Home a-Roam 4

The next few evenings are spent battening down the hatches for the upcoming November privations, resetting Planetary Interaction timers, and building a few Condors for a roam JR wants to try out.

Well, that and a bit of solo fun, which included a new Cormorant I'm trying out that managed to net me a few kills on its first flight. Definitely need to take that crazy looking ship out more in the future.

One dark spot on this solo flight was that I tried taking out a minor complex in enemy held territory, and found it entirely not worth the time. With only about half the changes to complexes currently in place, the massive fountain of ISK-production has been shut down -- which is a good thing -- at the cost of the sites being worth doing at all. That's fine, though: I'll take the benefits even if it means a month of avoiding plexes until the rest of the changes go in.

But enough about that -- I've got Condors to build for a skirmish fleet!

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There's something fun and liberating about flying incredibly cheap ships that can hit targets from over fifty kilometers away, fly 4000 meters a second, and chase down pretty much anything. Adding to the fun of this roam is the fact that Em and Shan are coming along on one of JR's roams for the first time (Em in a custom Condor that matches his very deep missile skills, Shan in a Vigil with several target painters, because he's Minmatar to the bone).

We don't find any 'big' fights, but that's fine for our group, which is happier mauling and taking down smaller groups of larger game. The Condor is (now) a wonderfully versatile frigate, and we have a number of ship variations that leave our targets all but helpless to harm us, and our losses are few and far between.

Not so the enemy, as we rack up kills on an Arbitrator cruiser, Retribution assault frigate, Punisher frigate, a Daredevil pirate frigate fit with entirely too many expensive modules that did him no good at all and, finally, a Rifter and Rupture out shooting NPCs in asteroid belts. It was a fine conclusion to the evening, so JR calls it for the night and we head home.

Or so I thought.

"Okay guys, I'm going to head o-- oh, there's a Pilgrim on this gate."

"He cloaked."

"Can someone decloak -- hey! We decloaked him!"

"Eh, he's just going to jump the gate. He's won't aggress anyo--:

"He's aggressing!"

"Everyone warp to JR. Everyone warp to JR."

The fight took well over five minutes, partly due to the Force Recon Cruiser's tanking ability and partly because we had to work through most of his drones first (and in two cases, reship in mid fight), but eventually we took the ship down, netting us a great tech-2 cruiser kill to cap off the night, as well as -- effectively -- the month of October.

And how has that month been going?

Not bad! Em, Dirk, and Shan have jumped into the pool, and last night our little corporation broke 100 kills since joining the war against the evil Amarr slave lords. Our win-to-loss ratio corp-wide is better than I'd expected at this point in our learning curve, but far more importantly, not a single kill on the board is any kind of structure. I'm very happy about that -- it simplifies the issue a bit, but it's still a good indicator that I'm getting what I wanted out of this experiment.

Why the retrospective?

Per usual, my free time during November will be pretty sparse, and what I have will be mostly dedicated to family and friends close at hand. Now is the time on EvE when we schedule a lot of long, slow, annoying skill trains that I've been putting off. I can't complain about how October concluded, and I comfort myself with the thought that I'll come out on the other end of November with a sexy new expansion only days away. I'm sure I'll post a few things here and there (perhaps stories of the corp's adventures while I'm MIA), but for the most part all I can say is good hunting, and I'll see you soon.