Assessing your Gang and the Enemy Gang

Generally
This page is dedicated to giving general advice on how to determine whether your gang will succeed while fighting another gang. The effectiveness of a gang depends on each gang's numbers, the ships in each gang, the tactics used on each side, and the fittings of each ship. There is no clear cut way to determine in every case which side will win the fight, however over time understanding what each ship is capable of, and understanding the use of different modules, is very important.

In general, there are five types of sub-capital ships, from smallest, fastest but least powerful, to biggest, slowest but most powerful, which are: Frigate, Destroyer, Cruiser, Battlecruiser, and Battleship. All other ships are either T2 varieties of those ships, or Capital Ships.

Toe-to-toe, both ships standing still, the larger ship will almost always win. However, that is not how battles are fought on Eve. Some small ships move too fast to be hit, some ships incapacitate other (larger) ships. Ideally, a group of three frigates and a Cruiser with ECM or Sensor Damps can very likely kill a Battlecruiser or maybe a Battleship, and a REAL stupid Battleship pilot could probably lose to a few frigates that 1/10th the cost of his modules, let alone his ship. If each member of the group upgrades from a Frigate to a Cruiser (which is still fairly cheap), the chance of succeeding is even better.

So, how does it happen, and what are other tools I can use when trying to PVP? Well, consider the following sorts of tactics:
 * (1) Speed Tanking
 * (2) Ranged Combat
 * (3) Capacitor Draining
 * (4) Electronic Counter-Measures (ECM)
 * (5) Sensor Dampeners
 * (6) Tracking Disruptors
 * (7) Target Painters

Speed Tanking
Various ships rely on speed tanking, most notably all interceptors, fast interdictors (basically the Minmatar Sabre), and the Vagabond (Minmatar Heavy Assault Cruiser (HAC)). Frigates of all kinds, the Stabber (Minmatar Cruiser), as well as other Heavy Assault Cruisers, and Recon Ships often speed tank as well. Speed tanking works best against the largest turrets, such as Lasers (Amarr), Railguns (Mostly Caldari, but some Gallente), Autocannons and Artillery (Minmatar), and Blasters (Gallente). When you speed tank turret-based attacks, they just simply do not hit you because the guns cannot track you.

Missiles, on the other hand, are more difficult to speed tank, but they too can be completely avoided if you are going faster than the missile type. This is far, far easier against Battleship-sized missiles, and mainly Torpedoes, as Cruise Missiles are designed to go faster and hurt smaller targets, since it has a smaller explosion radius.

Ships that are going fast enough to avoid missiles also tend to go faster than drones, which is a Battleship's primary method of killing frigates. While speed tanking Battleships, you may want to consider kiting and killing their drones. See Kiting below.

To speed tank effectively against drones and the heavier missiles, you must be going roughly 5,000m/s. At first glance, a newbie will wonder how the hell a ship goes that fast, as his frigate is moving 400m/s without an MWD, and maybe 1,500m/s with an MWD. Modules that lower the density of a ship or increases its max speed (ie. Nanofiber Internal Structure and Overdrive Injector) greatly increases MWD speed. A T2, faction or officer MWD may increase speed. Training skills such as Navigation and Acceleration Control also increase speed. The expensive snake implants also increase speed. Rigs, permanent modifications to ships, greatly increases speed. All in all, a Vagabond with a base speed of 600m/s with all the bells and whistles will end up going over 11,000m/s (and can outrun cruiser and frigate size missiles easily, let alone the slower Battleship sized). Incredibly well outfitted Interceptors can do a a bit better too. A Vagabond setup like that, with implants and everything, likely is 250-350million isk or more.

A ship that relies on speed tanking rarely fits a web, as in order to get to a very high speed you spend lots of ISK, and getting into normal web range (10km) with a speed tanking ship means your ship is now an expensive paperweight. That said, some fit a web for defensive reasons, so it can slow down the ship webbing it so itself can get out of web range and warp away. These ships also fit t2 warp disruptors so that they can disrupt out of 24km range, and they will orbit at approximately 20km from their target ship.

While Minmatar seems to run the speed game like a pro, their Recons (the Huginn and Rapier) also have massive web range, up to 40km without a faction or officer web. Avoid these ships at all costs.

Now does a speed tanking interceptor (ie. Crow) sound good to you? Don't act too fast, they do shit damage. However, they're great for holding someone down while the rest of the gang piles onto them.

Ranged Combat
Ranged combat simply means putting yourself in a range where you can do the most damage to the enemy and they can do the least damage to you. Often times short range weapons hurt more than long range weapons as well as track better, when relevant. Rockets, Blasters, Autocannons, Pulse Lasers and Torpedoes are short range, while things like Missiles, Artillery, Beam Lasers and Railguns are long range.

Missile range is dictated by the velocity times flight time, while the rest are simply given on the module. Certain ships, such as the Rokh (for railguns) or Raven (for Cruise Missiles/Torpedoes) give bonuses to range. If you go outside missile range the missile just dies and doesn't hit you. The remaining turret weapons just hit you for far less damage.

In large fleet battles range is used extensively to outperform the other fleet. Usually groups of battleships are tic-toeing around several Grids moving to a place where their battleships are out of range of the smaller tackling ships, firing away at Battleships far away from them.

In small gang warfare this has less of an impact, but it can still be useful.

Here is a list of the general range that certain weapons have.

TO ADD LATER

Capacitor Draining
Capacitor draining comes in two flavors: energy neutralizers and nosferatus. Energy Neutralizers rape capacitor at a rate of 1:1, taking energy from both you and your opponent. Nosferatus take away an amount of energy from your opponent, and give it to yourself, however in Summer of 2007, with the Revelations 2 Expansion, these now only work if you have the same or less (% wise) capacitor as your opponent. This was a major hit to persons who flew Amarr Recons (Curse and Pilgrim) which have bonuses to nosferatus and neutralizer range and capacitor transfer. These modules require training of the Energy Emissions Systems skill, and they can be deployed with great success for defensive and offensive purposes.

Energy Neutralizers - When a ship loses all of its capacitor it can no longer use its microwarpdrives, afterburners, turrets, warp disruptors, and all its other fancy modules. The small neuts that fit on frigates will have a 5,250m range and take away 45 energy, and the Battleship-sized neuts will have a 21,000m range and take away 500 energy. You could also fit named and T2 Neuts, and they will take a little more energy than they give you (not by too much, maybe 500 energy lost for 650 energy of your enemy). Because of the equal loss, smaller ships have little reason to fit the smaller neutralizers since they do not have much capacitor themselves, and they would drain their entire capacitor to take a fraction of a Battleship's capacitor. A Battleship, however, with massive amounts of capacitor, can easily nuke all the capacitor from a cruiser in a split second while only losing 10% or less of his own.

For example, if you are attacked by an expensive Vagabond, a Battleship only needs to activate his two neutralizers and the Vagabond goes bye-bye and shuts down immediately while the Battleship still has plenty of energy left. Beware, however, if the enemy ship fits nosferatu's he will only regain his capacitor at your expense, cause hey, guess who has the lesser capacitor now.

Nosferatus - These modules, or at least their offensive use, have been marginalized heavily by the Summer 2007 expansion. Previously, capacitor-specialty ships like the Amarr Recons mentioned above, or ships with open highslots like the Gallente Myrmidon Battlecruiser and Dominix Battleship (that uses drones, not turrets, to deal damage) would just latch onto an enemy, suck its life away, using the enemy's energy to repair itself while its drones brutalize the target. Since nosferatu's only steal energy if you have a lesser percent of capacitor than the enemy, they are not quite as effective offensively. Their best use is now for restoring energy while ratting, or smaller ships draining energy from a capacitor-laden enemy Battleship so it can keep its web, scram, and other modules running.

Electronic Counter-Measure (ECM)
ECM is mostly a Caldari weapon and it is an incredibly useful method of disabling an enemy ship, and certain Caldari ECM ships got a recent boost in December of 2007 from the Trinity expansion. The successful use of an ECM module means the target loses lock on all ships and cannot re-target a ship for twenty seconds. Used again and again, it can permanently disable a ship from targeting.

ECM is chance-based, based on the scan strength of the jammer against the sensor strength of the target ship. There are five types of jammers, one specialized to jam each of the four races, and then a fifth one which can evenly jam all races, but is never used because its not ever, ever worth it.

The smaller ships tend to have low sensor strengths and are easier to jam, and the larger ships generally have high sensor strengths and are more difficult to jam. That said, a Caldari Blackbird Cruiser, with modest skills and moderate fittings, and costing three million ISK (counting insurance when it blows up), has five jammers. Chances are, if the Blackbird pilot put each of five jammers on a different Battleship of the right race, he'd probably have two Battleships jammed for a very long time, and almost permanent.

ECM is very worth it, and if you are Caldari you may want to train it so because you can make ships far more expensive than yours completely worthless for very cheap.

Sensor Dampeners
Sensor Dampeners are mostly a Gallente weapon, however unlike Caldari ECM, it is very often used by certain ships of other races. Sensor dampeners were recently given a kick to the junk in December 2007 with the Trinity expansion, however they still are useful. Without bonuses, they used to reduce targeting range and resolution (affecting locking time) of an enemy by ~45%. Now, they do both to 17%, or with a new modification called a script, they can reduce either the targeting range or resolution by 38% at the cost of not affecting the other. Although this is a nerf to remote sensor dampeners in some way, if you load a script to reduce target range, and the ship you damp can no longer target you, you don't need to worry about his targeting time since he couldn't try to target you in the first place.

The Gallente Celestis is a great cruiser for sensor dampening with 5% per skill level increase in sensor damping effectiveness, and with multiple damps could shut down two Battleships, or multiple other ships, with 100% accuracy.

Tracking Disruptors
Adding soon, though mostly worthless and geez scripts make them even worse.

Target Painting
HAHAHA just kidding these are worthless.

Also, see Ships.