Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Funeral dirge

As I began playing Eve, one refrain in the tutorials and wiki pages had me defiant, doubtful, and insecure: "accept the fact that you'll lose your ship."

Yeah, right, I thought. That's just for the folks who shoot at other live folks. I'm going to play it cool, conservative, stock up on overwhelming firepower before jumping into anything.

Um, no.

My pride and joy, the Brutix battlecruiser Lady Roso (somewhat named after my wife), got blown up last night. And it was completely unnecessary, stemming from inattentiveness on my part.

I was running a level II mission. "I hear some pirates are blocking a useful acceleration gate," said the agent who asked for help. "Flay them, and leave their vacuum-desiccated corpses as a reminder to all who follow!"

Good money and a quick fight; no problem for my tall ship and gallant crew. Generally speaking, level II missions can be knocked out by a cruiser-sized ship; taking a battlecruiser (a baseline hull for level III missions) is often overkill, i.e exactly what I want. Huzzah!

Unfortunately, it didn't take long before I started getting knocked around like a ragdoll. One of the dozen or so pirates consistently jammed my ability to lock a target. I could latch onto something to shoot if I got very close, but then it didn't take long for my shields and armor to get stripped away. Soon after I jumped in the first time, I frantically recovered my drones, jumped out, and repaired the ship. I thought, maybe, I'd destroyed one enemy vessel -- but, that might've instead just been me losing target lock again. There was a six-hour window to complete the mission, though, and it was decent money; I figured I could just wear this out through attrition, with plenty of time to walk and play with the dog between waves.

The second time I jumped in, I figured out what ship was jamming me, and managed to tear it apart. Things were looking up!

But then another ship began jamming, and I was pretty close to the bad guys. Shields and armor gone, and rapidly taking damage to the last line of defense, the underlying structure. I begged my drones to return and started the jump-out sequence. But, too late: before I could escape, Lady Roso disintegrated around me; there was a brief flash of explosion before my character's capsule -- a vessel within the vessel that, in this instance, acts as an escape pod -- jumped to safety. It reminded me a bit of the Odyssey's destruction in Deep Space Nine's second-season finale: a frantic battle with a big ship and tiny support craft getting torn apart by smaller but better bad guys. The show's producers used a ship of the same class as The Next Generation's USS Enterprise to stun viewers: "This could just as easily have been Captain Picard blown to bits." I was almost just as jarred by how quickly Lady Roso bit the dust.

Baffled, too. Two of the enemy ships were battlecruisers, just like mine -- I thought that was odd, not having seen any in previous level II missions. But other tough missions instead have twice as many enemies or strong missile and laser batteries. This wasn't the case here: those two battlecruisers aside, the others were all frigates or tiny fighters, and not too many of them. On the face of it, it shouldn't be tough; yet, the persistent jamming incapacitated my ship.

Fortunately, Roso was insured (yes, this game has insurance: six levels of coverage, in fact); I bought and fit a new battlecruiser, New Roso, and set forth. I had to hop around to a couple of stations to pick up fittings: railguns from one station, a pair of capacitor rechargers from another. Along the way, I trained up on the Electronic Warfare skill so I could equip an electronic counter-countermeasures module to diminish or eradicate the jamming. I read online that pirates and other non-player (i.e. AI) characters aren't particularly affected by jamming buster busters, but I hoped for the best and launched into battle.

I didn't last long, jumping out before recovering a pair of my intrepid drones. A fourth time, I at least got all my drones back before fleeing. The dog, on my lap during that last attempt, was quietly weeping into my leg.

I'm not sure what prompted this, but I checked the mission directions again. Maybe I thought there'd be a clue. Ah. The part of eviscerating those villains? Well, it wasn't there: all I was supposed to do was fly out, see whether there were bad guys (yes), and use the acceleration gate they were protecting to make my escape. Not for the first time, my recall might be wrong: it might've been sufficient just to get jumped and to high-tail it out of there. What I do remember is this: the mission description says killing the bad guys is optional.

Dang.

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