POS Defense in Wormholes C1-6
Posted: 2010-04-24 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: carrier, die, eve, eve online, k162space, orca, pos defence, pvp, wormhole 16 CommentsNot so recently, CCRES came into our wormhole, noticed an orca floating in the shields, killed all our defences and reinforced our tower in case we had forgotten to put strontium in a tower in a dread-accepting enviroment.
The fact that they felt that the lack of strontium was a possibility makes me lose a little faith in the foresight of the Eve wormhole community.
Recently, I was contacted by a CCRES member who told me that they put the PoS into reinforced mostly for fun. Acting on various word cues in his description, I managed to decypher THIS message:
“Our reason was far grander than a petty Orca and what we had in the corp hangar, for the legendary tales of your pvp prowess and twisted cunning in use of cloaky ships was so utterly terrifying that we could not just close the connecting WH but attacked your tower in hopes that having their ships destroyed by your considerable defenses, THEN closing the connecting WH with what few ships remained would be the only way to appease your unquantifiable wrath. Unfortunately, the tower’s defenses had been mostly offlined and unanchored into the corp hangar due to a spy, who after his two year infiltration campaign only now had the courage to act on his orders to mildly inconvenience you, then immediately killed himself out of fear and shame. We were thus forced to put the inconvenienced tower into full reinforced, to better reflect it’s former armed glory until a point in the future where you could reanchor your powerful and majestic defenses.”
Anyway, we had the full compliment so they settled for sending us a mail essentially saying:
“Hey, we put your pos in reinforced looking for free ships, you should probably try this configuration next time”
(For those interested they recommended dickstar)
After the reinforced timer ended we repped the PoS in a rorqual, orca and a few BSs which got MUCH faster once we realized the ending of reinforced meant that we could access the cap rechargers, power relays and energy xfer arrays in the corp hangar.
Anyway, this shite got me thinking. Wormhole territory is fast becoming a shifting battlefield. PoS takedowns, once the product of Amarr BS fleets that passed out at their keyboards firing at abandoned structures, are becoming more frequent and frankly, kinda alarming. Between a friend of mine getting attacked by two dreads w/ BS support fleet, Planet Risk owning then being owned by R&K, and CCRES’s “Stront check” of our PoS, I’d like to give an overview of PoS defense in a wormhole:
You’re screwed.
Here’s a little more detailed and less cynical view:
C1:
Size restrictions allow only battlecruiser hulls or smaller, but know that haulers, which can hold cap parts, large towers, fuel, x-large ship assembly arrays and everything else required to build a dread to kill your PoSes, can.
Recommended defenses:
Small guns, some medium guns anchored but not online. BC hulls or smaller usually means your only attackers will have poor dps, so hardeners are recommended. By the time they’ve built a dread you should already be gone >.>
C2-C3
Battleships are allowed in here, good for sites, bad when someone hates you, has a route to you and has a BS fleet handy can be a significant threat to your well-being. Build a carrier and rent/own/know someone who has a carrier pilot handy to scare off/murder/ambush attackers.
C4-C6
Carriers are “allowed” to jump in here, hence you should be prepared. Don’t ask me how, we still haven’t come up with a a counter to a carrier/dread with support fleet.
Essentially, the deeper you go, the more likley you are to be screwed, because the less time attackers have to invest in beating you into the ground. A battlecruiser takedown of a PoS is torture, a BS takedown isn’t much fun, and a dread-assisted takedown is about less than an hour, so an attacker’s time invested in making your life a living hell is much less than what it took for you to get two capitals, orcas, and the other thirty ships you’ve amassed over several months into the wormhole.
Point is, if someone wants you out of a specific hole, they can motivate you to get out. If you fit guns, they’ll wait for your offtime and have RR gangs. If you fit ECM, they’ll bring a dread and sensor boosters. If you go full hardeners, they’ll bring a dread again. If you find the most amazing awesome pos configuration ever, they’ll just starve you of fuel. They can activate all your sites with a scan ship every morning, camp your static, build a dread, any number of things in mind to make you think “boy, I wish they weren’t here or I wasn’t here”. The best defence, IMO, is two fold:
The first and more reasonable method is to have several friends and/or piles of isk to hire several friends. Eve is a spreadsheet game, but is refreshingly simple in combat calculations, which usually amount to “Whoever has the most experienced friends wins”.
The method that, us lacking large groups of friends and a general sense of comradery, is to be ready to be gone. Write the PoS off as already dead, and have the expensive gear in capital ships/industrials. When, not if, WHEN you get attacked by a superior force move to a deep safe you’ve created before deep safes were nerfed(before May 18), and/or make a safe in system and logoff in it. Then, scan your static, which, since you’ve been preparing for this exact situation for a while, goes to a C4 or higher WH and will close exactly after you pass your entire operation through it, once it’s been shoved into cap ships/orcas. If said static has a static C4 or higher, move in, setup the backup pos and either rebuild there or go through the next static.
The third method, that dedicated people of eve will probably do, and do better than me, is to want the hole more. Have an Orca/carrier cloak in system w/ lots of SB hulls, scan ships hulls, and fits. Get 5-10 people in. Proceed to activate every site after downtime, bomb the static periodically and generally make whoever tried to take your hole/lives in the hole you want wish they’d never heard of a local-lacking environment. Take 200 combat scan probes, launch seven, cloak. Repeat every 2 hours or so. Eventually, they will leave. Wait a week. If they come back, do it all again, if they don’t, setup a small pos and put a maint array/hangar in it. Have one big ship and one small ship for each pilot. Pilots logoff in big ships w/ scan ships/SBs in orca and CHEAP haulers/other ships in the small tower’s maint array. Don’t bother putting anything in the small tower’s corp hangar, as anyone who finds it will try to put it into reinforced, making removal of the stuff difficult. Don’t worry about defenses, again, if someone wants the tower dead, it’s dead. Make sure to have stront, and if the dudes come back lookin for trouble, unanchor the pos (using a cheap hauler w/ SB support), stuff it in the Orca and go back to step one. Repeat as necessary until they stop coming back and you feel safe enough to anchor a large pos and/or keep living out of orcas/capitals. Use any spare orcas/carriers to collapse the static at inoppertune times, and restock your equipment (using cheap haulers) at 5 am their time and/or downtime. Bubble the static and cloak SBs nearby.
People attack your wormhole because they’ve either been hired to do it, they want your sites, or they’re just bored. The bored will leave, the hired will eventually stop working for the hirer, and the people that want your sites won’t get your sites because you activated all the sites every downtime. An Orca, a few scan ships and SBs w/ fits is not expensive at all compared to WH sites, so you can make their lives irritating w/ very little expense on your end. The person who wins will eventually either be the person/people who get bored first. Or, someone runs out of money. Who’s gonna run out of money first, the people w/ covops cloaks or the people who can’t cloak while they fight sleepers or mine?
k162space 
As you mentioned above, I think being able to quickly liquidate assets and get out fast is the most sensible option for most corporations in case of attack.
Never underestimate the power of provoked and persistent pilots. While we are very good at hiding, running, fleeing and generally trying not to get smacked over the head, we tend to fall into a group with longer goals. Most of us would happily fritter away our wormhole wealth in retribution and retaliation. Pretty much everything actually IN the w’hole is considered forfeit by the very nature of its tenuous existence. We really need a sign on the POS that indicates that we’re like 7-11, QuikTrip or your local Gas’N’Go – “No More Than 500 M In Tower After Dark.”
There is some good advice here, although from my point of view the GTFO is a bit of a cop out, but if you’re in WHs for ISK and not PvP I can see how it would be appealing.
I think I could add a few more bits of advice in terms of POS defences, if I may be so bold, this coming from someone who tends to shoot POSes in lower class, C1-3, WHs.
Firstly you must have a medium or large tower, never ever put down a small. Even in a C1 a small is well, just small. Fruther more in C1s, you are right to say taking down a tower is dull as hell but we’ll still do it and so will others.
A POS bash Zealot with good skills can put out 500+ DPS on a small tower and 450+ on a medium. Add stealth bombers doing 400+ dps at up to 50km with pretty average skills and you have enough DPS there to take down a tower in a resonable time with a decent fleet, even in a C1
So how do you counter this? Obviously online guns helps, take note many WH residents! No SB is going to hang around with active POS guns. However for a fleet of Zealots small and medium guns aren’t really going to cut it, most corps have two logisitcs pilots, at which point the combination of remote rep and speed/sig tanking the guns (small batteries are effectively BC class weapons) will probably render them ineffective. POS gunners would help a lot here, but they need to be online at the time.
My advice for C1 defence is a) A large tower, we’re nutters in our corp and even we won’t shoot a large with a sub BS fleet, b) all ECM with a few scrams and maybe 6 guns, the only way to reliably stop logisitcs pilots is ECM and having the guns and scrams means if something gets caught without rep it will actually die as opposed to just warp off.
For C2s and C3s, trying to scare people off with a lone carrier is probably a bad idea. A 10-15 POS bash BS fleet with logistics and some recon support will probably be able to deal with a carrier if it leaves the tower. Yes the addition of a carrier on top of the POS defences will make life a lot less enjoyable for the attackers. However, as with POS gunners, the carrier pilot actually has to be online at the time. Its no good having a carrier appear halfway into the POS bash when all the POS guns/EWAR has been disabled and the Bses are munching through the shields.
So for C2/3s a deathstar POS with lots of ECM to screw with logistics is probably the best, although even this can be defeated. We took down a large tower with 8 ECM batteries the other day, we lost two Guardians doing so (though refitting them with ECCM helped a lot apparently), but the tower went down eventually and our losses were recouped. Obviously capitals will help but lone carriers are neither scray or a “we win” button when used a against experienced players who want the job done.
However, I feel the main problem with defending POSes in WHs is not the POSes themselves but the corporations that own them. More often than not they simply aren’t big enough or don’t have enough active members in the WH to put up a reasonable defence. It doesn’t matter if you have the “dickiest of dickstars” if you’ve only got 20 members in your corp and only 5-10 active at the most in your WH then you really aren’t going to be able to stop a co-ordinated 15-20 man fleet. If they have enough active players to lock down your WH in the time between the POS going into RF and it coming out then the only way you can really defend it is to go after their fleet.
Actually thats quite a lot of thoughts, I hope it helps someone in a WH. Excellent work on the blogging as well, hopefull being “ATLAS pets” is as much fun as being in a WH.
Thanks for the disheartening tips 😦
And as for being Atlas pets, local is like people come in with a big sign saying “I’m in your system and am going to attack you now, is that alright?” 🙂 🙂 🙂
And come Tyrannis we’ll probably have enough skills to back into the WH and actually do things effectivley 🙂
I don’t think its too disheartening, the effort you need to put into killing a well thought out POS with active defenders is more than most people are willing to put in.
I’ve reposted this on a blog I’m fleshing out, and I think a good synopsis would be as such. Basically you need to consider what size fleet is needed to kill your tower and if you can do anything to fight that fleet if/when it has put your POS into RF. Having a tower that requires a decent BS fleet to kill isn’t going to help you much if all you can muster to fight that fleet is 5 players, one of whom is just an Orca alt. Ultimately the defence of a WH is about players and not POSes.
I need to also add that the security settings on the POS really needs to be correct. We put a Medium tower into reinforced the other day, all of the guns online, hardeners offline, and the guns never shot at us.
Tal Brasi and miningzen, thank you for your structured input. You’ve convinced me to at least go a medium tower for a C2 “initial investment.” As someone that has sieged a small in a C1 no less, I was leaning in that direction already. Time to read the rest of this blog after work :p
[…] is not to say we are safe. If someone wants an occupied w-space system enough they will take it. Rather than leaving a scout in our system they will leave the whole fleet. But first they have to […]
Cannot build a dread in WH space. You need sov to build a cap.
5 mil says you can. Anyone from CCRES wanna confirm?
You CAN build dreads and carriers in a WH. Can not build titans / supercarriers as they need sov.
Looking at the small cap fleet we have in our C2 is proof enough 😉
thanks
My understanding is that there are never any WHs into or out of C4 space big enough to pass a Carrier/Dread, only C5 and C6 WHs can pass carriers/dreads in or out. In our time in a C4, we have not seen any K162’s that could accommodate, although we could have just been lucky or missed them. Can anyone confirm or deny that? Thanks!
PS Posting here because most forums are people just giving opinions and they have never lived in a wh :).
confirmed.
as someone that regulary seiges WH towers i cna confirm x-large ship production arrays dont require sov to be deployed and can build BS carriers and dread’s and the occasional rorqual.
with regards k162 is the opposite side of the WH to which it was found from. i’ve personally not tested the theroy of jumping cap’s through a WH with the total mass allowance over the carrier size though it is appealing to the hauling minerals/ c,parts in and making inside.
with previous kill mails removign dick star’s in c1’s well we’ve done it sure it took a long time but a BC fleet with 2 logistics can easily remove any tower given time. i’m just lucky we have those seriously bored pilots that like to get drunk and seige whilst piss take on ventrillo.
seiging systems c4 and above hmm tried it once logistical nightmare properly wont repeat in near future.
as for tips on defence,thats a trade secret but we are for hire for removal and defense.
contact me in game scotayne hawkins.
Seems the best defense against a fleet that only wants to steal your stuff is a couple of Orcas. If you are under siege, just pack up all your stuff in orcas, warp to a safe spot, and log off. The attacking fleet will then have to decide whether they want to sit and shoot an empty tower, or find something useful to do with thier time on earth.
If the fleet is there to boot you from the wh, you’ll have to let them know that you will harass them constantly if they plan to stay in the wh for any length of time.