Friday, December 5, 2008

Space is Lonely

EVE is odd.

And by odd, I mean complicated.
And by complicated I mean frustrating.

I don't mean to complain.
I mean I could go play the mind-numbing, soul-sucking, grind-fest we have all mercifully agreed to call World of Warcraft.
I really could.
I've done it before.
And you know what? I liked it.
But I used to like lots of things that I don't like any more.

Like eating my boogers.
Ya I'll admit it.
I ate my boogers when I was a kid.
I'm not proud of it, but the memories are entirely too deeply seared into my mind to pretend it didn't happen.
And you know what? I liked it.
Why? cause boogers taste better than sand and most times I ate boogers, I was out on a playground with only sand and boogers to choose between and without the sense to know that eating boogers is sick.

That's World of Warcraft to a tee.
People play WoW because it's better than eating sand and that's the only alternative they know about.
But there comes a point where everyone looks down at the big green glistening globual on their finger and they say to themselves "grossness"
And then, for the first time in their life, they wipe the booger somewhere besides the inside their mouth.

But I digress....
Back to complicated....
My point is that EVE can be a very unforgiving place to be when you fly alone.

Given this reality I spent quite a bit of time and energy helping to assemble a 4 person squad to finally, (some two years since I started playing) begin a profitable corporation with sufficient military power that we could add a third item to the list of things we could do when a pirate decided to attack us, right under 1."run away (like a sissy)" and 2.beg for mercy (like a sissy).

Then one night, a bit of a emotion found its way into our corp discussions and our researcher/manufacturer decided to take his ball and go home.

Since that time we've tried everything right up to the point where we tried to get an Amarrian Armageddon



and a Minmatarr Typhoon to mate.



I'll let you figure out the logistics of how that one would work.
Alas, still no baby battleships.

Remember how I mentioned you need to flex your diplomatic muscles to make EVE work.
Ya so I wasn't kidding.
Admittedly I was talking about using diplomacy when dealing with other corps and alliances, rather than keeping your closest cadre of corp mates from biting eachothers heads off.
But whatever.

So here sits me, on the "raggedy edge"
3 combat pilots in my corp, only one of which who really ever plays.
That one would of course be me thus the pathetic post entitled "space is lonely"


At this point I'm soloing level 4 missions once in a while at night, and sometimes logging in at work where I launch my drone boat out into an asteroid field and wait for foolish NPC pirates to attack me afterwhich my drones automatically reaver-rape them.

This current situation does not lend itself to amazing pictures of fleet battles, but I do still tend to snap a sweet shot here and there.
This is a gallente vexor (drone-based cruiser) set against the backdrop of the Odette system.

Monday, November 3, 2008

ORCA HO!!!




ref: http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=597

Looks like there's a new mining ship on it's way to EVE. The ORCA is a sub-capital logistics boat to help bridge the gap on the road to the (previously posted about) Rorqual.

I'm never going to fly this boat. It's best to just be honest with myself about this. This fact makes me sad, but I can't afford to train to both this and a dread/carrier. If I have to choose, and yes I have to choose, I choose the dread. But still, it looks pretty sweet............maybe I'll get to splode one of these some day........mmmmmmmm..........splosions.........

RORQUAL HO

Was just shown this video of the rorqual transforming.
A little background:
The rorqual is the first Capital Industrial ship introduced into EVE Online.
Other captials include the Dreadnaught (A gun boat of epic proportions), Carriers and Motherships (Drone / Fleet support boats, also of epic proportion) and Titans (just wow). It's hard to really capture the size of any ship in space since there's little to compare against. In this video there's asteroids in the background but there's no way to tell how big the asteroids are so that's little help. Suffice to say that the rorqual is huge and I for one got a kick out of finally seeing it transform into it's functional status. Here's the game: Can you spot the clone vat bay?

Thursday, October 16, 2008

EVE-o-Lution

Massively.com wrote up a pretty cool article about how warfare within EVE is evolving. Checkzor it out here:

http://www.massively.com/2008/06/29/eve-evolved-state-of-the-war/

Some points I dug right down on included the info about cruiser-only fleets comprised of just Caldari Caracals:


Apparently these fleets can kill just about anything with their alpha strike. Think: 50 ships firing 5 heavy missiles each. That's 250 bits-o-badness coming your way before you even gave them your phone number.

I was also pleasantly surprised to hear that certain pilots are distinguishing themselves as FC's (fleet commanders) even in the factional warfare. How interesting is it that the Amarrians lost their best FC's and now are reduced to small roving bands.

Finally the fact that many of these tactics are developed with the specific intention of costing the enemy more than you lose in the process of exacting your toll. The all-cruiser fleets are an example of this. At something like 5 million isk each, you can equip and entire fleet for less than 2 or 3 hundred million. Not bad at all so long as you play your cards well enough to take out a few of your enemies battleships.

1

First you should know that EVE is cool as hell. I could go on for a long time about why it's cool, but I'll give you the condensed version:
1 Universe
Capital ship fleets
Functional and necessary diplomacy
Player Sovereignty
Functional economy
Piracy
Player built and operated space stations
And of course,
Siege Missiles

Now, if that list didn't make you salivate you either don't understand what I'm talking about or you are one of the walking dead. I'm serious. Go ahead and cut yourself just to see. You won't bleed.

For those of you who have proven you humanity by your continued interest, here's the deal. I'm constantly finding really effing cooling tidbits about EVE. Maybe a Titan was destroyed, or maybe someone employed a new tactic with resounding success. Whatever. The point is that there's a metric ton of "cool" happening in and around the world of EVE and I want a non-intrusive way to share it with the humans in my life without bombarding them with a constant stream of emails which all are basically "hey check this out" over and over again.

So, this is the place for that.

The blog is named battleroom in an homage to Ender (and therefore also Orson). If you haven't read Enders Game, I recommend you stop whatever you're doing right now and go read it before you get any older. Seriously.