Early Roams - Kamikaze Death

For the last two weeks I have been holding scheduled fleet ops on Friday evenings. So far the turnout has been pretty small (2-3 players) although the guys have been going out on casual, unscheduled roams every day of the week and getting fights as well. Because most of the guys are very new and have very low SP, I cooked up the most simple doctrine I could come up with, cheaply fit kamikaze-style frigates that can move fast, take out solo targets up to BCs, and suicidally pick a higher value target out of a fleet and attack it, relying on tank, low sig radius, and tank to survive just long enough to take it out. I've used these sorts of fleets to great effect in other corps, when I have had 5-10 members join in.

Unfortunately, so far we haven't had enough participation to really pull it off. With only 2 or 3 guys, and me the only one with any SP, we just haven't been able to be successful. I am going to keep taking these out, however, as I continue to recruit, as I suspect if we can just get a few more guys we will be pretty well off. I think I'll start encouraging the use of T1 fit destroyers to increase our DPS on the field with the crew we have. Here is a brief after action report on our first two scheduled ops.

Week 1 - Party-Pooped by Lame Falcon Pilot
For our first scheduled op we got 3 pilots to show up, 2 pretty new guys and myself. We got into our frigates and set out from our HQ looking for something to kill. A few jumps away we passed through HLW, a system where Northern Coalition. has set up camp, and played some cat and mouse games while they tried to catch us. They failed, and we decided to move on and look for less blobby targets.

A couple of jumps later we were sitting on a gate, with one other pilot in system, evidently in something cloaky, as we were unable to locate him on d-scan. That assumption was about to be proved correct. As we orbited the gate, a Dramiel jumped into us. He was from a different alliance than the other guy in system, so I crossed my fingers that they weren't related and ordered the attack. A dram seemed like a perfect target for our pretty green crew of 2 Merlins and a Rifter.

Scram, webs, and guns were fired up and cycling, the Dram was stuck in blaster range and going down fast when another white box popped up on the overview, and quickly became a yellow, then a red box. The other guy in local turned out to be flying a Falcon, who decloaked on top of us, jammed us, and took us out as the Dramiel escaped in low structure.

Week 2 - Hawk on Bubble
This week's scheduled roam took us out of Curse, into the Great Wildlands, and into Scalding Pass. There were only 2 of us available at the scheduled time, a few more had said they could come later, but I decided the two of us could head out anyway, and then maybe do another roam when more people were available. I was flying a Breacher, a newly rebalanced ship that I was playing with. My comrade was in a Rifter.

Anyway, we spent a little time in Scalding Pass dodging some alliance war-type blobs, while we poked around looking for targets and generally making a loop back around to Curse. Some more guys logged on and said they wanted to join us, so we began making best speed back to our home system. On the way back, a poorly planned warp landed us in a bubble and right on top of a solo Hawk. This was the kind of fight I would have loved to take with 2 more guys with us, but with just the 2 of us prospects were bleak.

I gave my comrade notice that we were pretty much fucked and might as well go down in a blaze of glory, then overheated everything and engaged. We managed to dig pretty deep in his shields, but the end result was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Assault frigs tear through T1 frigs as a general rule. My fleetmate managed to get his pod out, but I was stuck in the bubble and got an express ride home.