Ninjering 102: Ackbar

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about “Ackbar” ships and how you can bait and kill without needing to swap.

So, now that Retribution has failed to kill our profession and all the self-congratulatory bullshit is out of the way, it's time to return to our regular programming and talk tactics. Ninja salvaging with an eye to killing mission runners is a numbers game. Not many mission runners actually shoot at us, so the ones that do are precious. The most basic ninja tactic is to bait in a frigate, get shot at, warp out, dock up, grab a kill ship, warp back, then hope the mission runner is still there and will stick around long enough for you to get a point on him.

Shooty bears are precious!

Unfortunately, Retribution lowered the engagement timer to five minutes. That's not a lot of time. The mission runner is essentially in control of the engagement for the entire time until you're back in your death mobile and have him firmly tackled. All he needs to do is dock up for five minutes and the entire exercise has been futile. We used to get around that by fitting a point on our bait frigates and keeping the mission runner in place until an alt or a friend could bring us a kill ship to swap into. With the 60-second weapons timer now preventing you from ejecting, that got a whole lot harder (not impossible – but we're still working on that).

Project Cruiser and the Ackbar method

Way back in 2010, ninja celebrities Aiden Mourn and Solomar Espersei launched Project Cruiser. Mostly an exercise in finding a new challenge because Orca swapping was the near-infallible tactic of the time, Project Cruiser resulted in some very interesting fights that took mission runners by a whole new flavor suprise.

Oh no!

In ninja parlance, the tactics pioneered by Project Cruiser became known as “Ackbar”, after everyone's favorite space squid. Because it's a trap. You essentially invade the mission, loot the things, get shot, grab point and kill the mission runner with an all-in-one ship. It works fantastically well when it works, but it's a bit of a challenge. Cruisers – the only hull type with enough power to do this consistently while still looking fairly harmless – are generally easy pickings even for PVE-fit battlecruisers and battleships until you can tip the odds in your favor.

Revisiting Project Cruiser

Under Retribution's new Crimewatch system, Ackbar tactics have become a very desirable method of ninjering. Retribution also gave us some much-needed T1 cruiser overhauls. It's a perfect storm. As such, over the past weeks, I've been experimenting with new ships and fittings that can do the job. This has met with mixed success. So far I'm looking at four kills and two losses.

While both losses can be chalked up to pilot error (derp), they do show the weakness of the Ackbar tactic: it's hairy. Both Stabbers were lost just seconds before RR landed on grid, klaxons blaring and modules overheating – great fun but a bit too unreliable! You'll also note that both cruisers are fairly expensive for what they do on account of the Ancillary Current Router rigs required to cram far too much stuff on them. I've since switched to a much more Powergrid-friendly active shield tank and a rack of Gyrostabilizers and that looks much better on paper.

Can I Ackbar?

This post is not about specific fits though – it's about the basics of the Ackbar method. Once I get a few good fits hammered out, those will go in a post of their own. If you want to Ackbar you'll need the following:

1. High skills in Racial Cruiser, your weapon system of choice, fitting, capacitor and thermodynamics. Navigation helps too.
2. Deep enough pockets to stomach a few losses as you try out different fits.
3. A fair amount of confidence in your manual piloting and micromanagement skills. You need less of this if you have more of item 2).
4. Backup. Whether supplied by friends or alts, Ackbar ships really benefit from things like gang links and especially RR and cap transfer.
5. EFT-warrior skills. Remember that Meta 4 modules can often make a fit possible at only a slight loss in effectiveness over T2.

And that's *after* culling all the obvious failfits.

Ackbar is not restricted to T1 cruisers. Faction cruisers like the mighty Cynabal or T2 cruisers (especially of the Heavy Assault or Force Recon variety) can do the job just fine too. Better even, except for two things: they're more expensive to lose and they're more intimidating so they might not attract as much fire. Flying Ackbar involves a lot of compromise in fitting to achieve a sweet spot between speed, tank, DPS, cost and perceived threat. Good luck!

Ninjering 102: The UI

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about the UI and how to set it up for ninja work.

Make it easy

In September I wrote a post on setting up the Overview. The objective there was simple: to make life easier on yourself by sorting information in a sensible manner. It is a good idea to do the same for your user interface (UI). The UI is basically all the stuff on your screen – the various windows and displays that provide you with information and allow you to interact with your ship and your environment.

Before you read on, I invite you to check out this excellent article by PVP virtuoso Azual Skoll. His thinking on screen layouts is sensible and you'll see that I've shamelessly copied many of his ideas. That's why he put them on his blog, after all! Of course, for ninja work there are a few things you'll probably want to do differently. I'll outline my own UI setup according to a pretty picture.

My UI setup

Yes, that's the same screenshot I used in the Overview article. It works because it has pretty much everything active. Let's go over it by the numbers.

1. Local Chat. Local is an invaluable intel tool. It allows me to quickly check if my target has any corpmates in system by setting his corp to an alternative standing. This will cause any pilots in that corp to light up in a different color. I have also set known “white knights” and ninja hunters to a separate standing so I know if I need to look over my shoulder for them. I've set the list to names only and the font to fairly small. I don't talk in local but I do like to see the ubiquitous tears in there.
2. Other chats. Should be fairly self-explanatory.
3. People & Places and Scanner. I'm quite happy with these two being tabbed in the same window. Obviously I interact with the scanner a lot, both when probing down mission runners and for D-scanning while in or near a mission. I also use People & Places a lot for setting standings and making spot safes. But I never need to use them simultaneously.
4. Cargo and Drones. For looting purposes, I have activated the option to open every new container in a new window. By doing so I can keep my ship's cargo window small but easily accessible. When I'm in a ship with drones, I also have the Drones window tabbed here. This keeps the interaction close to the ship's HUD where my cursor spends most of its time.
5. The ship's HUD. With passive modules not displayed, and shield/armor/hull percentages shown. These options can be accessed by right-clicking the little four-bar icon to the bottom right. Come Retribution, you'll also find your safety setting here, which should be at “Partial.”
6. Locked targets. They're a bit of a pain to move around – you need to have something locked and then fidget about until you find a little crosshair to the bottom-left. You can drag this to move your locked items around. I put them above the HUD modules with enough clearance for EWAR effect icons (points, webs, neuts etc.) to show up.
7. Selected Item. This window goes just above the locked targets. This keeps the targets, mods (from the HUD) and various commands from the Selected Item window very close together for quick mouse cursor transit.
8. Overview. The Overview needs a fair bit of space because, especially when looting and salvaging, there can be quite a bit of stuff on there. I've elected to not take it entirely to the top of the screen though. In combat, the Overview will be notably less filled up and I don't want hostile ships or drones to be all bunched up in the top-right of the screen while my main action items are at the bottom.
9. Fleet window and Watchlist. This is a screen I don't interact with very much, but when I do it's mostly because a fellow ninja needs remote repairs. I therefore keep this window open at all times. The last thing a ninja wants is for his RR to be late because the pilot was looking for the fleet window...

Up to you

And there you have it. As with the Overview, personal preference will factor in to how you set up your UI just as much as occupational needs. How your UI works best for you is ultimately up to you. But I would encourage you to take some time to really sit down and think about how you can make the UI as user friendly as you can. Don't just grit your teeth if some ergonomic nightmare is costing you precious seconds in combat – fix it!

Ninjering 102: The Overview

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about the overview and how to keep your feeble brain from shorting out.

Information overload

Last week I mentioned the loss of my first Harbinger, which happened not long after I first moved from pure ninja salvaging to baiting and killing. A quick look at the killmail will tell you the story: I jumped a shooty Dominix and was jumped in turn by his corpmate in a Celestis. Said Celestis kept me pointed and neuted while the Dominix pounded me with blaster fire until I exploded.

That was not how it happened in my mind, however. I never noticed his corpmate until I studied the killmail. It was a pretty nasty failure of of situational awareness. Thing is, my overview was so cluttered by drones, rats, wrecks, containers, mission structures and whatnot that, ironically, I had no overview of the situation at all. I fixed that and I recommend you do the same.

Getting started

Right-click the little four-bar icon in the top of the overview window and select “Open overview settings.” From this menu, you can edit almost everything about what is displayed in your overview, and how. I won't go into all options in depth, you should consult the EVE manual for that. Wait, what? Oh. Well, in lieu of a manual, check out this EVEUniversity article and/or download ISK The Guide.

There's a lot of options in here. A LOT.

Don't feel like you have to set up your overview to EVE University specifications: a good overview should be matched to your needs and the circumstances you will most frequently encounter. I'll explain how I've set up my own overview and the thinking behind it. And it's the thinking that counts. I am still frequently tinkering with the overview but I am happy with the basics of my current set-up.

Tabs

First of all, you should know about tabs. By right-clicking one of the tabs in your current overview, you will be given the option to “Add tab.” You can have a maximum of five and I recommend you use them all. These tabs will allow you to quickly switch between different overviews as situations change. It's also useful for d-scanning if you have the “Use overview settings” box checked. It will use your overview settings as a filter, leaving out lots of junk you may not want to sift through, like wrecks and cans while in combat.

I use five tabs: Ninja, Gank, Drones, WarpTo, and Everything. I'll go over them one by one. When setting up your tabs, start by removing everything and then fill in the bits you think you'll need. This will prevent you from overlooking things like POS modules which can really mess up a d-scan result at the worst possible time.

Ninja

This is the tab where I spend most of my time. It has quite a lot in it: containers, wrecks, NPC ships, player ships and drones, and acceleration gates. What it leaves out is various celestials (suns, planets, moons, stations), structures and other inert stuff that I don't need to keep an eye on. While this particular setting can get quite cluttered in a busy mission with lots of rats and wrecks around, it is only used during the “baiting” stage of getting a mission runner to shoot me, when I don't yet need to worry about overextending my limited brain capacity.

The Ninja tab in action. Notice how all non-essential information has been stripped.

Gank

When things get funky, I switch to the Gank tab. This is essentially the same as the Ninja tab, except it leaves out the cans, wrecks and NPC stuff. I leave the acceleration gates in because I often find myself chasing a mission runner down a room or two (or six). One thing I also take out is drones. Once there are three or four ships on grid with five drones each, the overview quickly fills up, so it helps to get them out of the Combat tab. They are in the Ninja tab however, because it's intel: being able to gauge the tech level of the mission runner's drones from d-scan will give me a quick indication of how far up the skill tree this guy has gone.

Drones

Hah! Thought I didn't care about drones at all in combat? That's not true. In fact, drones can be a very critical factor, especially when I'm flying a flimsy little frigate, holding on for dear life while a friendly pilot is bringing me a Hurricane, and the mission runner starts launching Warrior IIs at me. That's why I give drones a tab all to themselves. It has the drones, all the drones, and nothing but the drones. This allows me to quickly target those drones I want to shoot down.

WarpTo

Sometimes I just need to go places. Or check on where a mission runner is aligned to. WarpTo has the sun, planets, customs offices (easy to forget those), stations and beacons. Not moons or asteroid belts though, because there's generally too many of them to be worth the hassle of warping to each one. If you do need to find someone whom you suspect of being at a moon or belt, it's better to warp to the planet and use some narrow-angle d-scan magic instead.

Everything

Unsurprisingly, this tab includes everything. Sometimes you'll want to see something that you can't visually pick out. Like moons or asteroid belts. It's more of a backup than something I use often, but when I do use it I'm always glad it's there.

Brackets and appearance

Some final tricks that have made my life in the overview much easier involve the use of brackets and the appearance of neutrals. Brackets are the things you see in space. EVE allows you to use a different overview filter for the overview itself and the brackets in space depending on which tab you have selected. You can configure this under “Overview tabs.” I use the Ninja setting for all tabs except WarpTo and Everything. This allows me to keep an eye on mission rats and enemy drones, or quickly select and save the location of an object for a tactical warp, even when I'm in a more limited overview tab. Best of both worlds, so to say.

Brackets in action. Though displayed in space, the wrecks are not in the overview.

As for appearance, this affects the colors and symbols of pilots and their drones. From the overview settings menu, note that only the “Filters → Types” settings are tab-specific. The other settings apply to the entire overview regardless of which tab you're on. I've used the options under “Appearance” to set neutral and no-standing pilots to a yellow icon with a yellow background. This makes them stand out much clearer from whatever other stuff there may be on my current tab. It gives a good visual cue whenever some third party shows up and it means that I'm always able to pick out players from NPCs and inert items at a glance.

Mess with it – a lot

The overview tabs and settings I've described here work well for me. As I already said, however, I'm frequently tinkering with the details and I'm sure other ninjas use other setups. I'd be delighted to hear how other people have theirs laid out. Why not drop a reply to this post with your thoughts? You can earn a cookie if you add a screenshot of your favorite tab in action. Apart from that, my advice to you is to grit your teeth and dig into those overview settings. They're a bit of a pain to figure out but you'll find it is well worth it in the end.

And finally, special thanks to Sihoja for involuntarily supermodelling in these screenshots. You were born for the catwalk, baby!

Ninjering 102: Safespots and You

Ninjering 102 is not about how to probe mission runners, how to d-scan or how to fit a hilaricane. That would be 101. 102 is about some of the finer tricks of the trade. This one's about safespots. And you. Yes, you.

What is a safespot?

Contrary to what its endearingly straightforward name suggests, a safespot is not safe. It is a spot in space that is off-grid from any celestials. It is therefore mildly safer from the alternative, sitting outside a station or at a moon or some such place where any Tom, Dick and Harry can just warp to you and make your life miserable. In a safespot, you can only be found by combat scanner probes, or by someone stumbling into you on a long MWD-powered trip into nothing.

The “spot” safe

Yes, I made these names up. Deal. The “spot” safe is a bookmark you drop just outside the mission grid you're warping into. From your People & Places menu, you can hit “Save Location” and enter a name for your spot – it won't actually save it until you click the final button. Thus, when you warp into a mission, you can set up a location and only save it just as the distance counter ticks to around 1 million km. Any closer and the deadspace warp denial effect may screw with you (I believe it extends to around 300,000 km from the mission grid). Name it something clever like “KPT Dominix Spot” so you know which mission it is close to.

The safespot is not created until you push this button - even in warp.

The primary use of this spot is to bounce back there when a mission runner is red but no longer in his mission. You can sit at your spot, aligned, with your d-scan set to 360 degrees and about 10 million km range. This lets you see the bear coming back before he actually lands on grid. Is he in his shiny? Warp in and catch him. Is he in his PVP boat? Think before you warp. Is he in a shuttle or pod? Let him land on grid, see that you're gone, and come back in his shiny. Then kill him.

Other uses:

• Quick bounce-back when a mission runner leaves his mission to put rat aggro on you.
• Place for RR to sit on close stand-by.
• General sneaky spot to check up on a mission you've visited earlier without alarming the bear.

The “short” safe

Remember how when we scan with probes, we ignore hits near celestials? That's because there's no point going after people who are transiting jump gates or (un)docking from stations. You can make a safespot very close (inside 3,000 km) to a busy celestial and sit there, your signature cleverly lost in the mess of ships warping in and out nearby. So use a gate or a station for this. Make an off-alignment safespot in the system first, warp to your celestial of choice an drop the bookmark about 3,000 km out. This prevents people warping through your grid when they're in transit between celestials.

So close, you can see the station in the background.

I use a “short” safe in all of the systems I frequent to increase the pace at which I can probe down mission runners. How? Easy: I drop both my scan ship and my bait ship there and eject/board between them. This saves me from having to dock and undock every time I get a 100% hit.

Yes, it's a little risky and you might get your shit stolen while you're away. Never happened to me but it's possible. I've only ever had my short safe compromised twice. Once by a noob who was just probing around randomly. And once because I foolishly made the spot in alignment to another station and someone riding an Interceptor on MWD stumbled into me:

Royal NASA > hello

Yuri Wayfare > herro o/

Yuri Wayfare > so you found my fabled safe spot

Yuri Wayfare > what mysteries is it you seek, Royal NASA?

Royal NASA > was not looking

Royal NASA > just testing ship systems

Yuri Wayfare > says the man flying an interceptor, hmm?

Yuri Wayfare > long-time player I see

Yuri Wayfare > why does he come into our sanctuary I think?

Royal NASA > hi i wasent looking for you i was alliened to gate was semi AFK

Yuri Wayfare > ...

Yuri Wayfare > so this safe is just shit you say

When someone finds your short safe, it's time to make a new one. A better one.

You

Well I painted myself into a corner with that title so I'd better say something about you. You handsome devil, you. Use safespots smart and often. Oh and don't save them to corp bookmarks unless it's in an actual fleet op. And clean them up afterward. I get sick and tired of ancient corp bookmarks cluttering up my systems. Don't be that guy.