Mercenary Coalition has fully deployed on our current contract. This one has some history for me, and the rest of Noir., as the target is Suddenly Spaceships. I'll save the details of the contract for my recap, but needless to say this contract struck an interesting chord for Noir.
It'll be helpful to give some context. Let's start with the most recent bit of relevant information: a Suddenly Spaceships alliance meeting recording.
If you don't have the time, I'll quote Talladar from his Reddit comment:
TL:DR
07:30 SMA are helping us evict Horde
08:45 We are going to install renters into Could Ring
12:36 Some guy with downs “WHAT DO ABOUT FWEDDIT BEING BLUE”
13:00 Downs guy: what value does standings with Fweddit bring?
13:20 CEO: None, OSS made us blue them.
14:00 CEO: They helped us defend our space and gave us two money moons (makes sense)
14:10 CEO: I would like to remove them from Cloud Ring (Cooooold!)
18:40 SMA wants to evict Horde and give us their constellation
19:25 I want to build a small empire using 30 guys in bhaalgorns
20:00 Imperium will never hit our space
20:30 After Horde is removed we turn Cloud Ring into renter space to buy 40 bhaalgorns
25:00 We just want to play the game for fun frags (and apparently run a renter empire)
25:54 Downs syndrome guy: I LOST MY PROPHECY WHERE I PUT THIS THING
27:04 Apparently SS had a meltdown at the thought of losing their sov station. (Wouldn’t that be a shame…)
There is more but those were my highlights.
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| Station Name: No Not Believing in Station |
I won't go into it all again, I've written on the absolute horrible management, embarrasing organizational skills, and outright shameful leadership style of particular members of Suddenly Spaceships in the past. And while Suddenly Spaceships apparently thinks about Noir. every time they dock, I like to quote Don Draper, "I don't think of you at all." Suffice to say, I don't miss a single thing about being in Suddenly Spaceships.
Nonetheless, someone apparently had a bone to pick with Suddenly and contacted us shortly after the meeting was leaked. Connection? Perhaps! I honestly don't know, but my speculation says there's something there.
Anyway, off we go! We had a couple of skirmishes with Suddenly that were very bad for us. I have no idea why some members of Mercenary Coalition are fighting frigates in Stealth Bombers, but they did and they paid the price multiple times. It was quite frustrating for me and the other late US time zone players since Suddenly Spaceships is so heavily EU focused. We're not able to get in on the good action and really pick fun fights.
But, luckily for us late US players, Suddenly does have quite a few POS in the area. Some of them offline, it turns out. We killed a small and a large offline tower without any response from Suddenly or the alliances they rely on to keep them safe, The OSS and TISHU.
This, apparently incited Suddenly into some sort of rage, and so they decided they'd take one of our towers too! And so they formed up 34 members of The OSS, 27 members of TISHU, and 26 members of Suddenly Spaceships in 27 dreadnaughts, 8 carries, and 46 battleships to take it from us.
In turn, we formed up 43 members of Mercenary Coalition. Athen switched back and forth between a few doctrines as more and more information became available. In the end a Cerberus doctrine was decided on. The plan was to coordinate with our POS gunner and take as much out as we could. The tower was worthless to us, and losing it meant absolutely nothing in the short term.
However, The Culture and Pandemic Legion had scouted the tower out already, it seems, and decided to come and pile onto it already. When they saw that OSS and TISHU had fielded such expensive fleets, they made the decision to come in with Rattlesnakes and kill them all. They weren't interested in the ISK our Cerberus fleet represented. In turn, they brought Pandemic Legion who arrived a bit later and helped secure the fight.
It was, frankly, a positive turn of events for us - and an unexpected one. In the end, we lost a tower worth 293M ISK and a few cheap ships. The others, combined, lost about 100B ISK. All in all, a pretty good day.
The full battle report can be found here, along with the footage from our perspective below.
