The Bastards vs A Band Apart – Day 1 recap

So I thought I’d recap what has happened so far today since the war went live at 1122 this morning. Obviously I won’t write a post every day because that’d be madness and, really, who the f**k would want to read all that anyway. Maybe I’ll write a post if anything major happens, who knows. I thought I’d write one about today since the first day is usually memorable.

I was off from work today as I am ill. I decided to log in from my laptop and eve from my bed for a while. Luxury. The war had started and I spotted a bunch of -ABA- frigates on scan, eight of them to just one of just one of me so I’ll take a small gun fitted Prophecy to pew pew and tank on their station. This was cut short when they simply undocked two Griffins and some cruisers/battlecruisers instead so I left and headed back to our home station.

They followed and proceeded to set up a minor camp on the undock, a bit of good natured smack in local took place with -ABA- calling for my immediate undock. The Huginn, Ruptures, griffins, atron, thorax and caracals vs me alone. I was feeling a touch outnumbered.

I undocked my trusty Brutix Navy and let them test my tank. It became apparent I could easily tank them for the 60 seconds that it took to wait out aggression. All that I needed was for one of the frigates to wonder into my web range. This didn’t take long and, lo, the first blood of the war was drawn. And second. And third. These kills were had by simply being patient and waiting for them to make mistakes. It didn’t help I was under two or three Griffins most of the time. A Falcon did pop up once or twice too. Every so often they would miss a jam as one of the frigates was getting in close to maximise his damage. When that situation arrived, blap, tank, dock, repeat.

An hour or so later I was joined by Known Associate, also in a Brutix Navy. The -ABA- gang swelled too, adding a Vexor and a Mauler to the mix as well as another Griffin. I was informed in local that they ‘have 200 Griffins to bring’.
The extra DPS wasn’t enough to break the BNI tank and it was, again, a simple matter of waiting for them to make a mistake and get too close. First it was the Maller. Getting wise they started pulling back and brought some logi. Now we have the same ships as before plus two Augorors, one flown by Mr Javix himself. The twin logi didn’t help when one of their Vexors got too close and agressed on a neutral third party Sigil.

Despite being outnumbered 16 to 2 so far it was 5-0 Bastards, it was only fair that -ABA- got a kill. One of our Meats, a new player, undocked to take a look and was volleyed by a Rupture. He learned about alpha strikes today. Congratulations to Wild Ai who, I believe, wins 50m for first blood by an -ABA- member. I’m not sure if there will be a prize for second blood but, at time of writing, that hasn’t happened yet so there is still time to consider it.

-ABA- continued to upship, bringing a Megathron, Neut Armageddon, Vexors, Confessor, Tornado, Oracle, Brutix and (not shown) the Falcon.

It is, perhaps, worth noting, at this point we had three people. I guess we should feel flattered that -ABA- believe they require this many people. Personally I believe they are better than they give themselves credit for with this but we’ll see how this war continues. There were some more calls in local for us to stop ‘being cowards’, to undock and fight. Even if we wanted to die gloriously taking down as many as we could, this was dashed by the near permajamming. Now they had enough firepower to wear even a BNI down in less than 60 seconds so killing someone making a mistake would be harder, if possible at all now. We elected not to engage further while they had such overwhelming odds. The Geddon, piloted by Rixx, promptly plonked itself right on the undock itself and had constant reps on it from not just the two Augs but also a whole flight of heavy armor drones. Perhaps overkill. The rest of the ships retreated to 25-30km away from the undock, well out of ‘get snagged being silly’ range. They spent the next while trying, unsuccessfully, to bump us off the station. They got a few good bumps in, I’ll give them that, but none were able to push us off the docking ring.

Mr Spaxi managed to snag a lone Griffin out of range of his friends, he even got the pod. Bringing today’s score to 7-1 (or 100m to 6m).

I went to make dinner at this point and came back to find, despite being told we’d be “seeing a lot of the inside of stations” and “good luck leaving this station in the next week”, they’d gone. I’m not sure if it’s because there was now six of us online but I have suspicions.

We went out on a roam instead with a couple of cruisers which was reasonably uneventful with the highlight being a Battle Exequror kill. We did manage to run into a very large thrasher gank with ~30 Thrashers. It didn’t end well for Eito. It was fun though and today has been a good laugh. I enjoyed the challenge of fighting extremely outnumbered in a situation where I had no real advantage. My strategy was to wait patiently for the other side to make mistakes and catch them when they did. Simultaneously I had to be careful not to make any silly mistakes of my own as I would quickly lose my ship if I had.

Thanks for the fun -ABA-, I look forward to some more ❤