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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Conditions of Victory

So, today the pilots of Per Ardua Ad Sol scored a mighty victory, assisted by none other than yours truly.

Now admittedly, there's no killmails to be had, but there's also no loss-mail. I guess it really depends on your definition of 'a mighty victory'... You decide.

Today a wormhole opened into Our Slice of Heaven from a suddenly neighbouring class 4+ wormhole. (I didn't stop to check the readings on the other side, but the wormhole indicated at least a C4). Within that wormhole was a branch of the Shadow of xXDEATHXx alliance. They decided to pop in and start running some of our sites.

Understandably I was a little intrigued to see 7 Moa's and a Bestower on my directional scanner when I logged in, and perhaps just the slightest bit amused when dropping combat probes cleared the system in about 25 seconds flat. Give the boys over there in xXDEATHXx credit, they were paying attention and they scrambled their butts out of there when the free gas harvesting time was over.

So while I looted their wrecks, others of the corp scanned the system down properly, identified their entrance and planted a scout.

Not really feeling like doing much, I AFKed for some time and came back to check on things a few hours later.

Seems xXDEATHXx had gotten bored sitting in their own system, and decided to come over and do a few sites.

That's all well and good, but I really wanted to run some of those sites in the next day or so...

What to do, what to do.

So that was when I decided on setting the Conditions of Victory. Against a group of remote-repping (with drones) Drakes and with relatively minimal numbers available on my side, and the knowledge of their numbers back in THEIR wormhole, I decided to see if we couldn't convince them to keep it quick by ripping their wormhole a bit of a new one with a few battleships.

Racquel and Leilani went to work in Scorpion and Dominix respectively, but as they arrived on-gate, an Onyx appeared beside the wormhole. "Oh crap" was pretty much the sentiment all around.

Ducking through, the Shadows converged from all over the wormhole, eventually sporting a fleet of 9 people on Our Slice of Heaven's side of the wormhole, including the Onyx. One drake dropped through and managed to decloak Leilani and she was forced to jump back through. As we're anticipating a HICtor bubble and much pain, Leilani ramped up the warp drive, and to our surprise, noted the Onyx had jumped through!

Racquel quickly scrambled to jump back through to our side, even as Leilani evaded tackles and warped out from under the 8-man gang of battlecruisers (one of them MIGHT have been an Anathema instead, reports vary).

Racquel then joined Leilani in attempting to warp, while the Onyx was still stuck on the "Thirty Second Timer of Doom" that we all know and love. She too managed to slip the tackles on her and warp off to the safety of our POS.

With the damage done, the wormhole starting to look a little ragged, I sat patiently on the wormhole and watched from cloaked safety as they milled about... As they warped back to their own space... As they came back with cloaker ships (sorry, homefield advantage wins in the intelligence business) and left again, and as they finally decided they wanted to play with someone else and popped the wormhole with a few visits of an Armageddon.

So, my Conditions of Victory were met, and the 4 of us that took the time to work on it effectively drove off at least a 9 man fleet.

Oh, and I got to go loot our combat site and salvage their wrecks. Only about 40 million ISK worth of profit, but hey, at least I didn't have to waste any missiles on it. ;)

Fly Straight! Even you Shadow boys! You were organized and you rallied FAST to every change of situation, it was impressive to see you in action, but I'm glad it turned out how it did.