The TL;DR on Haywire vs Dura Lexx 4

So, I have left enough time for the dencorub stains on the rectums of all involved to wash off in the slow grief tears of eviction before commenting on the weekend's action, but here we go.

Firstly, I have to give respect to Dura Lexx for what they do and how they do it. They are pretty pro at the whole thing, and put in inhuman amounts of effort into the preparation, and the hole control. They rage roll and get connections with which to bring in dozens of dreads, and they get it done with robotic dedication which a lot of couch-swooning groups can't or won't do.

Secondly, you may look at a 158B vs 18B battle and think "lol what scrubs" about Haywire, but remember - this was the 4th invasion of that hole by Dura Lexx. This was also the second set of engagements, and haywire handed them 28B-ish of losses in a previous skirmish that happened off a RF timer.So, yes, it wasn't exactly the most even of battle reports but all in all the defenders came out with a great amount of success and pride, but unfortunately, not with their toy box.

So what actually happened? 

Well, an empty Archon bumped out of the Dura Lexx POS, so we went over there and dropped our 15 dread fleet on top of it and got ready to fight. This resolved into a short brawl, as the enemy were caught pretty much by surprise, resulting in a Devoter and a Loki going down. We then noticed that, lets say 5 minutes after the fight started, one of the DAM Revelations warps onto grid....and gets caught 140km away in a stop bubble. So we can put it all down to Cardiff Solast, who is deaf as well as dumb.

Anyway, Louis tried to reposition the fleet, and warped us to a ping. Dura Lexx burned a Sabre atop us and dropped their arty aglfar fleet about 100km off, and burned 5 of our dreads before we could blap our way through the enemy Sabres. here's where the persistance, preparation and dedication of Dura Lexx pays off - not only did they have 10 fitted Sabres, they had another 5+ sitting unfitted inside their POS or inside Deep Space Transports, and these were fitted up as soon as they could be and thrown at us.

So, the first engagement was pretty decisive. We had superiority in dreads going into it, but Dura Lexx's tactics are to pin you down with interdictors if they can, and warp their dreads at range and sit safely out of brawl dread range plinking away. After losing 5 Dreads and 3 pods, we had more even numbers with them and our subs were heavily outnumbered as well (so many Bhaals).

So, we retired to the Lenny POS and sat inside, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with the whole Bolivian Army outside, and waited for the POS to get raped down around our ears. The Russians got it to 5% hull and then, because their dreads were arty fit, dropped siege and began slowboating away to reduce their risk.

So we just turned the POS field off and went for it, picking on the less experienced Naglfars first. We did OK, but not that great, and the BR speaks for that.

So, why did Haywire. lose?

Strategically, Haywire was a little unprepared. Compared to DAM's eviction however, there's Haywire unprepared and there's DAM unprepared.

Haywire had 28 dreads in their hole, but 12 or so were partly fit or unfit entirely. They could field 16-18, but we only had 6 dread pilots. So, obviously, there was a large volume of logistics that didn't get done for those unfit hulls.

Haywire had 2 Yachts and 1 Fagroller. Dura Lexx imported about 3-5 Yachts. The recent eviction meta relies almost exclusively on Yachts to punitively get and maintain hole control and flip connections. Having no spare Fagrollers or Yachts, and dealing with the chaos of hangars and POSs with passowrds and having to deal with security and expedience when allowing access to the batphone, that was simply not enough to get hole control for more than 1-3 hours a day, and even then, that was still one to two Dura Lexx yachts slowly slowly rolling holes while we probed desperately for connections.

Haywire. was 11 meat bods and the battle went down at a not totally convenient time Sunday night AU TZ. I was the only BUGRY / Empty Vessels guy there, as most of my guys have been couch swooning, having an IRL or have been doing 6 months in Taiwan trying to finger bang hot Taiwanese babs or something. The bulk of the fleet was made up of DAM, with quite a few US guys getting up at inconvenient times on the weekend. So, we were pretty undermanned at 22 meat bods and 45 toons in fleet. Probably that wasn't too bad, considering - Dura Lexx was probably just 3 Russian nerds all up :P But, if the timer had been set a few hours earlier, we'd have had more chance of getting my guys in on Sunday pre-DT.

But, really, I'll put it down to one guy: Cardif Solast. People who don't warp Revs onto field 5 minutes late could be the difference between a shit show and a decent POS defence. Its all on you, buddy.