Rather interesting

The Amarr are rather strange. I had logged into the game and motored to the Kamela station and was reporting war targets in militia when I noticed a fleet nearby in Kourmonen. I then proceeded to x up (indicate my willingness to join an ongoing fleet). We were operating under an FC I was not familiar with. This was a little earlier than my usual time, but a few of the pilots were familiar. The various scout reports including my own indicated that the Amarr seem to have various squadron sized fleets operating in close conjunction. One of the elements was definitely BS heavy and the decision was taken to up-ship.

Due to the usual dis-organization of the Militia we'd gotten split up a bit while trying to up-ship. Pilots already in BS were still in Kourmonen, a small ship element was in auga and the rest tried to do an end run and ran into a Vard gate camp on the way to rally in Amamake. (I suspect that this was the group that I had originally tagged in Kamela that we'd lost track of right before the decision to up-ship). During this evolution (and before the decision to go round the long way) I had motored straight to my forward base and up-shipped to a Stabber.

After we managed to get the re-shipping elements together in Amamake, most of our pilots were divided between 3 elements, the majority in Amamake, a small element in Auga and a heavy element in Kourmonen. Although the enemy was moving around quite a bit, we'd managed to nail the location of quite a few of their pilots. There was a rather large presence in Auga blocking our linking up between the elements.

It looked like they were organizing to keep our fleet separate. After waiting for an opportune moment the FC (remaining cool under the strain) managed to get the elements linked up after which we discovered that the Amarr dispersed, unwilling to go up against our concentrated strength. Even though their various elements outnumbered our fleet 2 to 1 in BS strength by our estimate.

I suspect that the elements we were tracking were not actually in proper coordination with each other. But our FC did the right thing and treated them like they were. We missed some opportunities to smash some smaller elements while we were less concentrated. But we did not loose a BS heavy fleet to the Amarr. Although disappointing, the FC is to be congratulated on getting the fleet concentrated properly.

What was interesting was the way the Amarr seemed to operate to keep us separate but then faded when we linked up elements. This of course lead to calls to hunt for spies. At the end of the day however, I suspect in this case that what really happened was that the Amarr militia was not coordinating their elements - they just had multiple fleets operating independently. This gave the appearance of a coordinated opposition but in the end the fact that the Amarr keep moving their fleet in the ways they did looks more like smaller fleets trying to avoid getting decisively engaged.

After some dithering we managed to catch a small squadron in Lamaa and exterminate it. I then took a break for dinner.

The rest of the evening was much less interesting after I got back from dinner - mostly indy stuff. Incidentally I'm sorry about the lack of talk of things I plan, but I have to operate under the assumption that the Amarr Militia are avid readers of my blog (probably not, but you never know) so I just don't talk about my future plans as much.