Poor planning and the quick reaction of the northerner’s side turned a jump-bridge defense into a 400 billion isk brawl last night.
The stage was the F-NMX6 solar system in the Pure Blind region, one of the most active in the game right now, PVP-wise. After Goons and allies dismissed a Pandemic Horde defensive timer, they had set previously, Seddow, the Horde FC, was determined to get a fight for his brethren. As such, he went to the F-NMX6 solar system and proceeded to reinforce the enemy jump-bridge in the solar system.
It didn’t take long for Goons & Co. forces to form-up a defensive fleet consisting of armor sub-caps (mainly Sacrilege) and Carriers as their capital backbone.
One must keep in mind that all this by itself was a dangerous proposition as the current NCDOT deployment solar system was located just a mere three jumps from their grid. If you add up the fact that all this was happening during the prime US time zone on a Sunday night and that the North itself has more FCs per capita than any other null-sec entity in-game, the stakes begin to show more clearly.
Predictably, pings went up, and in a matter of minutes, the Horde fleet was joined by the complete combined NCDOT/PL/PINE/DB subcap fleet, accompanied by their dreadnaught complement.
Once the first shots were exchanged, and the Goonswarm led carriers aggressed, the word was given to bring in the northern dreads into the grid. Goons counter-dropped, and boy, we had a fight in our hands!
Unbeknown to the brunt of the northern fleet, Goons started amassing capital reinforcements in the neighboring Cloud Ring region and started pinging other allies to restrengthen their subcap armada.
When the time came, the GSF leadership found themselves in one of the most troubling situations an FC can be faced with; they had everything ready to go except there were no cynos to bring them in and the ansiblex jump bridge they were defending has just been disabled.
Why no way to reinforce their fleet, what followed could only be described as a massacre on both sides, Goons taking the short end of the stick while popping a hefty amount of northern FCs. Still, the tide turned in HORDE/NC favor due to the afore-mentioned enemy shortcomings with northerner capital pilots having trouble to lock-on the enemy capital primaries in time before they exploded. The dreadbomb went down, the carriers were decimated shortly after, leaving the armor triage for last.
“My thoughts turned to Alexander of Macedon’s victory at Granicus and Issus…” one witness asserted in local chat.
Main take-aways from this fight:
There’s no such thing as having too many cynos in a fleet.
Whoever gets most people on the grid first always gains the advantage.
Close communication with your allies is almost always a matter of life or death.
After the dust settled, over +400 billion isk was destroyed with Goonswarm & Allies taking 80% of the losses at 320bil:
Lucky for us, the cameras were rolling, and we can enjoy the destruction in all its faux-technicolor glory:
