Shall We Dance?

Today I’d like to share some handy tips and tricks that I have learnt on my journeys through 0.0 space. I’d like to warn the dear reader though: nothing teaches you faster about your mistakes than getting your ass ganked and podded. A fleet commander can learn all the theory he/she wants, but as a Chinese idiom goes… it’s “just talking about soldiers on a piece of paper”. Or a paper tiger, if you will. A frequent 0.0 dweller who has experienced fleet battles will understand the power of a well-executed gate dance.

Consider each stargate to be a choke point: if the enemy wishes to leave (without logoffski or cloaking) he will have to leave via the humble stargate. As such, stargates are one of the most common battlefields in Eve, as shown by the ever popular “gate camps with a campfire”. You are bound to catch someone coming in or out if it is a busy system in a pipeline – just take a look at how Morsus Mihi camps the Tribute entrance 23/7 near the black hole (Jita).


The law of the stargate is closely linked to the aggression timer. For the uninitiated, aggression timer is a 1 minute cooldown period where you cannot jump through any stargates. It is caused by the following actions:

- You aggress, i.e. shoot, at someone
- Your light or heavy dictor drops a bubble and an enemy tries to warp out of the bubble

Consider the following scenario. You see a hostile ship on your overview near a stargate. If you are:

1) solo hunting: See if the bugger jumps through the gate – if he does and you have a nanofag fast locker, jump after him and wait for him to decloak. If he doesn’t aggress, tough luck – trying to warp scram him will only make him jump through and leave a frustrated you behind. You could try bumping and webbing the poor fella, but warp to 0 makes that fairly difficult these days.

2) in a small gang without a dictor: Slightly better luck, but still a tough partner. Hopefully you have enough tacklers to camp both sides of the gate. Get an inty of some sort to jump before him into the next system, and get one of the other tacklers on the same side to “push him through”, i.e. warp scram him and make him jump. Then, get the inty to point the fella when he decloaks. Webbers are paramount in any gang for this reason.

3) in a large fleet with dictors: Win. An inevitable end for the victim if he lands on a stargate, when properly executed. Get your dictor pilot to jump through and drop a bubble on the gate. Then, get half of your fleet to jump through. Proceed as per point 2) and you will have a tasty meal, unless the bugger is in a recon or cov ops. If so, try to decloak him with drones and fast little inties when he appears on the overview.

Good luck traveler – may we dance when I see you in space?

In other news: I am so impressed by LordChaos' hax Abaddon, that I plan to finish up training Caldari Cruiser V and all the goodies that lead to the Falcon/Cerb/Onyx, then proceed to cross-train Amarr Battleships and T2 lasers. You can see his videos of pwnage here.