Fleet Commander (or “FC”) – n. – A person who leads a large organized unit of ships for tactical or other purposes.
Oddly enough, this simple word seems to scare the living daylights out of most people.. including hardened PVPers. It’s such a strange thing to be sure. Despite the fact that my last few jobs required me to be a group leader, I hardly ever FC.. and I usually avoid it like the plague.
Now, every other blog has tips on how to be an FC, what your mindset should be, etc., etc. What I would like to find out.. is what your biggest, best screw up was when you were first starting to FC. You can put killboard links if you wish, but for the most part, I’m just looking for a good story.
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FC’ing is like just about anything in this game – it needs to be practiced to be learned. And unfortunately the only way to practice being an FC is to do so in the heat of the moment. You get flustered, you lose ships, your fleet thinks of you as a ginormous penis who should rule all from the get-go instead of worrying about a primary.
With this in mind, I’m willing to share what happened during my second time being an FC. We were flying a T1 cruiser fleet around Old Man Star – I needed FC practice and the guys were rusty after a few months out. We had a couple of frigates for tackle, but apart from that it was all cruisers. I was in a Stabber, but that’s besides the point.
We enter from Nourv/Tama and slowly progress towards Old Man Star, waiting for anyone to aggress us or for a pirate to appear – we’re NRDS you see, we won’t shoot neutrals unless shot first, you know the drill.
After about an hour of flying and eventually camping a gate into OMS, we send a scout in. Within 5 minutes we’re told there is a Myrmidon ratting in a belt with a sec rating of -2.6. While not blinky outlaw red, we as a group came rapidly to a conclusion that he’s shot a few people, he’s a pirate so is fair game.
So I formulate the plan. We warp in and align to the belt. As soon as the scout got point on him, we warped @ 10km. So we go – and the myrm pilot is moving away constantly(not that I knew) so we actually warped @ 15km and not 10. Bugger, everyone’s out of optimal and has to move to get him in range. Apart from me, who’s flying my Stabber like a mini-Vaga. After some yelling we get a web on the Myrm and begin hammering him. Drones go out from the target pilot, and at this point what should have been a simple kill went south.
I saw the overview filling up – obviously the Myrm was bait, and I had neglected to check local for any allies he might have had around. The drones got deployed and were hammering someone. I shouted out that “someone should take care of his drones”, then a Harpy, Falcon and Pilgrim came in. I got flustered; which do we kill first? Obviously not the Falcon because he was jamming me from 110km away. Was tempted to fly over and deal with him but the Harpy would have tackled me. So after losing one of our ships and changing primary about 4 times, I decide screw it. All fire on the Myrmidon. And while they systematically began picking us off, we managed to get that Myrm into structure. We’d decided to fight to the death, as our cruisers hadn’t cost much to throw together. But it was massive fail on my part to not properly pick a primary… our fleet was 7 or 8 strong, we shouldn’t have struggled to take out a battlecruiser if I’d done my end properly.
Irony has a cruel sense of humour. Once I was last remaining pilot I warped out, thus avoiding the fate of my fleet. I decide to go back the way I came – and entered a massive Gallente gate camp. Logically I should have MWD’d away but instead I burned towards an align point behind the camp, and got raped. Was a good laugh though.