It’s not an easy life, being contract mercenaries working for the Caldari Navy. The hours are long, the work is dangerous and the dental plan is decidedly sub-par. But the pay is good, and the looting plentiful, so our little corp tends to spend most of it’s time doing their missions. Most of the time, the jobs that come up are pretty routine – fly out here, explode all these spaceships, and sometimes we even remember to come back with the hostages, stolen documents, confiscated contraband or exotic dancers, as appropriate.
It is a mistake to think that one’s Agent is some how ‘on your side’ however, and the other night we spun the database magazine one click too far, put the mission revolver to our heads and drew “Worlds Collide”, widely regarded as one of the most difficult missions currently available. Of course at the time, we figured we’d have no trouble – fifteen uneventful and methodically executed bug-swatting trips in a row will do that to you. Pride goes before a fall, and all that.
Most of the combat missions take the form of quick forays into a specific NPC Pirate faction’s encounter location. Sometimes they consist of multiple areas, but each of these tends to be manageable with decent skills, clever equipment selection and a firm understanding of the NPC AI. For us, working for the Caldari Navy, it’s mostly the evil Guristas pirate gang, a kind of ‘Evil Caldari’, so we know what to expect, what they’ll do and use, and be able to plan accordingly.
Our Agent must hate smug people though - this time he sent us into the middle of a warzone between Guristas and Serpentis (the “Evil Gallente” variants). I call it a warzone of course, but found it quite suspicious that both sides managed to bury their differences just before we dropped out of warp, and didn’t shoot at each other once! I think we had to rescue some scientists or something. What followed can only be described as ‘harrowing’, as over the next hour we struggled against two battleship fleets, unpredictable aggro, warp scrambling uber-frigates, ECM jamming, energy management failures (“oom!”), and a withering hail of torpedoes with our names on them.
All in all, a bugger to break, and not helped by our Raven pilot crashing to desktop just before attempting to bug out. In the event of such a crash, your ship should automatically warp away some distance, theoretically keeping you safe while link-dead, but a Battleship is a lumbering object that steers like a cow, and to warp, one must be lined up on the destination. Frigates can do it instantly, but Battleship pilots need plan ahead a bit, allowing time to get clear. Whatever the cause, he blew up, and I barely escaped intact shortly after. Beaten, we called it a night, but with a real-time week to complete the mission in, this was certainly not the end of it.
The next night, after some revision of The Plan, and one new Raven, we tried again. It was still hard work, but a sustained assault of cavalry-like hit and run skirmish attacks – warp in, kill one battleship, warp out and recover, repeat – saw us slowly break the back of the two fleets. My own ship had been reconfigured to become the world’s largest Shield Repair Drone, making use of the extremely bulky and expensive Cap Boost Charges that everyone usually just leaves behind when looting, in the function of ‘mana potions’ I suppose, and the Raven using exclusively anti-battleship ordinance. Eventually, we’d whittled the big stuff down to the point where the next warp out was no longer necessary, and after that, normal service was resumed.
No time for complacency though – the stage was respawning one battleship every seven minutes or so, and while individually not a massive problem, spending too long going after barrels could easily see us overwhelmed again. The scientists were in step three of the mission, but to get there we had a choice of two different step twos, a Gurista one and a Serpentis one. We went with Serpentis, as we simply don’t get to kill enough of those and Gursitas are ten a penny where we live. Also, flinging missiles at ships trying to use ‘shotgun’ type weapons is much easier than flinging missiles at ships that are flinging missiles back. And using ECM.
The remaining stages, while challenging, proved to be far more ‘normal’ than taking out both armies in someone else’s war, and the rest of the mission proved boisterous, but uneventful, although you know you’re doing well if you’re down to grubbing through loot barrels for fresh ammunition. I’m glad we picked the Serpentis stage actually – being an Armour Tanker, I rarely see any useful equipment from the Gruistas, who usually drop gear best used by Shield Tankers. And then there was this:
Monster Sightings: The Fortress of Serpents
I’m not a big one for screenshot photo albums, but that definitely caught my eye. I’m the jagged speck just below the sun, and am more or less on the same level as the station, for size comparison. While EVE looks fabulous in general, actual points of interest are surprisingly few and far between. Still, in the words of one chat channel wag on seeing this very complaint: “It’s Space…what did you expect? Palm trees?” So seeing something like that on warp in just adds to the wonder, and for once, I didn’t mind the long slow aftermath barrel crawl in the slightest. Best viewed while listening to this in-game track:
EVE Online: “Surplus of Rare Artifacts” – by Jon Hallur
We completed the mission, but missed the time bonus, and I suppose that’s a win, technically, but I prefer to think of it as a draw. Payout, plus bounties, plus loot sales will come to about half the cost of the replacement Raven, and the rest won't be hard to earn, but when we can do that mission without losing a ship, perhaps then I’ll celebrate…