That ship you see there? That is an old industrial I found lazing about in my assets. It's there because the price of a Merlin on Jita 4-4 was at a little under half a million when I looked today. That's about... double what I would reasonably spend on a Merlin or any other T1 frigate. No doubt the fault of the patch rebalancing hybrid weapons and the ships made to use them. Luckily, I was able to buy 9 Merlins for almost 2.5 million ISK in total outside of Jita, and have the ability to haul them back to where I want them in only two runs. I would have liked 10, but maybe by the time I reach the 9th Jita will be restocked.
Meanwhile, I've been looking at the two factions in RvB. Yes, I know, seriously considering which side to join in RvB seems kinda silly, but bear with me here. The Blue side, as of writing this, has 627 members to the Red's 788. No doubt because “Red Federation” just sounds more appealing than “Blue Republic”. I mean who even has republics, anyway? Those people in the new Star Wars had a republic, and what came of it? Exactly.
Federations on the other hand are much more awesome. Starship Troopers had a federation, and while both turned out more or less like parodies of Nazism, consider who had the more awesome uniforms and soldiers who could actually shoot things. I mean can you imagine that battle? What was left of the Storm Troopers after somebody said “Nuke 'em, Rico” would be firing wildly at everything but their targets until they were all finally shot full of holes. There's also the fact that red is just generally a better colour. Blue has its moments, but really, if you had to pick one or the other and you went with blue, you're a boring person.
Anyway, it's going to be slightly surprising then that it's actually Blue that I'm choosing here, considering I'm not a fan of their colour or political system. There are two main reasons for this: they're smaller, which means more enemies for me, and they have a neighbouring lowsec system. Like, directly neighbouring. So when I'm not engaged in meaningless savagery with the Red Feds, I can hop into lowsec and do violence to unsuspecting travellers (and more likely, suspecting pirates). As you can see, it's a happy situation.
The Life and Death of Merlin I
Well, my first fight as a member of the Blue Republic is done. There wasn't a great deal to it, but I feel I can take some things away from it. Backing up a bit though:
I signed in today after finding myself with mail on the EVE-O forums. It was about joining RvB, and had some information there like how to set up the overview, which I followed to some extent while floating in space outside Blue HQ in Autaris. There was battle going on there, but people seemed to sense from my afterburning in one direction that I didn't want to be involved. A Merlin probably wasn't worth chasing down anyway.
I spent some time on that, messed it up, then fixed it. Finally happy with it, I flew around the enemies and allies alike sitting outside that station, not locking anyone and only being locked once by an Ishtar. I think the pilot probably just locked me in case I was tackling for a small fleet forming there, and when I didn't attack his much too powerful ship he felt happy to ignore me.
Some people lost ships there, others fought and warped out. To be honest I was paying more attention to how well my ship responded to orders, because I'd had issues with that last time I played EVE. It didn't seem to cause any problems though.
At one point I saw a Rifter and started moving toward him, but a Caracal was already too close for me to beat, and they soon engaged. Surprisingly the Caracal's whole fleet then warped to it and annihilated the Rifter. Admittedly it was hardly the biggest fleet, just a handful of ships that happened to be outside the station, but a Caracal should already be more than enough to kill a Rifter. Hell, I'm surprised the Rifter even tried.
Not seeing much more in my difficulty range and not wanting to take on Destroyers yet, I wandered around for a bit, playing with the directional scanner and finding it a bit overpopulated in this system to make much use of. I was finding things, but too many of them to filter through. Admittedly, my distance might have been too long even though the cone of my scanner was only 90 degrees.
After bouncing from stargate to station to stargate, I came across the same Rifter pilot again (I've decided it's probably best not to name anyone in here for the moment). He had just come in the gate and warped off as soon as I arrived, either because he had already started to or he thought I was leading that fleet onto him I imagine. I had a feeling he'd be back though, given what happened when he tried to fight outside our HQ before.
Sure enough, he warped back and immediately locked and attacked. I hit orbit (set to 2200 meters) and activated my afterburner in case he was going to be out of my range, but it only ran one cycle because it became obvious he wasn't kiting or even orbiting far away. Turning that off and activating my web, scram and guns/rockets (followed almost immediately by small shield booster) I was happy to see that I was landing hits and getting through his shields. Unfortunately, he was also getting through mine just as fast, and I was shield tanking. Not at all surprised, I watched as his ship kicked mine to pieces with only scratched armour to show for it.
We each dropped a “gf” in local (mine along with a “lol”, which I felt my flying had earned. I didn't even remember to overheat my modules...) and he offered to give me back my stuff at the Blue HQ. Given that my ship cost less than 1 million all included, I told him not to worry about it. I'd be concerned about him trying to land with that fleet still sitting there anyway.
I think I've learned a few things here. Firstly... that I spent so much time watching displays and modules I don't even remember seeing my ship. I guess mental time management is something that comes later on.
Secondly, I've spent too much time fighting NPCs for overheating to even appear in my mind in a fight. That too will probably come with time, although I'm going to try just pre-heating some things next fight. I've heard that works, but I'm not sure exactly how. Anyway I should try it.
Thirdly... my fitting sucked. Maybe not the layout, exactly. It was two rocket launchers and two neutron blasters in the highs, an afterburner, shield repper, web and scram in the mids and two magnetic field stabilizers in the lows. I also had an EM and Thermal (I think) shield rig because they were just so cheap. I'm not yet sure that was a bad idea, but the quality of the modules and ammo certainly sucked because of how cheap I was.
This isn't so much a bad thing, given that I probably would have died anyway. I learned that I need to remember overheating for less than 1 million ISK. It does mean that once I'm out of cheap things to learn, I really need to put a tiny bit more money into this investment, however.
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