually click on your targets in the world. You spend most of your time staring not at the world itself, but at something called the overview. The overview is just a sortable table. Each row tells you how far away the ship is, what kind of ship it is, who’s flying it, and potentially a bunch of other optional information like velocity, alliance, and corporation.
On top of the overview are filters for different combat situations. For battleships — the fleet ships of the line in situations like this — all you need is a Hostile Battleships view. This scopes your world down to just a list of your counterparts in the enemy fleet. The picture on the left is a support-only view of the battle. Unlike the battleship-only view above, this view is much more sparse. Battleships are clearly eh backbone of any fleet. Battles are won or lost by taking out enemy battleships. The rest of the fleet exists to keep friendly battleships alive, make it hard for the other fleet to target our battleships, and keep wounded enemy battleships from retreating to safety.
That last bit was my job. I was was flying an Interceptor. Faster than any other ship on the field, I watched for retreating enemy ships and jumped on them with a warp disrupter. That way when their armor started to wear down, they couldn’t start their warp drives. When our battleship fleet wore them all the way down, I would bounce to the next target. If I attracted enemy attention, I would burn hard away from the enemy fleet until their target locks broke and they shifted their attention elsewhere. When I’m actively tackling someone, it looks like this – my “locked” target is in the upper top part of my screen, with two icons just to the right of it showing that I’m using my missile launchers and warp disrupter on the target. On the bottom, you can also see my micro-warp-drive is on, and my current speed is nearly 5k/s.
The most striking thing about this kind of combat is how abstract and slow it is. There are no formations, just amorphous blobs of purple (my fleet), blue (friendly fleet), and red (enemy). These blobs drift slowly through space, with dots occasionally warping off and warping back, trying to avoid death by breaking enemy target locks on them. There are no football-style plays; no delicate formations, daring gambits, or flanking maneuvers here.
Instead of calling plays, all we get are names of enemy targets. The Fleet Commander calls out the name and ship type of our target, focusing all our battleships’ fire on one enemy ship until it buckles under our attention. The support ships flit around the edges, doing our jobs independently, hoping not to attract any attention while we carry out specific side missions.
It’s all quite lonely. I swap between a list of enemy battleships and enemy support ships fading away all the friendly ships until my screen is just angry red. I haven’t the faintest idea if we’re winning or losing, all I know is that there’s a lot of red and no one’s shooting at me.
Until, all of a sudden, I die. It happened fast and out of nowhere, and I was knocked out of the fight. If I was really dedicated, I would have slow-boated back to Tribute in my pod and jumped in another ship and made my way back to the fight. But it was late, and I’d spent 3 hours in fleet already. This, in the end, is probably what decides fights more than how fancy your ships are: who has work in the morning and needs to get to bed.
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