Uh, I absolutely know what I'm talking about. My alliance does nothing but micro-gang -- or did, anyways. Here's the issue at heart: these days, a microgang (5-15 people) is good for ganks only. And in particular, it has two flavors: 1) Use moderately priced ships. You gank one or two ships at a time, and then either cloak up (in the case of black ops) or scatter (in the case of inty swarms / sniper BCs). 2) Use cheap ships. You gank one or two ships at a time, and then die to the response fleet and not give a fuck. (Nano Thoraxes, etc.) 3) Use powerful but slow-moving ships. Everyone runs from you until they have a proper defense fleet up, and then dunk you. Either way, at best, you're getting a easy (almost boring) gank and then blueballing a response fleet. Now, if you were playing a few years ago, there were tons of examples of a small, well-comped fleet being able to take a few kills off a fleet, and maybe even do sustained fighting with a larger fleet for a bit, and then disengage. There were a couple ways to do it, most of them focusing on speed (Vagabonds, 100MN Tengus, arty Tornados/Muninns, etc) or highly flexible damage projection (Zealots, Rail Proteuses, Navy Apocs with a single triage carrier, etc). These days, trying to do this kind of stuff will largely get you killed, with little or nothing to show for it. There's a few different reasons for that: * Warp speed changes. If you're flying anything cruiser or bigger that can't cloak, hostile inties and dictors will absolutely get ahead of you, no matter where you warp. It doesn't even require predicting a warp-to range correctly; the inty can warp to the same celestial at 50km, get there before you, and then start burning your direction as you decelerate out of warp. He'll get within tackle range before you exit your warp. (e: Also, dictors have been redesigned, and every dictor now has a built-in double bubble.) * Changes in fitting meta. Railguns and sentry drones provide huge flexibility in range and tracking. The strength and relative cheapness of sensor-dampening ships remove many of the advantages of kiting/skirmish fleet comps. There are relatively few "hard counters" left in the game. * More accessible logistics. Logistics is no longer the realm of bittervets who train for months to be good at repping; there are now Tech1 logistics ships, and most fleets with 20+ people will have 3 or more logistics ships. In many cases, you cannot break the reps of a fleet that is the same size as you, unless you bring ewar ships to jam them out. (Which is problematic, given the nerfs to ECM in recent years.) * A general raise in median SP, especially with respect to capitals. Having a carrier alt isn't the sign of an old player anymore; it's rapidly becoming the norm. Most alliances have been running subsidized capital programs for years. Capital escalations are depressingly common, even before you get into the ever-retarded blurf about batphones. There's just not much you can do with gangs of that size, outside of farming scrubs who don't know any better. It's killmails, sure, but it's not really satisfying, short of "lol I grief your ratting rounds" factor. And it's going to become worse in the upcoming patches; as a single exmple, they just announced an anchorable device that masks things around it from directional scanners. Let me put it this way. Even GSF's comedy frigate fleet doctrines (Harpyfleet, Hawkfleet) are expecting >20 people. Harpyfleet, for example, is designed around a baseline of ~20 Harpies and 10 Bursts. Thank you for proving my point. You ganked a solitary retard (e: or two) and then got out before the cavalry arrived. I mean, it's cool and all -- they got mad/sad, and it's a killmail on the board -- but it's not really pounding-pulse we-won-a-sustained-fight-with-1/3-their-numbers PvP, of the kind that used to be possible just a year or two ago. e: It's also that, in the case of harrasing ratting space in inties, killing a ratter doesn't really matter in the day and age of the AFKtar / AFK-VNI. You weren't paying attention and lost a VNI to PoitotDot? Who cares -- as long as you have a replacement on hand, you can earn the isk to buy a new one in under an hour. Right now, everything is cheap in Eve except for PLEXes; as a result of that, the only reason to care about losses is Green Killboard Pride. (Which, unfortunately, as as bad as ever. Syndicate is full of gangs that have enough logistics to tank your entire fleet's DPS, but will still run from you, out of fear that you might have some trick up your sleeve to generate a lossmail for them.) Quote ECM hulls in general are less common these days, for a few reasons: * Sensor strength skills * A severe reduction in ECM range, at the same time that many weapon systems got increased range -- the typical Falcon has a 70km optimal for jamming, and gets blapped pretty easily by rails / Curators these days. The Kitsune can still jam from 100km out, at the cost of being made of papier-mache. * Major buffs to damps, and to the damping bonuses on Celestis/Maulus hulls. Plus, in general, when any fleet of 30+ is going to have 8+ logistics ships, you don't really care if 2-3 of them get knocked out at a time by ewar, as long as the remaining 7 can keep you alive in the interim. Why bother spending mods on ECCM/sebos/etc. when you can just comp an extra logistics boat, and spend that mod slot on more tank or more cap stability? I mean, since you've been gone, CFC's actually developed a large fleet doctrine called "FuckYouFleet" which literally consists of 50+ Celestises damping everything down to single-digit km lock ranges (and 30-second lock times) while assigning their five medium drones to the FC to kill things with. Basically, my lament is: microgang isn't strictly impossible these days, but it's certainly been reduced to a tiny handful of viable doctrines which everyone knows (sentry Ishtars, istab Maledictions, blops drops, rail protes with guardians, etc.), and you either like them or you don't. Everything else tends to be just bullying retards and quick hit-and-run ganks -- and speaking strictly personally, that doesn't really give me a rush. e: Here's potentially an even better way of saying it: Modern medium-to-large fleet doctrines are now extremely situationally flexible; it's no longer viable for small nimble gangs to pick kills off of the edges. It's very rare for doctrines to be countered using an new and unexpected fleet comp. The game has been refined to the point that numbers can trump pretty much everything, with the notable exception of titan-supported slowcats. Quote Figured I'd post a followup example to my earlier :words: about proliferation of logistics in microgangs. This is a good example of two microgangs running into each other in Syndicate, SV (I think) versus FIGL: http://www.figl-alliance.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=116000 Each side in this engagement has 4-5 logistics -- literally a third of their gang. What can they tank? Let's be generous and assume the following: * Neither side has ganglinks * FIGL chooses to primary an Exequror first * All ships are well fitted (i.e. Exeqs have 3x med reps and an 800mm plate, Oneiros have 4x large reps and a 1600mm plate). Under those situations, the two Exequrors and two Oneiroses will allow the primaried Exequror to tank over 3500 DPS. (That'd be 4500 DPS with an off-grid link T3.) To break that tank all the DPS cruisers need to be putting out an average of 450-500dps. That's a tall order for a Thorax, much less a bunch of Stabbers. In practice, FIGL's Stabber fit puts out 300-350dps under ideal conditions, meaning you really only need ~2500dps of reps (i.e. two Oneiroses) to render their entire gang ineffective. So it was massive overkill. The only reason this fight had a conclusion at all is because of three reasons: * The SV logi came in piecemeal, so they never had their full repping power on field. * The untackled survivors ran away once they took enough losses. * The SV logi have no ECCM fitted, so the FIGL Kitsune probably took at least two of them out. If both sides were competent and came in as a group, this fight would have ended in a stalemate, neither side able to break each other unless there was a lucky ECM jam. If either side had gang links, this fight would have ended in stalemate. More realistically, if each side had done proper scouting, they would have seen 4 logi, gone "fuck that, can't break that much repping," and one (or both) of the fleets will dock up. And this is just for a throw-away Tech1 cruiser gang! You should see the logi that's on field when, say, I-RED is running a sentry domi gang. Or TISHU baiting for a NavyPoc bridge.