RvB and Cruiser Brawl IV

So while I am working on my plan, I decided to join Red Vs. Blue as it will give me more opportunities to PVP and, at the same time, learn small gang warfare in hunting with like-minded individuals.  Not a perfect fit by any means, but I need probably AT LEAST 5 million SP plus the required kills to even be considered for The Tuskers, so I have awhile to go still.  (Currently at 2.4 mill SP.)

Cruiser Brawl IV.  I joined the day prior to this and saw the advertisement on their forums that they wanted people for this.  The gist of it is that the Leader of RvB gave everyone 10 tech1 cruisers of their choice, along with all the tech1 meta0 fittings they needed.  Thankfully I was able to participate in this and the cool part is that we could insure each of the ships and then collect the insurance money when they blew up.  (Note the when, not the if...)

Since I came late, I had the choice of only a few ships and was able to get 2x Caracal, 4x Moa and 4x Omen.  If I had known how badass the Moa was ahead of time, I would have just opted for 10 of those. (twice the insurance payout as the other two as well!)

So Cruiser Brawl IV, "what is it" you might ask.  Well essentially, everyone is on even ground fittings-wise and there are two teams, the members of which are selected old-school dodgeball style.  Keeps things relatively fair and even.  Sadly I wasn't the last one to get picked (50 mill goes to the last guy to get picked) and I took my fitted ships (1/2 long range, 1/2 close range brawler) and got to our team's rendezvous point.  After nearly 40 minutes of team selecting and coordinating, 50 people warped into planet 1 and started duking it out.  This is where I began my first lesson...

Lesson 1 - I hate small fleet combat: 
Not only did I seem to get primaried fairly quickly  once I warped in.  By the time I found the guy that our FC was calling primary, I didn't really have time to lock him before I was toast.

Lesson 2 - Close range brawlers don't last long:
The majority of my instant losses were me warping in to 0 on one of our close range fleet members only to be primaried as soon as I warped in.  20+ people all firing on an Omen, no matter the amount of tank, makes quick work on him.

Lesson 3 - You aren't safe in a sniping boat:
I decided to fit some long-range fits to try and maximize my damage potential.  This is actually where I got included on the killmails as I was actually doing some fairly decent damage a couple-few times.  The problem with this is, I also got primaried fairly quickly lol.  Not sure if people identified the weak-ones and homed in on them or not, but I was flabbergasted when I spoke with a couple people and they had only taken a couple ship losses by the time I was out of all 10.

Long-story short, this went on for a couple hours.  Once I was out of ships, I listened on voice comms and, people were offering others their ships to keep them in the action, but I was unable to fly any of the ships they were offering.  This led me to my first decision.

Decision 1 - Train up Cruiser III in all races:
I know this is typically considered a bad thing to do as it can branch you out too far, but the way I figure it is, it takes about 10 days to train up all races to Cruiser III.  This isn't a ton of time and, while I could get Engineering V and a racial frigate to V, I want to be able to fly anything should the chance come to be able to sit in it.  I have read many posts as well and have noticed that a lot of people eject out of ships instead of letting it get destroyed to save their implants and it seems like common sense that if I want to live a life of piracy someday, it would be beneficial to be able to fly any tech 1 ship sans capitals.  It doesn't take too long to be able to sit in it and, if I don't plan on actually piloting it in combat, barely being able to sit in it will work.

Decision 2 - Train ALL support skills to IV or V before trying out T2.
Support skills mean a lot.  I know this, everyone knows this.  What I didn't REALIZE  is that they damn near mean everything.  You can take someone with relatively maxed out support skills and pit them against a better ship with someone that has fairly basic skills and all advantages are nearly gone in even tiered ships.

So another day done, new lessons learned and I made about 50 mill in the process due to insurance payouts.  Can't beat that. :)