The Hydra Principle
Original text by Rells
Expanded and updated by Sanfrey Statolomy
Copyright Agony Unleashed
Contents
The Frigate Fleet
Introduction
A frigate fleet is not simply a blob of people in frigates. Blobs are disorganized, often poorly fitted mess of ships that rely on sheer numbers to win. This article will teach you how to take a blob of frigates and turn them into a lethal force that can absolutely crush much larger ships.
However, keep in mind that a frigate fleet is not simply a blob of people in frigates; this is a mistake made by many and repeated incessantly by those who have never seen a proper fleet. Blobs are a disorganized, often poorly fitted mess of ships. The tech one frigate fleet properly configured would utterly destroy a frigate blob of the same size. Agony Unleashed has proved this to be the case a number of times in our classes (by students such as yourself). The key to learning how to build a fleet and not a blob is to study the configuration of a frigate fleet.
In the PVP-BASIC class, our focus will be on getting you into PvP in the easiest way possible. Since you will lose ships in PvP, the easiest way to get started is to work in a frigate. In fact, there are a number of advanced PvPers, including the instructor, that actually prefer to work in smaller ships. Even if you love that shiny battleship, when you first start out you will be losing ships quite quickly, and it's a lot easier on both your wallet and your ego if you lose 1/4 million ISK ships instead of 1/4 billion ISK ones. Keep in mind that even if you're an expert PvP pilot in a frigate, that does not guarantee you know about battleship PvP and vice versa; there are a lot of dramatic differences between flying the two ship classes. Just like in PvE, it's best to slowly work your way up the ladder, getting experience in one ship type before moving up a gear.
This article will introduce you to selecting and fitting the right ship to meet PvP Basic class requirements, allowing you to assemble an optimal tech one frigate fighting force. Once you complete the article, you will not only know how to fit your own ship, but also how to fit an entire fleet.
Selecting a Ship
For the purposes of PvP, the tech one frigates are divided into a five distinct categories. The first are the combat ships, designed to inflict damage and put out as much firepower as possible. These ships are the Punisher and Inquisitor for the Amarr, the Merlin and Kestrel for the Caldari, Incursus and Tristan for the Gallente and the Rifter and Breacher for the Minmatar. These ships combine both firepower with mid slots, allowing them to mount Electronic Warfare devices. There is no "Best" ship from this list - each has advantages. A Kestrel puts out an enormous amount of damage for a frigate with its four launcher slots and bonuses, but then a Rifter is much faster, and can be used to catch up to the opponent. The Amarr Inquisitor is another decent ship, but its two mid slots, a problem with Amarr ships, are somewhat limiting. This doesn't mean it isn't welcome in a fleet, but rather that its options are more limited. The best frigate fleet would probably have a mix of all of these kinds of ships, so that the bonuses could be used to the best advantage of the fleet.
The second PvP category of tech one frigate is the electronic warfare (EWAR) frigate for your race. These are the Crucifier, with a bonus to Tracking Disruptors, the Griffin, with bonuses to ECM (sometimes called jammers), the Maulus, best suited to use Sensor Dampeners, and the Vigil, which has a bonus with Target Painters.
Thirdly are the "scan probe" or astrometric frigates; the Heron, the Imicus, the Magnate and the Probe. These are useful as cheap scan platforms, although are overshadowed by the more expensive Covert Ops ships.
Next up are the fast frigates, the Executioner, the Condor, the Atron and the Slasher. Quick even for frigates, these ships serve as excellent close recon ships, able to go through a gate ahead of the main fleet and provide intel.
Finally we have the mining frigates, the Tormentor, the Bantam, the Navitas and the Burst. With mining and cargo bay bonuses, these four don't have a place in a combat frigate fleet.
You should pick the frigate that you are best with. If you have a lot of gun skills, don't go with a missile boat. If you have a lot of EWAR skills you might want to choose an EWAR frigate.
The Basics of Fitting Your Ship
Once you get your ship, set up your propulsion first. This seems counterintuitive to most pilots that normally set up their guns/missiles first. However, there are some really good reasons for fitting propulsion first. To understand why, we will talk a bit about orbiting. If there are some things in this section that you don't understand then don't panic because we will be going over this critical information in class and that will help to clarify everything for you.
In order to maintain a full speed orbit around any entity, you need to consider the effect of inertia. As your ship accelerates in a straight line, it builds up inertia that resists the ship turning. The more inertia you build up, the longer it takes you to turn. Since inertia is a function of mass times velocity, you have to either reduce velocity or mass to turn your ship faster. The faster you can turn your ship, the closer it can orbit to a target. If you put a microwarp drive on a Thorax and tried to orbit an asteroid at 2000m, you would go flying off into space because it couldn't turn fast enough. The Thorax would move in and out of the orbit in an elliptical, rather than circular, pattern that would consistently deteriorate. A frigate bearing a microwarp drive would have similar problems.
The main problem with an elliptical orbit is that it messes up the way you fight. Instead of maintaining the same orbital velocity, your angular velocity goes up and down constantly. The problem with that is that it gives the enemy guns a better chance to hit you when the angular velocity goes down. Furthermore, if you have set up your guns for an optimal of 7km and then you move in and out of 7km in an elliptical orbit, your guns are not hitting as well as they could be.
You should avoid an elliptical orbit and instead seek to maintain a stable, circular orbit around the target while flying at a good speed. To do this you will have to either increase the agility of your ship or decrease the speed of your ship. You can improve the agility of your ship through the training of Evasive Manoeuvring and Spaceship Command skills as well as putting a nanofiber or inertial stabilizer on your ship.
An afterburner fitted to your ship is an absolute must. This will help keep up the fastest orbit that you possibly can, ensuring much higher ship survivability. Some of you might be wondering why we don't use a microwarp drive. The reason is that microwarp drives are great for covering long distances, but they make you light up like a Christmas tree and that makes you easier to hit. A frigate with the microwarp drive running will have the signature radius of a Battlecruiser, meaning that if the enemy guns hit you, you are already dead, and a dead ship is no good to the fleet! Keeping your signature radius small is critical in ensuring the survivability of your frigate. Unless you can get some enormously high speed like an interceptor, a microwarp is not worth the reduction in fighting power and increased chance to die.
After that you should take your ship out and try to test its orbiting capability on an asteroid. Just orbit around the asteroid and watch your distance from it. You should choose an orbit that is at least 6km from the asteroid but no more than 10km from it. The reason for this will become clear in the in-flight part of this course; for now just trust us on this. The closer to 6km you can get, the better. However, you don't want to get closer than 6km or you run the risk of being insta-podded by a battleship with smart bombs equipped. It's best to stay out of this range and let the battleship run out of cap and destroy him. I assure you that destroying a battleship with tech one frigs is not only possible, but is a fairly regular occurrence with Agony classes.
Once you establish your orbit you should set up your guns. Frigates should be set up for damage rather than tanking. Typically in a frigate fleet you will either get blown up or get out without a scratch. If those huge guns actually get a shot off that hits you, you aren't going to be tanking the damage anyway; therefore a tank on these ships is largely a waste of time. Put on as many guns and rockets as you can fit and use at your optimal range. The only thing that should go in your mid slots at this point is your afterburner. In the next section we will talk about setting up your mid slots.
When it comes to lows, forget the tank. Tanking is the process of absorbing and repairing damage from an enemy. In a frigate fleet if you get locked up effectively you will probably be able to tank as long as you can sneeze. Relax, you are in a disposable ship and clones are cheap. If your ship is just scratched, the remote repairers can easily repair the ship after the fight. Instead use those lows for any engineering or hull equipment you need to make the frig work, as well as damage mods to increase your damage output. The only possible exception to the rule is the fitting of a Damage Control to a low slot. You might consider this if you have an extra slot because it essentially turns all of your structure into armor and only for an extremely small amount of cap and fitting requirements; a damage control might give you a couple more seconds of survivability.
Fitting Your Mid Slots
A frigate fleet should be treated like the many headed Hydra of Greek mythology whereby if you lose one of the heads, there is still quite enough to go around killing the targets. The player that gets killed merely picks up a new ship and joins the frigate pack as soon as he or she can. The goal is to set up this hydra so that losses are minimized and effectiveness is maximized. A properly fitted hydra fleet can easily turn a battleship into a large paperweight and kill it without any ships getting destroyed; or kill a drone or FoF missile boat with minimal losses. The key to setting up the ships is to set up the fleet by considering our mid slots as a grand total.
In a frigate layout there will be some compulsory equipment. You need guns or rockets; after all, you can't take down anything in this game with harsh language (although many people try). In the mid slots you will need an afterburner to get to the target and orbit as fast as you can. You might also eventually need some engineering gear to make the whole setup work better. What remains of the mid slots in your fleet are used to equip EWAR and tackling gear. To illustrate, lets think of a 20 pilot fleet.
If we require all of our pilots to equip a warp disruptor then we can get 20 points of warp disruption on the opponent and for sure he isn't going to warp away. However, we would be wasting mid slots because even a ship with a full load of warp core stabilizers (stabs) in the lows can have at max 8 points of stabilization. Therefore, if you can muster 9 points then you can pin anyone in the game. In reality, encountering a combat ship with stabs is rare in PvP, and if they do, it will probably only be one. However, equipping your fleet with only 5 points is also a bad idea because if you lose one of the pilots that has a point, then you are down to 4. If you lose 2 you are in a situation where even more targets can get away from you. So what you want to do is hedge your bets. We say we need 150% of 5 points to scramble. This means that in a fleet of 20 you might want 8 or 9 people equipped with warp disruptors. This will allow you to lose pilots and still be able to warp disrupt. The pilots with the 8 stabs may still be able to get away but that is a such rare occurrence in PvP that it wont matter. If you know for sure a certain pilot has a whole rack, then you can change the fitting to catch him as well.
Another trick you can use to minimize the capacitor impact of the disruptors is to have 3 or 4 people that have 7.5km warp scramblers as well. This allows the pilots with the more cap intensive warp jammers to turn off their disruptors once the scramblers take over.
Once you have determined how many warp disruptors you need, you will have some number of slots left over for various other modules. The most interesting modules to put in these slots are stasis webifiers (webs), tracking disruptors (TDs), remote sensor dampeners (damps), target painters (painters), and electronic counter measure modules (ECMs). We apply the many headed hydra principle to these modules and equip our fleet accordingly. In order to understand how many of each you need, you will have to understand a little about how EWAR works.
A Brief overview of EWAR
EWAR modules are perhaps the best asset of a large fleet of small ships. They can turn that scary battleship into a paperweight and make the difference between winning the day and losing the whole fleet. The most important factor of a frigate fleet is the balancing of EWAR usage in the fleet. All EWAR modules have stacking penalties which means that after a certain number of modules being placed on the target, the benefit of the modules becomes less and less.
You may have also heard of or noticed scripts. Scripts are loaded into either a Tracking Computer, Tracking Disruptor, Sensor Booster or Sensor Dampener (they also go into the Warp Disruption Field Generator, but that is beyond the scope of PvP Basic), and they modify the bonuses/penalties the module gives. For instance, a basic Sensor Booster I gives a 25% bonus to both targeting range and scan resolution. Using scripts, you can make one of those bonuses 50% at the expense of the other becoming 0% (so with the Sensor Booster I, you could increase your targeting range by 50%, or the scan resolution by 50%, or both by 25%). In the frigate fleet, you should bring both scripts for your Electronic Warfare module (they are not expensive) and use them at all times (it is better to have two Tracking Disruptors with opposite scripts than two Tracking Disruptors without scripts).
Stasis Webifiers are essential to frigate fleets because they slow the opponent's sub-warp velocity. Without webifiers, it would be impossible to kill many large targets because they would merely power up to the gate and jump, before you could overwhelm them. Furthermore, interceptors and the Vagabond heavy assault ship move so fast that without webifiers on them, they can merely fly away from you and out of range in seconds.
Webifiers work by applying a velocity modifier to the targeted ship's maximum velocity. For example, the Stasis Webifier I module slows the target by 75% which means it applies the modifier 0.25 to the maximum sub-warp velocity of the ship. Applying two Stasis Webifier I modules would slow the ship to 6.25% of its original maximum velocity. You simply multiply all of the velocity modifiers together to get the final velocity modifier to apply to the target. With 4 Stasis Webifier I modules on an interceptor with a max velocity of 4000 m/s, the interceptor would be able to do 15.6 m/s (4000 * 0.0039). Putting on an fifth Stasis Webifier I module would slow the interceptor to 3.9 m/s and a sixth would slow it to less than 1 m/s. From this math it is clear that there is really no need for more than 6 webifiers to hold an interceptor foolish enough to get caught. In fact, 5 webifiers should be more than enough. Slower ships would require even fewer webifiers; a 260 m/s ship would be slowed to 1 m/s by 4 webifiers. Applying our hydra principle, 7 or 8 webifiers should be sufficient in an optimal fleet.
Tracking Disruptors apply their modifiers to the tracking speed and/or optimal range of the opponent's guns. This makes it much more difficult for the guns to hit you. However, tracking disruptors only work against turrets and do not affect missiles or drone ships in the slightest. The mathematics of tracking disruptors is identical to that of webifiers with the exception that there is a stacking penalty that is imposed on tracking disruptors. The more tracking disruptors you put on a ship, the less the effect of an additional tracking disruptor will have on the ship. Having 5 tracking disruptors on a ship will mean that it probably can't hit a planet at point blank range. Applying the hydra principle we want 7 or 8 tracking disruptors in our fleet.
Remote Sensor Dampeners make it difficult for enemies to target you by making one or two modifications to the targeted ship. First, they apply their modifiers to the scan resolution of the ship; the lower the scan resolution, the longer it takes the ship to target your ship. Secondly, dampers apply their modifiers to the maximum targeting range of the opponent. Since remote sensor dampeners use the same mathematics as tracking disruptors and webifiers, calculating their effect is easy. A battleship that can target to 200km with 5 Remote Sensor Dampener I modules on it would cause the battleship to only be able to target ships at just over 23km away; by this time the stacking penalty will be very high and putting additional dampeners on the target will accomplish very little. This essentially means that you can reduce a sniping battleship to not be able to target the frigates orbiting it if you have enough dampeners. With ships that don't have such extreme range capability, less dampeners would be sufficient. In a frigate fleet it is recommended that you have as many dampeners as you can to cripple the targeting range of your opponents. It is also recommended that you train up the skill Signal Suppression in order to improve the effectiveness of your dampeners. If you have 10 or 12 in a fleet, you are probably doing pretty well.
Target Painters increase the signature radius of the target by applying a tag to the target that makes the target easier to track; this is most important when engaging small ships with larger ships. You can think of a target painter as making it easier to follow someone in the woods because they have been hit with a yellow ball from a paint ball gun. The increased signature radius means that guns targeted at the painted ship hit more often and better; instead of glancing blows and misses, they score perfect and excellent shots more often. This increases the damage per second (DPS) of the ships firing on the painted target. Also keep in mind that everyone firing on the target benefits from the effects of the target painter, not just you. When calculating the number of optimal painters in your fleet, there is no mathematical formula that I know of that works. The basic idea is that you have enough target painters when your guns are hitting excellently or perfectly on every shot. Beyond that the increase in signature radius doesn't add significantly to the damage; after all, once you are hitting 100% of the time and for 100% of the damage you can, you can't do better. Experiments have shown that 5 target painters are usually sufficient so we would want about 8 in the optimal fleet.
Electronic Countermeasure Modules prevent your opponent from locking you at all and cause them to break any locks they have established. These modules can literally turn a dangerous pilot into a spectator. However, ECM jammers are virtually worthless without (a) a ship with ECM strength bonuses, (b) high ECM skills, and (c) Signal Distortion Amplifier modules or Particle Dispersion Augmenter Rigs. Since only one Tech 1 frigate has an ECM bonus, the Caldari Griffin, ECM within a frigate fleet is somewhat limited. However, it should not be underestimated, especially when combined with Sensor Dampeners. There are basically two types of electronic counter measure (ECM) modules; the multi-spectral jammer and specific modules that target specific sensors, also called "racial jammers". In EVE, there are 4 different kinds of sensor, with each of the 4 races using one type of sensor on all of their ships. This is where multi-spectral jammers and racial jammers differ. Racial jammers hit one kind of sensor more than the others, while multi-spectral jammers hit all 4 sensor types equally. Following is a list of each race's sensor types and the corresponding ECM jammer type.
- Amarr - Radar - White Noise ECM
- Caldari - Gravimetric - Spatial Destabilizer ECM
- Gallente - Magnetometric - Ion Field ECM
- Minmatar - Ladar - Phase Inverter ECM
A ship is actually jammed when all of the sensors on the ship are overcome by jammers. However, since a ship can only have one sensor type (the one listed above), it is easy to work out if a ship will be jammed (note, it used to be possible to have more than one sensor through crafty use of ECCM, but this is no longer the case). The calculation to jam a sensor is fairly simple: the strength of the jammer for a particular sensor is divided by the sensor strength of the ship's sensor to get a probability to hit. For example, a jammer that has a strength of 6 would have a 6/10 chance to jam a ship with a sensor strength of 10. Therefore, the stronger the jammer, the better chance to jam the ship. The addition of more jammers doesn't change the chance for one jammer to jam the ship but it makes it more likely that the ship will end up jammed. Think of this like rolling a die; you have a 1 in 6 chance to roll a 6; each successive die that you roll still has a 1 in 6 chance of rolling a 6. However, the more dice that you roll, the greater the chance of getting at least one 6. If you have a fleet with 5 multi-spectral jammers with a strength of 4 going against a ship with a sensor strength of 10, the chance of each jammer hitting individually is 4 in 10 or 0.4. The chance of the jammer missing is 0.6 (1 – chance of hitting). Therefore, the chance that the target is not jammed is equivalent to the chance that all of you miss; this value is 0.65 or 0.0776. Since Jammers use a large amount of CPU and capacitor, only the Griffin is suited to carrying them in a frigate fleet. In addition, Jammers are random (as explained above), which makes the Griffin somewhat of a wildcard in fleet combat. It can theoretically jam 4 ships from now until doomsday, or it could not jam a thing. As a result, you should not be over reliant on ECM, although you should definitely consider it as that 'special surprise' (nothing sucks more than being on the receiving end of jamming).
Another benefit to racial jammers is that they use 2/3 of the capacitor energy of multi-spectral jammers. This is important when you consider the limited capacitor capability of your average frigate. Ships like the Griffin can easily run several jammers at once if the pilot has good skills. Racial jammers also have a longer range and are easier to fit than multi-spectral jammers.
Accounting for Losses
Inevitably you will suffer losses when you are in a frigate fleet. At some point it could be that your losses become a detriment to the configuration of your fleet. For example, if you lose 2/3 of your ships with warp disruptors then you may not be able to prevent the targets from warping off. In order to combat this problem, you will want to make sure that all of your pilots have the skills to use all of the modules that you can put in the mid slots. This is not that many skills to train up so it shouldn't be a problem for any pilot 2 weeks or older. In addition, you will want to make sure that you can hot swap the fleet at a moment's notice.
To prepare for the hot swapping there are basically two ways to accomplish this. You can either have each of your pilots carry each of the modules that could possibly go in the mid slots or you could have a weapon and module cache somewhere in the area of combat that is accessible to all pilots in your fleet. The advantage of having the modules in cargo is that each pilot can switch out quickly. The disadvantage is that you will lose more modules when a ship is blown up. The advantage to having a weapons cache is fewer modules destroyed but this is balanced against the necessity of having to fly to that station. It could be said that you could use a Carrier to combine the best of both worlds, however, jumping a carrier is far to expensive to support a frigate fleet.
Sometimes you will not be able to even dock at all such as when deep in enemy space with no NPC stations at hand. In this case you might want to bump up your ratio to have 200% of the modules that you really need in your fleet.
The Optimal Fleet and Smaller Fleets
Now that we have gone over all of the principles, lets put it together to figure out what the optimal size of our fleet would be. We need the following modules in the fleet:
8 Warp Disruptors
4 Warp Scramblers
8 Stasis Webifiers
8 Tracking Disruptors
10 Dampeners
8 Painters
8 Racial Jammers (varying types)
This sums up to be 54 mid slots. Assuming 2 to 3 slots per ship, we need 18 to 27 pilots to form an optimal fleet. In fact a frigate fleet of this size would pretty much blow anything out of space.
However, you don't always have 18 pilots available to fly with you, so sometimes you have to make do with less. Also, you may not have ECM specced characters in your fleet to run the racial jammers. The second most optimal fleet would be one that didn't have reserve modules and lacked jamming but covered all of the bases appropriately and made up for lack of ECM with sensor dampeners.
5 Warp Disruptors
2 Warp Scramblers
5 Stasis Webifiers
4 Tracking Disruptors
10 Dampeners
4 Painters
This is a grand total of 30 modules which means 10 to 14 pilots. This is a much easier number to manage and is quite workable in situations where you are fighting close to home and the popped pilots are able to refit and be back in the action quickly. This number of pilots could still destroy battleship though it would take them longer.
If you go for smaller fleets, you should try to keep a balance of the modules and tailor it towards what you will fight. If you have only five pilots you don't have the capability to overwhelm the tank of a battleship so don't bother fitting to scramble one. In this case 3 warp disruptors will probably be enough to catch most cruisers. If you intend to hunt interceptors then make sure you don't skimp on webifiers.
If you are the gang leader remember to be flexible and keep the principles of fitting that you have learned here in mind when fitting your fleet. Have your fleet members list out their mid slots (the offensive modules only) into gang chat and reconfigure them before you go out fighting. Also keep an eye on what you are losing either from attrition or from people coming and going. You should generally be able to tell a pilot that just logged on what he should fit before he gets to your gang.
If you follow these principles, ships will die fast at the hands of your frigate fleets and blobs of ships will die even faster in the disorganized mess that they are in. In the process you will have loads of fun, as well as inflicting a lot of damage on the enemy.
A Note on Nosferatu and Neutralizers
There is much discussion as to whether Nosferatu (a high slot device which drains enemy capacitor into your capacitor) and Energy Neutralizers (a high slot device which burns enemy capacitor at the cost of friendly capacitor) is Electronic Warfare. However, this discussion is beyond the scope of PVP BASIC. A single small Nos(feratu) or Neut(ralizer) is unlikely to do any damage to the capacitor of a cruiser or above, and it puts you in smartbomb range to use it. Nosferatu/Neutralizers are covered in to a greater extent but for the purposes of PVP BASIC, Nosferatu and Neutralizers are considered weapons, not electronic warfare.
