Fleet types in EVE

In a lot of cases, fleets in EVE are thrown together with little thought as to their composition - bring what you can from amongst ships you have available. Most pilots will have a few variants of ships they fly regularly, and the hope is that the FC will be able to mash this random array of ships into some semblance of utility. Some times it works, sometimes it does not.

Obviously there are some fairly standard fleet setups:

The T1 roaming gang. These are usually harassment fleets sent out to enemy space with the intention of getting some lucky kills without risking too much in the way of expensive fleet assets. Some times these are intentional suicide fleets and you go into them not expecting to come back in your ship. These will usually be Cruiser or Frigate fleets, occasionally battlecruiser fleets, rarely BS fleets. The idea here is to move fast hit quickly and fade.

The T2 roaming gang. Again usually harassment fleets. This time not so suicidal. Making full use of the best EWAR and hardest hitting Heavy Assault Ships that the fleet commander can lay his hands on. These are probably some of the most survivable gangs when well lead. Again the emphasis is on rapid movement and keeping the enemy off balance.

The Battleship with tackle support. These tend to be defense fleets put together to counter roaming gangs. Although most roaming gangs have no problem melting smaller forces or picking off stragglers. They have problems when running into proper battleship fleets. The problem with battleship fleets of course is that they tend to have problems catching and killing faster roaming fleets. So the idea is to fly with a mix of cruiser sized vessels and battleships. The smaller ships provide the tackle and the bigger ships provide the punch. Due to the rapid movement of the smaller ships this fleet tends to go up against, the best bet is probably a mix of long and short ranged RR BS, with snipers taking care of the ships at range and the close range BS defending the snipers with the faster cruisers and frigates pinning down the enemy.

The main line battleship fleet. These tend to be used as part of maneuvers in and around POS warfare situations. Depending on the intended target of the fleet, it will either be sniper heavy or close combat heavy. Except for the specialist EWAR vessels, tackle is much less of a priority since usualy in situations where these fleets are employed there are fixed objectives that will either be defended or abandoned before the fleet gets there. These tend to operate in support of capital operations.

Now it is obvious that just as there are different ships in EVE that serve different purposes, the same can be said of fleets. This means that the various pilots of a corp/alliance will necessarely need to maintain a stable of different ships in order to be ready to support what ever operation is called for. It would be a good idea for corp/alliance leadership to have regular get togethers to discuss what ships different pilots should have available to themselves in order to be able to support various fleet operations that are liable to be called. Not to mention making sure that there are diverse capabilities available when fleets need to be formed.

The thing is that these types of things need to be worked out ahead of time. Preferably coordinated with industry so that replacement ships are available in short order when called for. As evidenced by the alliance tournament, planned out stuff tends to work better than ad-hoc fleets. So all corp and alliance leadership realy should take an interest in the number and tyeps of ships available to their members and try to ensure that pilot availability for operations is kept at a high level.