Scouting

Notes on Covops Operations and Scouting:

Firstly, please note that I'm not an experienced scout - this post contains the things I've learnt to date, and more experienced scouts may want to correct anything I've gotten wrong. But I have learnt this stuff in dribs and drabs so far and thought others might appreciate having some of it written down. This document also concentrates on covops scouting - that is, covops ships (tech 2 frigates) with proper tech 2 covops cloaks (or those crazy cloaked weapons platforms, the stealth bombers, if you must). You can start out with smaller frigates with prototype cloaks, but as they can't warp while cloaked a lot of this won't really apply.

Note also, this document is aimed at high-sec scouting, as I have no real experience in low-sec or 0.0 yet. Particularly in 0.0, bubbles and gate camps will change the way you operate - but by that stage you should know more about what you're doing anyway

Fittings:

I can't say much about fittings - I know one cloaker ship only, the cheetah. Generally, I try to fit for speed of movement and distance of warp. The crucial items are a covops cloak and a microwarp drive. Don't bother fitting guns, you should never be using them (and trust me, covops ships fall over fast when targetted). Yes, I know some people will disagree - I view weapons on a covops ship as an advanced practice, at best.

First rule of cloaker operation: If you're not cloaked, you're doing it wrong Any time you feel a need to decloak, think carefully about what you're doing and whether there's a better way.

I'm cloaked!:

Congratulations! First thing to note - undocking is dangerous to everyone, and especially dangerous when there's war targets in local. So the easy answer is never undock. If you're in a covops ship and intend to fly it repeatedly, consider logging out in space while cloaked.

When you do this you get warped off to a semi-random place in the system. When you log back in you'll be de-cloaked, but will immediately warp back to where you were. During this warp you have time to re-engage your cloak.

Suggested places to logout are (in order): mid-way through a warp to a safe spot, or at a safe spot. Don't do this near anything as you run the risk of fumbling and appearing uncloaked near someone who can see you.

One other point on this - when you logout, close anything non-essential. In particular do not leave a market window open, or any other window that takes a while to refresh. This is because you'll have a moment of frozen client while these refresh as you login and that's frankly terrifying

I've been decloaked, what happened?!:

There are a number of ways you can be forcefully decloaked. First of all, if you get within 2Km of anything you'll lose your cloak. This means don't get too close to other ships and don't hang around at a warp-in point (one of my most terrifying moments was sitting on a 100Km warp-in on a gate and having a larger ship warp in exactly 3Km ahead of me).

Stations have a range around them that's nominally 2Km, but can be deceptive due to "pointy bits", so be very careful near stations.

Cargo cans will decloak you and are sometimes easily missed. Gate guns are extremely dangerous - they're very small, usually not in your overview, and scattered around the gates. Very easy to run into by accident - be aware of them. There are some notes on overview settings below.

Passing ships appear able to decloak you if they're coming out of warp near you. I'm not 100% certain on this one because I've seen cases when it hasn't happened, but for safety's sake (and for general sneakiness) any time you warp in you want to move either up or down off the plane of movement, to be well out of the way of traffic.

Your own probes - if you're launching probes, keep a close eye on your cloak, as your probes can decloak you while you're moving them around - very easy mistake to make, and very easy to be looking at the map view reorganising your probes and not realise it.

Bookmarks:

Bookmarks are, I suspect, something like 95% of what scouting and covops is about - at least in areas where you can bookmark. You'll slowly collect a large number of bookmarks around any system you frequent and they are your lifeblood - the difference between scouting a system with no bookmarks and scouting one you know your way around is immense, and will change how you operate.

So, what to bookmark? There's a handful you'll want:

• Bookmarks warp distance off gates. You want a few bookmarks that are more than 150Km and less than grid size off each gate in each system you go through. You want to be further than 150Km because you want to be able to warp in and that's the minimum distance. Further away is better so long as you can still see ships coming through the gate. You'll spend a lot of your life at these bookmarks watching gate traffic.

There's two way to get these. The first is to warp to 100Km off a gate then turn in a random away-from-the-gate direction and move (while cloaked) until you're out far enough. This is a great thing to do if you're doing other things, like watching traffic through the gate, or talking with FC.

Alternately, warp to 100, bookmark that, then warp to something else at 100 and bookmark that. Then warp back to your first bookmark _at 100_. Presto, you have a spot close to 200Km off the gate. If you do this still move a bit to be off the plane, and don't do your two warp-ins in-line with each other.

Incidentally, note that when you come through a gate you come out at 15Km away from the gate - 150Km is your minimum warp distance, so your bookmarks should ideally be more tha 165Km away, 170Km+ to be safe.

Try to move off the plane once you have your spot - that's directly up or down - as that'll make you less likely to be found.

Note also, if you can, try and make sure that multiple bookmarks around a gate are far enough away from each other that you can warp between them - that makes hunting down an enemy for a warp-in point much faster (more on that below).

• Bookmarked warp distances off stations. Same rationale as the gate bookmarks.

• Bookmarked safe spots. You want these to be as non-obvious and non-easy-to-find as possible. Between objects (ie. inline from gate to station) is bad but better than nothing (and can have some uses as they're deceptive to an enemy watching you warp out, assuming you're not moving cloaked). Out at scanned down locations - cosmic anomalies and the like - can be good once they're empty. Use safe spots to generate new safe spots by dropping bookmarks mid-warp between them. Keep creating new safe spots - if you or any of your fleet members turn up in them uncloaked you may burn them and have to throw them away.

Note, if you're closer than ship scanner range to other celestial objects you may be spotted (if uncloaked) by any ship using their shipboard scanner. This can happen very quickly so don't assume that just because the fleet stopped in your safe spot for only 60 seconds it hasn't been scanned down.

• Bookmarks off-grid. These are like the warp-ins for gates and stations, but just off-grid. Off-grid means far enough away from the location in question to not be able to see ships on the overview (typically near the 500Km mark from your location). These are useful for a couple of things - they're great hiding places and they're very close, so if you want to (for instance) setup an ambush, you can bring a fleet to the off-grid position then move yourself closer to watch the gate or station, get a warp-in point, and bring the fleet in quickly. See below for more info on getting warp-in points on targets.

To get these, you can either warp and drop a bookmark while warping (this can get you out 1AU or so if you can time it right) or you can simply point away from the station and travel - if you do this at a gate, switch brackets on and watch the gate guns - when they disappear, you're off-grid for ships (which means you can't see ships and they can't see you, but you can still see the larger structures). A little further will take you off-grid for the gate itself.

Quick note on warping in - some bookmarks, particularly safe spots, you may want to warp to at 100 or 70 or similar every so often just so you're not always coming in at the same place. Some bookmarks this can be dangerous for - if you have a bookmark at 160Km on a station and you warp to it at 100Km from the other side of the station, you place yourself at 60Km from the station, which if it's camped may not be what you wanted. Always think about where the bookmarks are in the system - use the map (F10) to get a feel for this.

Some more notes on bookmarks: http://wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/Safe_Spot_Bookmarking

There's an excellent article on bookmarking on the Agony site (assuming it stays accessible) http://www.agony-unleashed.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.17

Bookmark Organisation:

As you build up your bookmarks, organisation of them will become important. You can leave them all in the main folder, but that folder will take longer and longer to load - and a delay on getting to your bookmarks may be an issue.

The best approach I've seen to date is to create the following folders: stargates, stations, celestial objects, POSes, safe spots, people - that's six folders. Then, as you bookmark, move the bookmark into the relevant folder (I use the "people" folder for bookmarks near other people's warp-in points or supposed safe spots). That way, your right-click drop-down of bookmarks has a nice organisation and is easy to quickly get what you want - it will only ever present you bookmarks in your system anyway. This scheme also means that bookmarks you want to treat as temporary, you can just leave unfoldered and clean up later.

Incidentally, a folder per system looks appealing initially, but it suffers similar problems to not foldering at all - there's too many systems out there, your main folder ends up cluttered.

Come up with a naming convention that suits you - something that makes it clear where the bookmark is and what it's for. My current setup is station or gate name and distance, and maybe a note on whether it's off-grid or something special.

Moving around:

Obviously, your goal is always to stay cloaked, but to position yourself where you can see what's going on with your potential enemies or "neutrals". To that end, it's worth understanding how grids and on and off-grid positioning work - there's a nice write-up that goes through the more in-depth mechanics of "grid fu" at http://will.neoprimitive.net/grids/gridfumanual2.pdf - very useful to understand when you find yourself 100Km off a station but unable to see anyone.

Moving through gates rates a mention - if you are fitted with MWD's, there's a sequence of "double click a direction, hit the MWD, hit the cloak" that gives you a short burst of speed while still cloaking. This can be useful for putting some space between you and the gate or any watchful eyes.

Warp-in Points:

You'll sometimes be asked by your FC to try and get a warp-in point on a target. This basically means staying cloaked, and maneuvering into a position that's a warp-in distance away from the target (ie. a number that appears on the "warp to at..." drop-down) and also in-line with somewhere the fleet can be. In other words, you ideally want something like this:

Fleet ------- Target -- You

Where the fleet is some distance away, out of sight, and you're about 50-100Km away on the other side of the target. Distance from enemy is at your discretion, you ideally want it to match up with the warp-in distances so the fleet can drop directly on top of the enemy (or at appropriate range - that bit's up to the FC to organise ). You don't want the fleet to have to warp through the target, is the only note here, as that gives the target time to see them and run.

This is one of the trickier things to do, mainly because the target will often keep moving. One tip, if the target's warping in and out: Note the distance to the target, note your move speed, and double-click right near them to move toward them. If they warp out, keep moving - time yourself to try and position roughly where you want to be (remembering it's better to be too far away, than right on top of their warp-in point, otherwise they may decloak you). Drop lots of bookmarks while doing this, you can always go clean them up later, and they mean you can warp out and back and resume where you left off.

If you do find an enemies' safe spot, or a warp-in point for a popular location for an enemy, make sure you've bookmarked it - they're valuable so long as the enemy doesn't realise you've got it.

One other small note on this: If you're scouting for a sniper-heavy fleet, you may actually sit between the target and the fleet - the idea is if you're 30Km from the target toward the fleet, the fleet can then warp to you at 50Km and they're perfect sniping distance away. Depends a lot on the situation though, and not likely to be done in a Uni fleet.

Overview:

The overview requirements for a scout are different than for normal fliers. Your job is to see as much as possible, rather than only the enemies. First of all, switch brackets on - that gives you a clearer view of things like gate guns that are otherwise tricky to see. Include neutrals and war targets. Beyond that, I'm not 100% sure what works best - I have major celestials (planets and gates and stations) in my overview, because they're useful for distances, but that may not be the most efficient. I'd appreciate feedback here from other scouts.

Fleet Ops - X'ing up

Uni policy is that scouts do not X up with the rest of the fleet. If you see a fleet forming, directly convo the FC and ask if they want a scout, Nine times out of ten, they will, and they'll drop you into a separate wing so you don't get ninja warped around with everyone else . Likewise, scouts don't get listed on AAR's. Secrecy is important to being a good scout - if people know your name, they'll notice you in local easily.

If you're out in a covops ship, and a fleet is around, or you've logged in after fleet has formed, don't be afraid to convo the FC and ask if they'd like another scout - scouts are about the only type of pilots that can usefully join a fleet mid-op, depending on where the fleet is and where you are. I figure it's better to offer and be turned down, than not.

Scouting:

Most Uni fleets will look for a forward scout and a rear scout, and any number of floating scouts. Forward and floating should be covops ships, rear can be a prototype cloak ship in a pinch, but covops preferred.

The forward scout's role is to check each gate before the fleet warps to it. As a forward scout, you want to be able to warp to a gate bookmark, check that the gate is clear and give the go-ahead, then warp to zero on the gate and jump through to check the other side. If you don't have bookmarks, this process gets tougher - you're reduced to either travelling uncloaked (bad), travelling cloaked to the gate (slow), or bouncing off a remote celestial to do a warp to zero when you want to go through the gate. So bookmarks are valuable here.

Rear scouts watch the back of the fleet, to make sure no-one's following. They'll typically stay one jump behind the fleet, and need to watch for neutrals or suspicious behaviour.

Floating scouts have a slightly freer job - depending on your FC, they'll either be carefully positioned by FC instruction to watch different gates and/or neighbouring systems, or they'll be free to move around and look for WT's. Floating and forward is pretty much interchangable depending on FC decisions.

Reporting war target sightings - do this as calmly as possible, and as clearly as possible. Good reporting would be "command, darius, I have one cerberus on the korsiki gate in osmon, jumping through to you now". Bad reporting would be "hey guys, there's a war target coming at you!". TS discipline in the uni at least is always lead with the channel name (that's "command" in the above example) and your name so the FC knows who's talking where, then provide the ship type and location, optionally war target name and any other details you might have.

Scanning down the opponent:

If you can fit an extended probe launcher, then it's well worth getting some practice at using probes. The Apocrypha scanning system makes one particular type of probing well worthwhile. It goes something like this:

• Warp to a safe spot, decloak, and launch 4 probes. Cloak up again.

• warp back to where you want to keep some eyes on. Be sure you're still cloaked - I've had issues with being decloaked as I warp off after launching probes, still not sure why (may be the probes themselves decloaking me).

• Hit F10, switch all your probes down to 0.5AU, and move them to a nice neat small circle around whatever you're monitoring - typically a gate or station.

The goal here is to provide enough scan strength in 0.5AU around the location to find any ships that have warped off-grid nearby. With half-decent skills, you should get a fix on anything cruiser and up pretty much straight away. So, you just keep hitting the scan button every so often. If you get a hit on something just away from your location, bookmark it, and warp to it at 100. You can then scope out the area, see if it's a worthwhile target, maybe get a warp-in point - all hopefully without your enemy knowing.

Note, this also works for bookmarking people's insta-undocks, and their safe spots around gates. That also means that if you're helping an uncloaked fleet around, be aware that even just off-grid they may be visible to enemy scouts now. Also, be aware that your probes show up on people's ship scanners, so if they suspect you're out there, they may pop their ship scanner, see your probes, and run.

There's an excellent guide to scanning generally at http://www.eve-ivy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15856

Be aware that if you're doing this, anyone clever (anyone using their ship scanners) will notice the probes and high-tail it out quickly. But if you can catch their warp-in or warp-out points, it may help you track them down next time they warp through the area.

Probing like this may also be a distraction - I've had fleet commanders that specifically ask for the scout to probe down targets for them, and I've had fleet commanders that would rather keep you on the move, so it will depend on the type of fleet, purpose of fleet, and whim of the FC as to whether this is a serious part of your duties. It's worth getting some practice in on, imnsho, as it does get asked for, and some FC's will assume you are capable of doing this.

Freedom and Rules:

There is some personal style that comes in here, as scouting can be a freer role than some others in fleet - personal judgements need to be made about what you're watching when. However, two things are important: If the FC tells you to be somewhere, get there, and if you see something that needs investigating and move off your last instruction, clearly inform the FC you're about to do that. The FC cannot make good decisions on faulty intel, make sure they understand the environment around them as best you can - that includes making sure they're not assuming you're somewhere you're not.

I've personally found a combination of both command channel on TS and a text chat channel in game provides a good balance - if your FC + WCs + other scouts are in a text chat channel, low priority notes can go there without interrupting voice chat. I've also had a few fleets where the scouts have setup a channel amongst themselves only, to discuss where they are and what's happening - that can also be useful, think of it as squad chat for scouts.

Well, that's pretty much it for now. I'm sure I've missed things, and bear in mind I'm only a new scout, so I'm looking for feedback from more experienced scouts. Best thing to do is get out there in your scout ship and practice, set up bookmarks around gates and stations in your common hunting areas, and don't be afraid to volunteer to scout for fleets as they setup - everyone loves an extra scout