That. Was. Kickass.
Yeah, the above report does a good job of highlighting the important bits but it doesn't expand upon why I loved today's fight. It wasn't just big ships facing each other and left clicking. Heck, it wasn't just the normal maneuvering either.
After securing the area from the ludicrously honorable Bogdan and boarding the station I found out that I didn't bring any torches. Shooting the Fac block with a sidearm wasn't going to work. So I did what any sane marine would do in that situation. I placed a beacon next to the faction module in the form of a ship block, stepped back, and told the big bad heavy cruiser floating outside to shoot it.
That's right, I ordered a freaking airstrike.
Afterwards I grabbed the loot and hopped back in my ship, ready to fight whatever nasty surprises the Bogatyrs had for us.
I didn't prepare enough. Nooooot nearly enough.
The enemies were fast with long ranged weapons. The most I could do was get the occasional lucky hit off with the anti-shield weapons and then watch as the enemy fled out of visual range and led the poor AI fleet vessels onto the killing range. Poor lemmings, gobbled up by the predators.
Near the end of the engagement when my SHP was at 60% and weapon comps were all down I set my ship to ram whatever smaller one was in front of me and jumped out of a hole that was blasted through the bridge's blast shutters.
That's right, I defenestrated myself in space.
Put down a core, power block, and thruster and began trying to hastily extricate myself from the situation as I still had the booty from the palace on me. So there I am in a core, trying to dodge beam turrets, outrun frigates... And lock-on missiles are fired at me.
At this point I reached a certain nirvana. A clarity of thought that so rarely happens in Staramde. I stopped trying to control the shaking in my hands. I let the shaking control me.
I jumped out of the core shuttle, clicking through the 'the ship is moving, are you sure you want to do this?' message with about the same grace as the Doom guy. I immediately place another core, jump in, scroll wheel over both power and thrust blocks and I'm out of there, watching the missiles circle to the old thruster-core doomed to die.
That's right, I did double defenestration. I even had some cheesecake to celebrate once I was back home with the loot.
