Wrong Place, Wrong Time

As stated before, it’s quite enjoyable to have AAA nearby. They usually have a gatecamp running on Sendaya gate, Doril system, and there are always some guys running around. If traffic is slow on home system, let’s go mess with AAA on Doril! Kinda like instant fun!

A feature of AAA is that they feel so safe on numbers, they hardly ever used scouts on nearby systems, se we could easily sit a fleet on Jorund or even Utopia for most of times. Most engagements were pretty straitforward... Bring in bait to the Sendaya gate, agress, bring fleet. If they had too much dps for bait to survive the long warp from Utopia/Jorund to Senday, warp around instead and bring AAA to Utopia or Jorund. Other times, they just had too much, or we were too few and just had to wait for an opportunity to arise.

But these engagements aren’t really anything diferent than normal roams. Biggest rewards came when AAA really did not had a gatecamp going and we could set up to catch straglers. Here are some tactics we used. Some worked, some not.

Tactic n.º1:

Get cloaky Eyes on AAA Station;

Get a cloaly sabre 100km off the Sendaya gate.

Get either a cloaky fleet near the sabre, or a fast fleet docked on station Doril V

Wait for AAA duck to undock

See where it aligns.

If aligns to Sendaya gate, tell Sabre to decloak and bubble up.

When duck lands on dictor bubble, tackle, bring/decloak fleet.

This worked for a limited ammount of time... AAA probably issued a “Don’t warp to gates directly” memo, and people started to use pings near the gates, avoiding our bubble. That brings us to tactic n.º 2.

Tactic n.º 2

If AAA wants to use pings, let’s get them there!

Get cloaky prober on grid. May even make him squad leader;

Get 5 probes at 0.5AU on your gate.

Get your own fleet on several pings around.

You’re set...now play the waiting game for a duck to arrive on a ping.

When duck arrives, probe him. With probes at 0.5AU on your gate, you’ll even probe frigates in 10 seconds (or less).

Squad warp your guys to the Duck.

Gank the Duck fast!

This tactic works well against BCs that take some time to aling down to the gate, but can get many more.

Now... There are some fellas around that like to mess with AAA even more than us. Outbreak pretty much griefs them all the time. Not only using the tactics described above, but with couple more than we don’t use, like 100mn Tengus, bubbles on station and even Black Ops hotdrops. More than once, we were forming the grief a AAA camp and Outbreak had beaten us to it, forcing them to scatter.

The following tale is about such a day, where we were on the wrong place at the wrong time:

A particular day we saw a AAA gatecamp. Can’t even recall what was, but we could take that with a couple of T1 Cruisers and some T1 Logi. Unfortunatly, by the time we arrived on Doril gate, ready to bait the AAA Fleet, Outbreak had already scattered the AAA gate camp, by using a couple of Talos and Vagabonds. I also noticed probes in space near the Sendaya Gate, so Outbreak was using Tactic n. 2 described above. Soon enough, a AAA Cyclone goes to a ping and I see all Outbreak warping to it! This would make the ideal move for us to come in, because I had myself probes out too! We would warp on top of the AAA Cyclone and the Outbreak gang! Unfortunatly, the Cyclone was fast enough to get back into the gate foiling my plan...

At this point Outbreak gang all warped to different pings, waiting for a next kill. Well.... we had come here to kill something, and since Outbreak was not too worried about my probes on space (they could easilly see on them on scan) I probed out a Vagabond that was slowboating. As tackle we choose a Maller.  So basically Maller jumped, warped to me at 0km (I was like 5km near the Vagabond), and even against my expectations, he managed to get a scram on the Vaga. At this point our whole fleet jumped in and warped to the Maller, killing the Vaga and scattering the rest of the Outbreak gang.

Unfortunatly this is when things start to go bad. At the exact time the Vagabond dies, a AAA Dominix and a few BC’s come to the gate. Not only that, they warp the the Vagabond wreck. Our FC makes the call to engage the Dominix. We knew it was bait because AAA Battleships don’t just warp into enemy gangs, but we though we could take what was coming with the help from our logi.

We underestimated AAA at this point... They brough  in a LOT of guys. Even our logis that were somewhat far from the main fleet got tackled fast, and they outnumbred us 2 to 1 or so. Basically we all died!

http://killboard.appetite4destruction.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=43215

Funny fact... AAA had been forming for the last 30 minutes for the Outbreak gang, and we show up scatering them, putting ourselves in the line for the AAA blob. 

Nevertheless, once again, the magic of T1 Cruisers stands out. We killed 1 Vagabond and 1 Dominix, lost 7 T1 Cruisers and we still managed a 58% eff. Also no one was really too much pissed because T1 Cruisers are 40mil and bellow. In the end was a fun engagement!