Originally by: Jade Constantine

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Oh I dunno really.

Last night I was hanging about on ventrilo with alliance mates chatting about this and that all things Eve and elections and merc coalition exploding etc and thinking about starting a game of Supreme Commander. Then a scout reports the presence of an Exceed Inc. Nano gang camping PF (2 ishtar, 2 munin, 3 rapiers, couple of frigates) and making a mess of local.

"Lets mess 'em up" someone suggested and there it was. So we are jumping into ships trying to plan how to stop them burning out from the gate, what we needed for bait, how to counter the rapiers, how to score some hits etc etc while forming up, making pounce spots, briefing late-comers and jumping into the fray.

We baited, they took the bait, we pounced with shortish range battleships (turned out to be a mistake) and rapier tackle of our own. Killed two rapiers, lost one, chased from from the gate, I was dog-fighting with an enemy Ishtar (me=one of our rapiers) tackled him too far for the primary BS dps and had to overload my drives to escape (was like catching a tiger by its tail and realising the friendly hunters were out of range). Complex spinning engagement which went on for a while before we disengaged to refit the battleships for longer range guns and reship our downed pilots.

We went back, fought some more, scan-probed for safe-spots, chased -10s and eventually I tagged a Vagabond on a gate from a 3rd party corp (again -10) and held him at 20 while slowing killing him with drones. This turned out to be a "bait" from the new guys, a sexy twin Sleipnir, Deimos and Myrmidon squad appeared to forcefully remonstrate with my Rapier and I had to burn out fast calling for help. Our reinforcements jumped in and counter-bounced the trap and it ended up with us catching a nano-sleipnir away from the gate and the rest of the hostiles jumping out with heavy damage. Damn good entertainment. Enemies safe-spotted and I was pumping out probes to try to narrow them down and a the deimos logged off with about 1-2 minutes left on aggression timer and I failed by about 20 secs on the hunt getting to 500 klicks before seeing him frustratingly disappearing from local.

We had new pilots having their first ever pvp experience (and kills) in eve in that swirling engagement between heroic free captains and the regressive 0.0 dogs trying to shoot up neutral shipping. We talked over the tactics, refined loadouts, planned counters and refitted ships and generally had a ball.

Then it was 5am! And we'd completely forgotten about Supreme commander...

Point is, I'm a five year old eve playing veteran and I've pretty much seen it all up to this point but Eve still manages to suck me in and enthrall my attention with these beautiful skirmishes and tactical showdowns and mental chess-match strategies in gorgeous graphic spaceship conflict.

There are problems with Eve sure. But to my mind there is still a hellova lot of life in the old girl yet, and I don't foresee me giving up on the pure entertainment this game offers for a very long time.

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