Finally joined the good fight, with a slightly different approach...

[Ydiss]

I spent the last three or four days preparing to join in this war, having put it off for a long time due to not wanting to do the whole solo orbital thing. I'm going to get a couple friends to join me (Odyssey will probably put that on hold though!) but I wanted to try a different strategy and so thought I'd give it a trial run today, on my own... Found a threat 5 and dropped in and... won on my first attempt

It was messy, I missed several cues (just a case of practice for these though) but I won, so that was pleasing. This is how I did it (I'm wondering if anyone else has done it this way):

• My ship is a Corvette tank build, designed to withstand and soak up damage and not evade it whatsoever.
• I am also running a second commander, who is flying a Conda that's built purely with all turret efficient beams with regeneration sequence. This ship also carries decon and repair limpets and the field neutraliser.
• I use AHK to send basic key sequences to the alt commander client (very basic stuff, like target me, target my target, switch fire groups and fire etc) but this does require alt/tab (there's no way to directly control the other client without it having focus and nothing is "fully automated", it's just the same as doing it myself but with basic macros to do it faster). This is a method I've used for normal combat elsewhere with up to three clients at once, which is stupidly fun and challenging too.
• My Corvette engages the interceptor (4x gauss... oh my they're fun to use! And stupidly fast DPS too; 2x vents to keep cool, was able to fire near-constantly which was fun) whilst the conda constantly fires at me with the regen beams.
• The idea is that I counter everything like this:
  • Lighting, directly countered by the 8 beams constantly healing (this was hilarious by the way, the lightning attack was totally ineffective )
  • Caustic damage countered by the decon limpets (and this is one part where I need to practice, it's quite a lot to manage two accounts at once when trying to aim gauss constantly and being inexperienced with the battle, and so my usage of this was limited)
  • Hull damage countered by the repair limpets (same as above, I just didn't use this in the fight but I will do if I try again and get more practice in)
  • Swarm: I just ignored it. And I don't think this would work versus higher level interceptors. But that's OK, I'm not bothered about trying those just yet and will probably just do that in a wing.
  • EMP: The alt has the field neutraliser so that would counter it. Of course, I didn't quite spot the timing of this one (was too excited hah) and so got hit by this. Survived it fine but I think quite a bit of hull damage was inflcted at this time.
• Aiming gauss when remaining still (this was my initial strategy and it worked OK, don't want to stray too far from the heal boat) wasn't easy, definitely not with a static Corvette. But by the end I was hitting regularly and the four gauss cannons shredded through the Cylops. The target actually flew off sometimes and moved about a bit so I think I'll go with a more mobile attack pattern but always keep in range of the heal boat. This is actually going to be challenging to learn for when we do it as a wing.
• The strategy for when we wing up will be similar except my two friends will be the DPS dealers in medium ships and will snipe the hearts and, more importantly, handle the swarm while I continue to tank the damage. Aggro management will be important here but the Vette deals heavy damage and will always be closer so this will be mangageable I think.
• I will of course be able to heal them both using the turret beams as well (and send off limpets too).

So, my first trial run of just me and my two boats was a success. I ended the battle with about 50% hull on both (and the heal boat had almost lost its shields, so I am going to adjust my strategy if I try this again "solo"). I missed a ton of shots and messed up a lot but I think I could have done this a ton faster. It didn't take long though. As I said, those 4x gauss cannons are lethal.

I know this wasn't strictly solo at all (if I tried this solo I'd lose as soon as the lightning attack hits, I'm not sure SCBs would be enough to counter it fully). But it's absolutely a way that a duo wing could play (it'd be so much easier if the second ship was piloted properly). But it was a lot of fun and I'm happy I managed it. I know soloing the Cyclops isn't extremely challenging and I know many have done it purely solo (and I guess you can just spam shards at them as well). But I was pleased I managed it on my first attempt anyway so wanted to share

Anyway, I'll be shelving all this now because I'm going to be doing something quite different tomorrow evening Maybe in future I might be "tank and healer LFG" though...