(This is a write up done by Kadesh, member of Warlords of the Deep alliance and the victors of the ATXIII. Kadesh brings a detailed insight into the mindset of not only a tournament player, but one of the best teams in any Eve tournament. Enjoy.)
Hi, I am Kadesh and I have been doing tournaments for the past 3-4 years. They are very hardcore and addictive, but I regret nothing.
I watched and admired tournaments since AT6, and as a regular solo pvp pilot I wanted to participate just to visit Jove space, I didn’t have any ambitions. At some point in the past, I met HaartSp. We did not know each other well – I was just selling some stuff I produced to him/his friends, thus his corp entered AT9 as part of Hydra without me. When I asked about any details (and as I didn’t know how things were done, I had so many questions), Haart always replied in a way which made me think that he considered me a spy. Not much I could do about it. Hydra won AT9, and after that Haart revealed some details about preparations and the tournament itself. Until this moment, my only chance to play in the AT was by joining DarkSide, which still had a handful of pilots I respected a lot, but now I knew that there was a chance to join Hydra too.
Before AT10 preparations started, I coded a few scripts and helper tools, and apparently they were good enough to join Hydra, its AT team and AT leadership right away. Being promoted from nobody to a demigod felt good. I couldn’t call being in the same comms channel as Garmon otherwise.
Besides coding tools, I tried to contribute to wormhole logistics and theorycrafting. With little to no experience in theory, I spent more time listening than talking, and even with this approach I was called a retard numerous times. The only setup which was made & posted by me was a shitty Gallente rush, which never saw the light of testing.
The Hydra/Outbreak ban from AT10 enraged me. I knew how teams were integrated during AT9 and how it would change in AT10, it simply felt unjust. With many observations taken into consideration, I am still confident that it was revenge of some CCP employees for AT9 finals, served cold. Some of our guys were saying “farewell” to Eve after wasting 2 months of tests just to be banned, I didn’t. I knew there was a good chance I would reconsider my initial intention to “quit” Eve.
After taking almost a year-long break from Eve, many of us (but not everyone) came back for AT11. Practicing with other teams was allowed but we didn’t trust CCP after how they handled AT10, and we tried to do internal practices. We only had enough on weekends to do practice, but we were ahead of the meta – we were the only team to submit a flagship Domi and knew AT11 was going to be sentry cancer. We started good but we couldn’t adapt between actual tournament weekends due to internal practice limitations. Our “perfect” run was destroyed in that match vs PL which none of us can ever forget. We won match and series, but lost flagship Domi, Etana, and Cambion. These losses crushed our morale, and the sentry all-in made 90% of our setups questionable. As we had no time to react, we did absolutely stupid stuff in the grand finals and lost it.
However, there were two good things about it: the experience from these mistakes cannot be underestimated, and we developed a relationship with Exodus. We tried to knock PL out of the tourney by teaching Exodus guys what to use/what to do. They almost beat PL and took at least 2nd place, but due to losing 1 careless interceptor in the deciding match vs PL they won nothing.
When CCP announced NEO2, Hydra entered under the Warlords of the Deep ticker and Turn Left (from AT11 Exodus team now main corp in The Camel Empire) under the Thingy ticker. To me it felt that nobody besides us treated this tournament seriously. While other teams might’ve practiced more vigorously, results seen from the first week indicated that there was a huge gap between Warlords or Thingy and them. It was so obvious to me, that I spent the final week on preparing for our matches vs Thingy instead of matches vs other enemies, which paid off in the grand final.
NEO2 was the first tournament where my contributions to theorycrafting became massive & solid. It took “just” 2 years (and 3 tournaments, not counting anything besides majors) of hard work – something to note for teams which are trying hard and failing. If you keep moving forward with the same group of people, there’re good chances you’re going to improve your result vastly over the years. And vice versa – regardless of how good you are, with no tournament experience you will be horribly failing for at least the first two tournaments.
AT12 started relatively soon after NEO2, thus some of us hadn’t recovered from burnout by that time. Nevertheless, Hydra joined and Turn Left made an alliance called The Camel Empire so they could join.
The metagame was quite rich in AT12. We fed ideas/setups to PL opponents, and they fed to ours. By lucky (or unlucky?) coincidence, none of these attempts were successful.
We had a few significant oversights in our theorycrafting. For example, the shotgun/machines concept (marauder + sentry/mobile drone spam) had been missed by us, mostly because we had the very same concept in NEO2, which didn’t work well in 8 man format even with pre-nerf Ishtars. We decided to retest it after the Affirmative leak, and to our surprise the 12 man version had a good winrate vs our setups. Strategy and setups were reworked from scratch to fit the new meta, thanks Affirmative for giving us time to do it.
Another meta-breaking thing was used by Nulli/Huns vs us. Our assumption that 3-4k+ tank turtles are removed with Tengu+Loki bans was proven wrong by their hybrid Proteus turtle. We reworked our strategy and setups once again… just to be knocked out by RONIN on the final weekend. This was the only match where we had a suitable setup to win, but fucked up both our prefight plan and execution badly. Many of us were very disappointed because of these results and left TS with the intention to not join it again until next tournament. Nevertheless, some people recovered overnight and joined TS to root for camels. Nothing further meta-breaking was shown by other teams during the rest of the weekend; therefore camels were able to just avoid our mistakes and won AT12.
Before AT12 even started, we knew that it would probably be the last AT for a significant part of Hydra leadership. Besides this, we had quite a few people in Hydra corps who went AWOL and no active members in executor thus we basically had no control over alliance. We had to get a new executor but I was a relative “newcomer” for Hydra and had never been part of its TQ culture, so I decided it would be easier to just create a new alliance for AT13 and transfer any interested people over there.
I knew we would not have enough for a full team from the remaining people, thus contacted F4bske, who practiced in AT11 with us. He talked with his corp and they agreed to move their corp to a yet-to-be-formed alliance, and we figured we would now have more than enough people for a full team.
Out of 5-7 name variants we picked one. I was quite sad that only the few older Hydra guys supported my preference, “This Game Is Terrible” – not much of the team was at the stage where they were bitter vets, let alone where they could make some fun of actual bitter vets. I re-created my one-man corp with this name, and gave birth to the new alliance. So, in January, Warlords of the Deep alliance was born. Like the past AT, we approached camels to do testing together; they confirmed that they were willing to do it.
After that there was a long period of inactivity. We just made sure that all the people who wanted to participate were in WotD’s corps – poked most of our past team members, and despite the loss of Garmon and Duncan, who were inspiring our team in past years, many agreed to do yet another run. Outside of the leadership, our biggest loss was knifee – he almost solo’ed sisi wormhole logistics for AT11, NEO2 and AT12.
After the rules were announced, things got running relatively quickly. We knew that each week of tests was valuable, thus didn’t wait for the promised land of Duality. First practices were run on the 27th of May, roughly a week after CCP published AT13 rules.
I was quite happy with the rules. We knew right away that with all the rule changes bombers, missiles, ECM and RR drone spam were going to play big roles in the meta. Personally, I felt that damps were nerfed too harshly, and that turtles/semi-turtles being unbanned was too restrictive for us, but we had to work with what we were given. Turtles were our nemesis continuously during past tournaments, thus over 3 years we mastered them to perfection – we knew both how to build and how to demolish them in many ways which are not very obvious to even good teams. I was confident that if we put significant focus on them, it’s likely they would not be an issue.
We tested 3 times a week, for 2-3 hours sessions and 3-5 sets in each session. During the first and third weeks of the tournament we increased testing to 4 times a week. Not the most relaxed, but not the most intense testing schedule, and we knew that some teams were spending much more time on testing. Despite that, some of our younger eastern european members started calling practices after soviet labour camps, GULAG. “No fun, no freedom allowed”, they said. (yet they were talking about dicks and transgenders for days)
One of the biggest differences between new and well-established teams is having multiple people devoted to their specialization. Theorycrafters/strategists, SiSi/tq logistics, spies, coders, pilots for every ship role, we had all them covered. But with departure of Hydra old guard, we did not have experienced tournament FCs with us anymore. It became obvious that we had an issue several weeks deep into preparations. We tried several members and settled on Haart, who freed himself up from some IRL business and agreed to join us. To back him up, we had other people rotate FCing in practice.
The most problematic period coincided with my vacation, when I couldn’t help my team. Singularity was unstable and even down at our regular practice hours. People were fucking up, desyncs were massive, fight resets were called multiple times in a row, frustration was growing, people were rage-quitting practices, and camels had their own issues with FC too. When I returned – the thought “maybe we don’t have much chance after all” visited me for a brief moment, but it was gone with next practice. With Singularity being more stable, with some minor effort to relax social tension, there were much less reasons to be annoyed, and people significantly calmed down. Besides that, during preparations period there were some issues with attendance and personal piloting skills, but we resolved them by getting some additional people into the team and doing small-scale skill training.
We approached theorycrafting our regular way. We never did “practice every weekday”, even during tournament, just to not burn people out and to make sure we always have enough time to analyze results of previous tests, make necessary adjustments and do SiSi logi before next one. Instead of spamming setups to see what sticks (like some other teams are doing, at least that’s how I’m reading post-AT posts/talks), we focused on researching meta and how available “construction blocks”, ships, do within it. Our pool of finalized setups exceeded 25 only once or twice, if not taking into account relatively minor variations of same idea. Bad setups were thrown into the purgatory – our subforum for dismissed stuff. In the end we had approximately 15 setups for the actual tournament, or around 25 with variations.
Our intel data sheet was huge however thanks to Nebula and Suitonia. Tournament practice units arrived quite late and not everyone was using them properly. I don’t think we borrowed anything from “stolen” setups this AT, but it gave us confidence that our understanding of the meta was correct.
We were pretty scared of our first match, as usual. Despite all the intel we had, it’s still a step into the unknown. And year after the year these fears turn to be groundless. Black legion brought a setup which would have a hard time at beating anything from the purgatory even if they executed it properly. They didn’t.
For the second match we had TMA. Same result, although it was more predictable in this case. They had a sizeable amount of RSBs though, so if we brought damp-based setup it could’ve been more difficult.
Saturday’s fight was something which I expected to be the hardest clash in the tournament. We considered tuskers as one of the most difficult opponents, going into losers bracket at this point would be rough, the match itself was bo1. Tuskers banned exactly what I expected them to ban – Malice, because we intentionally baited that ban with our 2nd day setup vs TMA, and Etana, because there were :rumors: that we had cool Etana/Cambion setups. We brought an ewar-heavy kiting setup, tuskers had a fast brawling setup with a curse, not the easiest matchup for us. Despite many big ships fucking up (some to a lesser, some to a greater extent) we managed to win. Not without significant losses, but that’s the cost you pay for flying bad under Tuskers’ pressure. As a side note, some people here on FHC implied that Moas are bad ships; they aren’t for such kind of setups, but they lack some flexibility for other matchups, from my perspective.
On Sunday we fought Triumvirate, to my surprise. Almost everyone from our leadership expected to fight afterlife, but they suddenly lost to Tri. Like with some of our past enemies, we brought a setup which wouldn’t win vs anything from our finalized tournament pool, unless we did some huge mistakes or they had some mad luck with jamms (maybe we baited ecm with ecm bans, but our bans were pretty random). We executed on below-regular level here, but not much tri could do. Sorry knifee, we love you.
When results of 2nd weekend were concluded, almost every resource I visit from time to time got some attention from some PL members – they posted that we’re going to repeat AT9 again, that we should be banned, they released ‘official’ EVE-Bet warnings (according to my knowledge, EVE-Bet is controlled/run by PL members), posted on eve-o, slack, reddit, and maybe some other resources which CCP devs visit. It annoyed me in the beginning, especially considering that any response would be used to just continue holy crusade. Maybe it was frustration that we could spam a few setups and rely on execution while they had to show new setups often. Realizing they were probably frustrated warmed my heart and comforted my mind. Thanks to this thinking, I was able to focus on tests and strategy for the final weekend.
First series was vs camels. We didn’t want to go through LB just because of penalties (+bo1, +bo3, 1 match disadvantage in finals), so before the matches we went through our setups and made a few plans on how we’re going to approach each matchup. We should’ve won vs what camels brought if we put enough webs/dps onto bellicose, but most of our web carrying ships got disabled (jammed by ecm drones, killed before reps landed, screened) and bellicose survived. It turned out that camels replaced RECCM with additional invuln, which most likely saved them from losing 1st match. 2nd match we just guessed wrong what they’re going to bring, but had chance nevertheless. Unfortunately our chance was by relying on RNG which wasn’t on our side. We lost series.
Next fight was vs tuskers. They kept banning etana, which was pretty useless, because it neither removed nor significantly weakened any of our setups. We brought Purple Mistress of the Shadow, widow concept which we made during AT11, but ended up using just now – with numerous modifications to fit the modern meta. We were scared that tuskers can manage to pop our logi right away, so jammed dps and vigil in the beginning. When it became obvious that our logi is safe, almost all the jamms were thrown onto tuskers’ logi. Thanks to a more flexible setup core on our side, after the right calls were made – there were little to no chances for tuskers to win.
Fight vs tuskers was 1st where we brought our flagship. I saw someone from PL mentioned they have the most expensive one; this is not true, their flagship costed 60-65b, while ours 80-90b, depending on context. We ended up never using setup with the most expensive fit because of :meta: reasons, but it was cool nevertheless: [widow turtle fit], [unused setup fit]
When day was over, we knew whom are we going to fight next day. We knew camels’ setups, exodus were pretty predictable and didn’t show any indications that they can bring any metabreakers, thus we focused on our arch enemy, PL. We saw that their general idea is to play defensively: turtle up, spam TDs vs turrets, bring firewall vs missiles. TD spam also indicated that they do not want to spend bans on arty sleips and in general they tested vs LR med turrets and recognized their power vs bomber-heavy setups, which they tend to bring. Firewall part caused us to panic for a brief moment – we did some tests with it in the beginning and knew how it works in all the details, but dismissed them right away because torps were bypassing non-flagship firewalls. Long time passed since that time, most of our setups relied less on torps and more on cruise missiles, thus firewall diminished effectiveness of our setup pool greatly. Initial plan was to ban out TD spam with dual armor logi bans and work around firewall by converting few suitable setups to use torps instead of cruise missiles + change support to make sure that torp ships arrive on top of their target. I adjusted 2 setups to rely on torps before finally falling asleep.
5 hours later I woke up and bought some energy drinks, it was safe to assume that day will be long. I adjusted 1-2 other setups to use torps; overall it felt uncomfortable to use these, except for maybe just one out of four. Obviously we had other non-torp setups which would work in this case, but when your pool of setups shrinks this way for a final day, your strategic position is much worse. Then Leeloo woke up and sent single message:
[10:35:28 AM] Leeloo: sure it kills cruise missiles also?
It broke my tunnel vision, and I remembered all the firewall tests we did – guristas cruise missiles bypassed it too. We changed cargo layout for our cruise setups and calmed down, since this moment we were confident in our ability to beat PL. There was small chance that PL would change bhaal fit to have meta 13-14 EMP smartbombs (which kill even non-EM guri torps, let alone cruise missiles), but I assumed we can outplay it on the field, just because bhaal cannot be torn into 2 different ships – they would have to make hard choice between utility and protection in this case.
Before our match vs exodus, we watched camels vs PL. We should’ve been doing last minute checks instead, but when we saw setups fielded – almost everyone switched to stream. We had arty sleip + moracha setup during our testing period finalized, but by unlucky coincidence ended up never testing it because I accidentally overwrote it with another variation of arty sleip concept, and just let it go – it wasn’t flexible enough from my point of view to justify cost/testing; it would be cool to test it just as benchmark, because PL had resources for it, but at that point I thought PL are not going to field something kitey. Lack of practice vs massive arty spam led to many mistakes on camel side, and after they lost first claymore I closed stream, it was over for them. Disheartening match for us, as we didn’t want to see PL in grand finals after all that shit PL members poured onto us. I didn’t believe that camels will be able to recover, and started thinking on how to approach forthcoming LB finals vs them.
With quite bad mood, we entered match vs exodus with very yolo setup, which focuses heavily on ship trade and benefits from it. Warpins were very unfortunate for us – exodus caught xo3e in his hyena right away, but failed to catch mine and wasted way too much time on chasing it. Their logi died, support died way faster than ours, and we had stronger core on top of that. Our execution didn’t suck this time, one of relatively impactful things we could do to improve result was killing that cruor a bit earlier to avoid further losses. 2nd fight exodus brought some weird setup which, from my perspective, was not much better than what Triumvirate used vs us, and we just powered through it.
Meanwhile, camels did not tilt and just banned setup vs which they were not prepared, and won their 2nd match. 3rd match we watched with a bit better mood because we saw that camels stabilized, and because we finished our bo3 vs exodus flawlessly. When camels were killing PL’s flag bhaal on last minute, almost everyone on our TS yelled “KILL IT!”. Camels winning 3rd match and killing PL’s flagship were incredibly good news for us. PL should’ve been low on morale, and their setup pool shrinked because of flag bhaal loss + firewall no longer working. Also flagship loss removed technical possibility of fielding real firewall.
While we had some time to think about what to do with moracha setup and we had few tricks in the sleeve to deal with it, most of these options were quite risky. We opted to control PL same way as camels did and just remove this setup and its variations with bans. Looking at PL’s bans and knowing their love for RPS stuff (although this year meta was not so RPS’ish imo, especially when compared to AT12), I expected heavy bomber + ECM based setup with strong focus on caldari jamms, as PL left our widow setup open and supposedly assumed that our primary armor setup is removed with malice ban. This might’ve been next-level bait to make me think like that, but I suppressed all attempts to overthink it. We picked said armor setup, did some adjustments on the fly – guardian/damnation to have biracial setup for better ECM resistance, logi dropped inector for ECCM, bombers dropped all RSBs to have 2 RECCMs on each, replaced malediction with web crusader to be able to do damage to turtles/ab bombers. PL brought ECM bomber turtle, and we had enough experience at beating these in our tests. Many bombers died quite fast, few remaining held for quite a long time, because our typhoons were getting jammed quite often and bombers had active hardeners. They would die superfast if we had neut on svipuls instead of rocket launcher, or brought neut vengeance, but we didn’t, despite considering these options before the fight. Successful jamms on our logi removed one of our t3ds from the field, but we still were leading on points. DHB in the end went for an epic vulture bump, which reinforced our point lead. Seeing as PL had just web and no scrams, we should’ve started bumping as soon as we killed 2-3 bombers. After this match, I felt satisfaction – as I not only predicted what they’re going to do (we can’t say for sure, but their ECM layout felt like it was 1a4c1g2m or 4c4m, according to how our ships were jammed), but also flew in my favorite ship, crusader, in AT match vs one of the best teams in EVE, and won it.
For second fight, I expected amarr-focused ECM setup with bomber spam. No ECM setup can live without caldari ships and PL had way less incentives to field armor setup without flag bhaal, therefore we were ready in our pure-caldari widow setup with strong bias towards caldari ECM and massive RECCM spam. As we landed on grid, I knew that PL has chance to win only if they have luck + massive caldari ECM all-in, but they didn’t – killmails showed amarr-focused scorp and minmatar-focused blackbird. Fight was easy with such a massive out-pick. Rest in pieces PL, while some of your members are chill bros, many others are awful shitposters. You won’t be missed.
Funny thing, Garmon’s (too) cocky prophecy from 2013 was fullfilled.
Matches vs camels promised to be hard, but we had strategic advantage which, ironically, PL gave us by destroying camels’ flagship and major part of their unique pool. The meta was dictated not just by the setups already fielded by both teams, but also by setups which we practiced but ended up not using until this moment. 1st round we did bans which were suggesting that we’re doing arty sleip or triple-typhoon setup. Scariest thing camels could bring for triple-typhoons was 6-bomber setup they used on day 1 vs SMA, but doing so would be super risky, because we also could do arty sleips; they went for the most reliable and flexible option with these bans, we brought almost direct counter to it.
After that we wanted to field some cool ECM turtle we didn’t show so far, assuming camels will do certain bans. They did bans which kind of forced us into it, while leaving open few setups which could be adjusted to be a direct counter. I decided that it’s better to field something else and out of few armor setups picked ‘default’ one which was the most reliable. When we landed on grid, I started regretting that we didn’t take other armor setup we were considering – the one we had little to no chances vs camels’ widow tengu turtle. However, we managed to pull it thanks to 3 things: they had heavy skew towards caldari jamms (as expected, they anticipated us fielding ECM turtle), client of one of their widow pilots crashed twice during the fight and we handled bumping slightly different than we did during practices. After our match vs camels in semifinals I talked to captain of one of the other teams, he suggested me to bump vulture instead of tengu, and that’s exactly what we did in match vs PL’s turtle in LB finals and here, vs camels. To camels’ misfortune, they were in formation to protect their tengu from bumps, leaving vulture exposed, and they were not swift enough with their tackling mods to deal with incoming battleships.
3rd fight we ate camels’ bait and brought exactly what they wanted us to bring. Camels had one of the very few setups which are able to deal with widow semi-turtle. We turtled up, moved frigs to safe position and waited for camels to do mistake. Sometimes their frigs entered reprange of our basi, and when I thought that one of their kitsunes dived too deep, we went for it and were punished. It was convincing enough, we didn’t try to win the fight after that and tried to just save remaining ships. Fortunately for us, we used the same support module layout as in the fight vs PL, with heavy skew towards RECCMs. While more RSBs could’ve improved our offensive capabilities and chances to win this match, it was RECCM spam which saved our 80b flagship and 2nd chremoas.
On the final match I honestly have no idea what camels thought, maybe they tried to do some reactionary bans and horribly failed, but our “pubbie buster” (how PL called it) setup was open in its full power. The biggest threat in camels’ heavy bomber setup was stiletto, thus we completely focused on disabling it, while trying to pop the bombers and keeping our bigger ships at safe distance – camels’ setup shreds them into tiny pieces if they get tackled. We lost quite a few ships this fight, but got the series and, consequently, took 1st place.
Probably you noticed how big last day’s section is, compared to sections of even whole first two weekends; that’s how it felt to us too. We were completely exhausted, but happy – all the objectives which we could imagine were attained.
The team
This writeup is my personal perception of AT13 events; however (obviously!) it wasn’t just me who brought us to where we are. It’s a legacy from the Hydra team which conceived our tournament culture and knowledge, and the people from this year who made it up to the last weekend. Few shoutouts would be:
bluemelon – best new addition to leadership, great motivation to do AT-related duties
leokokim – great dedication, gave up being in TQ matches to have logistics done for us
soldat – dank latvian legend
haart – savior from FC problems, helped police the GULAG even during vacation
gavjack – better shitposting than all of PL combined (ask gobbins), never get old, best practice dedication on the whole team
duncan – soothing professor, joined closer to tournament to spread belief
leeloo – oldest of the guardes, didn’t let his dreams be dreams
nebula – new head of KGB
chessur – smug agent, loved by reddit
pandemic legion – yeah I lied above when I said you won’t be missed, you’re our biggest motivation to participate, there’d be way less competition without arch enemy, and you’re the only team who manage to keep surprising us year after year
ccp – many thanks for keeping this thing up; I think that how elise calls AT “fanservice” is very accurate, it’s endgame content for many of us and we’re grateful for it
haters –
Quote Originally Posted by Duncan View Post
you are welcome to put in the effort we did this year and try to take our titles away
c u all next year
![[widow turtle fit]](http://funkyimg.com/i/21Smd.jpg){kind=link}
![[unused setup fit]](http://funkyimg.com/i/21Sme.jpg){kind=link}