I've been listening to Mind Clash ever since it started being syndicated on the Crossing Zebras RSS feed. So when I logged into Theomachy and saw Kael Decadence had an open invite for an informal little team, I joined right in. When it was all said and done Kael was kind enough to invite me onto the Mind Clash podcast, so you can hear our thoughts on Theomacy in Episode 40.
The Theomachy team put in a huge amount of work here, and CCP has really stepped it up with the Thunderdome server. We were actually there for Theomachy at the same time as other folks were practicing for the AT, so there was probably extra load than it was designed for as well. Unlike SiSi, Thunderdome is not replicated off of Tranquility. Your account is there, but none of your characters and assets. So the first thing you do is create your character and use a command to grant yourself all Vs in everything. That meant that Theomachy had a wide range - had they chosen to there could have even been Titans on field. However, it sounds like they'd experimented with capitals and up before and kept it toned down.
Since you can spawn anything, there was also some question about whether or not they could enforce the rule of having no implants and boosters. When we first logged in it sounded like that rule might be waived, so I spawned myself a full high-grade Snake set with a bundle of other +6% implants just in case. It turned out that they were able to handle that, so we all ripped out implants back out. Talk about feeling rich for a little while.
Basically they had us all Titan bridge to a target system, set our medical clones there, and then podded us to remove implants. There was a bit of a hold up as it turned out the Titan didn't have the right isotopes handy, so the overall event was running quite a bit late. All these are learning lessons that the Theomachy team is taking to heart, so I have confidence things will run even better next time.
When you arrive in system in your pod and the event starts, you dive towards the empty ships and try to grab one. I did have a bit of a glitch when I first arrived - regardless of what ship I got into, my HUD remained stuck on pod. I received permission from the organizers to log out and log in, and after that I was all good.
And after this I didn't take any more screenshots because I got wrapped up in actually flying and not dying (bad blogger!) You can see the recording twitch streams (Meerdudd and Kael Decadence).
I wasn't sure if the ships were going to be crazy fits or not, but all of the ones I got into seemed generally reasonable. I ended up in a string of destroyers and cruisers for a while, which was good for zipping around but with so many pilots on field it is pretty likely that one of them that just blap you in you're in a frigate (especially given RLMLs). For a while I got into a Exequror, which was a good complement to Meerdudd and Kael being in battleships, but one of the other groups probably decided it was too good a complement and primaried me. A solo Exeq running an overheated Ancil doesn't last too long, even at full AB speed.
For our comms: Meerdudd and Kael were streaming and I was able to speak to them through their Discord. However, I could only hear them through their twitch stream. That meant there was a delay between when I heard them and when I could reply. It was maybe only 30-60 seconds or something, but it felt like forever. It meant I had to anticipate their calls, or just join in late.
I was surprised how often I was able to reship, even when there were bubbles around. People were probably much more wrapped up in their individual combats in large part. If you go into Theomachy thinking "I probably won't last 10 minutes" you'll be surprised. It's great fun and for a good run to. I'd recommend trying to get into the largest ship you can, as speed doesn't end up really playing well in such a large mob scene. It's no surprise that the winners were all in Marauders last I saw.
Eventually I did head back to reship and got caught in a bubble and podded. It felt like a good end to the whole thing after a long series of fights. I'd highly recommend it, so look out for it next year.
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