covert research facility

Erik's Blog

Guides and other useful information for surviving in the amazing world of Eve Online

Guide: How to solo a Besieged Covert Research Facility with a Tengu

I recently figured out how to solo the Besieged Covert Research Facility sites with a Tengu. They are actually pretty easy to do, if your ship is fitted accordingly and you keep on your toes. But before we get into the details of the approach, lets first look at the potential rewards and the risks of this particular site:

The rewards seam to vary between 15M and 150M (including expected profit of a potential BPC). Apart from Covert Research tools and some pirate ammunition, you also have a chance to get:

• 30-day SKINs for destroyers or battle cruisers (e.g. Cormorant Guristas SKIN (30 Days) )
• 10 run BPC for Limited / Experimental Hyperspatial Accelerator. The BPCs are worth quite a lot (25M / 140M). Especially if you choose to produce and sell the modules yourself.
• Low-grade Slave implant (e.g. Low-grade Slave Epsilon,worth about 150M)

However this combat site involve quite some risks:

• High NPC damage output: The NPCs put out a lot of damage across all damage types. The official page on the CCP wiki says they are adjusting their damage type to your resist profile.
• NPCs web and scram: All NPCs will web and scram you, and they have an extreme range of 40 KM.
• Dangers of Low Sec: These sites only appear in low sec, so you are always running the risk of being pointed and killed by a pirate.
• No acceleration gate: There is no acceleration gate, so any ship can instantly warp to you on grid and try to catch you, giving you very little reaction time to escape.
• Ghost timer:  At about 15-20 Minutes after first aggression the site will explode and the enemies will warp off. So if you are too slow (e.g. because you get disturbed and have to warp off) all your efforts will be for nothing.

So that brings us to the question if the the Besieged Covert Research Facility sites are worth to run at all. Judging by how many of these sites are available in systems during the day, they seam not to be too popular. My personal opinion is: it depends. The main danger comes from other players in local and due to the missing acceleration gate they can be upon you in an instant. On the other hand, these sites can be run in less than 15 mins, which is quite a nice ISK/hour rate. So I think they are worth running, if there is no threat in local, e.g. during off hours or if your allies control the system. Otherwise the relatively moderate rewards do not justify the relatively high risk of running these site in low sec.

How to run the site

So if you decides to run the Besieged Covert Research Facility here is the approach I have used to run them successfully many time.

In order to successful run these sites with a Tengu you need to meet three requirements with your fit:

• Tank needs to sustain high amount of damage across all damage types over a longer period of time
• You need to be able to hit the NPCs from outside their web/scram range
• You also need to be fast enough to control range to the NPC
• Finally you need enough DPS to break the tank of the battleships and clear the whole site within 15 min.

To meet these requirements I chose a kiting tengu fit (figures might vary with skills, examples with max skills:)

• Heavy Missile Launchers, using T2 fury missiles, doing 668 dps @ 70 km
• Medium deadspace shield booster, balanced resist profile + DCII -> 797 ehp/sec against uniform damage.
• Deadspace afterburner -> 675 m/s. Together with the low sig radius of the Tengu this allows you to speed tank a lot of the damage
• Cap Stable -> You need to keep the AB, boosters and hardeners running the whole time.

Please see Appendix below for full details of suggested Tengu fittings.

One remark about damage types of Mordu ships. The old CCP wiki page  for this site says you need to tank against omni damage: “Mordu ships will test your tank and switch damage types to find your weakest resistance”. However some people have stated that Mordu ships only deal kinetic damage. I have tested this myself and can confirm that they switch damage types, so tanking against kinetic only will most probably get you killed.

Running the site

The actual running of the site is quite easy (assuming there is no threat in local):

• Turn on all shield mods (booster, hardeners). Set default orbit to 60 km
• Warp in at 70km. The NPCs should be at about 80-90 km range when you land. Turn on your AB start orbiting the nearest NPC at 60 km.
• Start hitting and killing the nearest NPC when it comes in range until it is dead. Switch to the next NPC nearest to you. Rinse and Repeat.
• Always check distances to the NPCs. When any of the other NPC approaches you, start orbiting that one at 60KM and continue shooting your current target.
• I suggest killing the cruisers first, since they seam to be closing in faster and they also die a lot quicker.
• When the 2nd wave appear they will not attack you unless you shoot first. Therefore take the time to reload and get into optimal orbit to the first ship before you attack.
• If there is too much incoming damage, overheat your shield booster and hardeners to mitigate it. (This is also how you can tank against the full 5 Mordos’s battleship wave for a while.)
• Be prepared to warp off if your shield is not holding (and come back after repairs).
• Be prepared to warp off if any NPC gets too close. (If they web and scram you, you are most likely toast)
• Be prepared to warp off if any other ship approaches you on d-scan or lands on grid (its most likely another player trying to kill you)
• After all NPCs are dead, burn to the container (usually around 80 km away) and get your reward! Don’t forget to kill the Thukker structure for some extra loot.

Final remarks

I personally like doing the Besieged Covert Research Facility site, because they give the often provide a fair reward for just 15 minutes of work. Still the risks of getting caught in your expensive Tengu is very high. The main issue I see is the missing acceleration gate, which makes it too easy for pirates to catch you. My guess is that more people would be doing these sites if they had an acceleration gate.

I hope this guide was helpful to you. If you have any comments please let me know in the comment section.

Best regards, Erik

Please find below example fittings for soloing these sites. I am sure they are other fittings that work just as well (or even better if you put in more ISK), but these are the ones I have successfully used myself.

Example fitting

This fitting uses a deadspace medium shield booster and provides you with up to 796 EHP/s against omni damage (with max skills). It costs about 1.0B ISK, but will give you the ability to easily hold the maximum damage of five Mordus Legion battleships without breaking a sweat. And by the way: this fit also works nicely for running DEDs and other PVE sites. Just exchange the two hardeners to match the damage type of the rats.

Note (July 17th, 2017):

The Tengu fitting as been updated to reflect the T3C changes on July 11th, 2017. The new fit is a bit more expensive, but has about the same performance and is still fully capable to solo the Besieged Covert Research Facility.

Show Comments Hide Comments

4 Replies to “Guide: How to solo a Besieged Covert Research Facility with a Tengu”

usefull intel thanx o7

Hmm it seems like your blog ate my first comment (it was extremely long) so I guess I’ll just sum it up what I had written and say, I’m thoroughly enjoying your blog. I as well am an aspiring blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing. Do you have any tips for beginner blog writers? I’d genuinely appreciate it.

Thanks 🙂 I am glad you like my blog. If you like to start your own blog, my tips would be: 1) Pick a nice blog tool that suits your needs. I like the altervista blog. it is based on wordpress (which is one of the most popular tool for blogs) and gives me a lot of freedom for customization. 2) Choose a content theme for your blog and stick to it so that people know what to expect from your blog 3) Market your blog entries. e.g. I am pasting new entries in the Eve Online forum on Facebook and Twitter

233432 557651I adore the look of your web site. I recently built mine and I was searching for some design suggestions and you gave me a couple of. Might I ask you whether you developed the web site by youself? 555949

Comments are closed.

Seamless Theme Keith , made by Altervista

Create a website and earn with Altervista - Disclaimer - Report Abuse - Privacy Policy - Customize advertising tracking

Besieged Covert Research facility ship/fitting

I’ve been wanting to run these, I’ve had limited success with a t3 but takes way too long.

When I see people run them is usually locals who are comfortable running around their losec neighborhood in Battleships and they also complete the site in a matter of minutes.

Any travel survivable ship/fit suggestions?

You and a friend both flying Gilas should be more than sufficient… even if they were PVP fit Gilas. Keep a wide orbit and let your drones do the work. Be careful to not be scrammed, it’s not unusual for one of you to have to warp off and come back

With the arrival of 5 battleships without reward need to be prepared to receive 1000 dps/sec. Gila overcome this? I’m not sure.

It’s about do you want to run them safe or you want to run them fast. And by safe or fast I mean use ship that can stay well out of rats point range possibly perma aligned to some celestial (HM Tengu for example) vs stay at zero high dps setup (HAM Tengu, Battleship).

Yes, you don’t want to face tank them. Keep moving and keep on the edge of their scrambler range. Call primaries to your friend.

I have used a dual rep pvp fit Deimos, which seems to work well. With the combination of high resists, low sig, high dps and great armor rep it can easily tank the incoming dps. I only used this on about 5 or 6 sights before I gave up due to poor loot drops, so am not sure if it’s viable for long term success.

How poor was the loot?

-Thanatos -Barghest -Ishtar -VNI -Loki

Using a carrier really trivializes them. You’re done in like thirty seconds. Barghest is a lot safer and probably what I would recommend. Warp in at 10km, align to a station, activate mjd and missiles. By the time you’re done the MJD is ready to jump you back to the loot.

Ishtar works… ok’ish but not great. VNI doesn’t really work that well and the Loki works fine but you have to be in the rat’s disruptor range and that kind of sketches me out.

The loot is OK. You usually get 20-30 mil for very short work. I basically just do them when they show up in my home constellation. I don’t think they’re worth going out and hunting for specifically. They’re better thought of as a nice change of pace to break up the monotony of whatever you usually do. They’re worth being prepared for when they show up but not worth hunting for. Also they drop blueprints that are worth building yourself even if you aren’t an indy guy.

Out of about 5 sites in the past couple days, about 80m isk worth of covert research tools, wildly random faction ammo and missiles, one low grade virtue gamma, which hypothetically sells for 100m but has 0 market (highest buy in game is like 10m), and absolutely garbage 30 day skins.

Maybe better implants drop occasionally, it would be nice.

I havent seen the first bpc drop yet in 5 sites. Not sure what kinds are on the loot table.

Really the ammo makes it worth the trouble to me, since a few(3-4) random stacks drop every site, and some of its rare. (Just got a stack of domination nuclear L which goes for 5k/round)

I’d say running 5 in rapid succession is fairly good indicator of what to expect for averages, since being losec, multiple conditions have to be lined up in your favor to be able to run even one.

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

Combat sites

Combat Sites are a broad class of locations involving player versus environment (PvE) combat, usually in engagements against pirate faction enemies. Combat sites can be found throughout all types of space in New Eden, now including null security and wormhole space. The rewards for completing a given site can also vary due to the nature of rare loot mechanics: most sites have a (largely unknown) percentage-based chance to spawn a uniquely named enemy ship, which in turn has its own chance to drop random Deadspace or Faction modules, or even unique blueprint copies.

Combat sites are usually found via exploration and most fall into one of two broad categories: combat anomalies and cosmic signatures . The most notable difference is that anomalies do not need locating, while cosmic signatures must be found using Core Scanner Probes. Combat sites found as cosmic signatures may be further divided into DED rated complexes , unrated complexes , and chemical labs . In general, cosmic signature combat sites are considered to be both more dangerous and more rewarding than combat anomalies found in similar areas of space.

Like missions, the type and amount of enemy ships found in a particular combat site is consistent across all instances of the site, with only a small, pre-determined amount of variance. The enemies present in a given combat site can belong to one of six factions in New Eden: Serpentis , the Angel Cartel , the Blood Raider Covenant , the Guristas Pirates , Sansha's Nation , or the Rogue Drones , and most combat sites are named for the faction found within. Unlike missions, combat sites do not feature any enemy ships from any of the four empires, nor are there combat sites guarded by ORE or the Sisters of EVE . Hostile NPCs from the Mordu's Legion pirate faction only appear in the Besieged Covert Research Facility . All enemy ships within a combat site have bounties that are paid to the player who kills them, and if that player is part of a fleet, the bounty is divided evenly among all fleet members on-grid. As a general rule, bigger ships (such as battlecruisers and battleships ) or uniquely named ships (such as those belonging to pirate leaders or complex overseers) will award higher bounties, and will also be harder to destroy.

Expeditions and COSMOS sites are unique combat sites that do not fall into any of the above categories. Expeditions are unique chains of combat sites that may be triggered when a player fulfils certain conditions in an Unrated Complex, and the associated sites can only be reached via the Agency window. COSMOS sites are static combat sites that can be found in several constellations across New Eden, and are marked by beacons that are automatically visible on the overview. These sites reward items required for COSMOS missions, materials for Storyline modules, Faction modules, and other rare items, but can be entered at any time.

• 1 How to do combat sites
• 2.1 Besieged Covert Research Facility
• 2.2 Faction Warfare
• 2.3 Triglavian Invasion Combat Sites
• 2.4 Homefronts
• 3.1 Unrated complexes
• 3.2 Blood Raider Temple Complex
• 3.3 DED rated complexes
• 3.4 Chemical Labs
• 3.5 Combat relic sites
• 3.6 ISHAEKA Tactical Response HQ
• 4 Expeditions
• 5 COSMOS sites
• 7 References

How to do combat sites

Running combat sites, is the act of entering and clearing the sites of hostile NPC ships (a.k.a. "rats"). Clearing these sites greatly benefit from having a PvE ship that can deal with the type of pirate ships you will face. Below you will find the combat sites divided up according to the pirate faction that you will find in these sites, so make sure your ship is equipped to handle them.

Most Cosmic Anomalies are combat anomalies inhabited by pirates. [1] Unlike cosmic signatures, they do not need any scanning equipment to locate, and instead will automatically appear in the scanning window after a short delay upon entering a system. Because of this, combat anomalies, particularly those found in high-security space, represent an entry-level set of combat sites that many new players will encounter. All anomalies consist of a single grid without acceleration gates that can be entered by any type of ship. Combat anomalies will spawn multiple waves of hostile NPCs, and have a low chance to spawn a commander ship that can drop faction items; they also have a small chance of escalating into a DED rated complex.

With the exception of Rogue Drone sites, all combat anomalies follow a naming scheme of <faction> <anomaly> . The <anomaly> denotes the difficulty of the site, and follows an identical pattern for all factions except Rogue Drones. Generally, the higher the difficulty of the site, the higher the rewards for completing it. Each faction's sites will only appear in their designated regions (with the exception of Rogue Drone sites, which can appear anywhere). For example, the Heimatar region has Angel Cartel rats, and therefore only Angel Cartel and Rogue Drone combat sites can be found there. For a list of which pirate factions can be found in which regions, see Dotlan .

The difficulty of possible combat anomalies depends on the security status of the system, with higher security status equating to easier sites. Within high-sec (security status 1.0 to 0.5), sites in the lowest difficulty tier (in terms of difficulty/ value) will be found. Low-sec (security status of 0.4 to 0.1) contains the middle tier, and the highest tier will be found within nullsec . The security level of the space where Rogue Drone sites are found also affects the difficulty of the site.

The <faction> Burrows and the Drone Collections are generally only worth doing for meager bounties/salvage.

• ^ The other type of anomaly involves harvestable resources, such as ore or ice. All other types of site, such as Relic and Data always appear as signatures and require a probe launcher, and therefore they are never anomalies.

In addition to their basic version, Hideaway, Den, Rally Point and Hub sites also feature three variants of progressive difficulty featuring elite enemies. These variants follow an extended naming convention as follows:

• <Faction> Hidden <anomaly> - Level 2; higher amount of triggered spawns.
• <Faction> Forsaken <anomaly> - Level 3; moderate difficulty, featuring elite enemy ships.
• <Faction> Forlorn <anomaly> - Level 4; featuring tougher enemies and elite ships.

Besieged Covert Research Facility

Besieged Guristas Covert Research Facility is a unique cosmic anomaly found in all low sec regions that spawns two waves of Mordu's Legion cruisers and battleships equipped with webifiers and warp disruptors. Unlike other enemies, these ships are able to switch damage types to find what is most effective against a given target (instead of dealing omni damage).

Besieged facilities are not to be confused with Ghost Sites , which are found in all types of space, can belong to any faction, and are hacking analyzer focused. There are no other pirate faction versions of the besieged site as of 2018. Notable loot includes higher-end implants and ship skin BPCs , as well as special module BPCs.

Faction Warfare

In faction warfare space, faction warfare complexes show up as combat anomalies. Once someone warps to a site, it will also show up as a beacon in the overview.

Triglavian Invasion Combat Sites

In Pochven, Minor EDENCOM and Triglavian Victory Systems EDENCOM and Triglavian Sites appear as Cosmic Anomalies.

Highsec systems feature additional Combat Anomalies called Homefront Operations. They are a form of group content that requires several people.

Cosmic Signatures

When you scan down a Cosmic Signature it may be a Combat Site.

A Combat Site can be a:

• Unrated Complex
• DED Rated Complex or
• Chemical Lab

Unrated complexes

Unrated complexes have a good chance to contain a commander spawn that can drop Faction items. They may also escalate into an expedition .

The sites contain multiple deadspace rooms separated by acceleration gates. The acceleration gates separating the rooms are usually locked, in which case some condition must be fulfilled, or a key must be found to proceed. The sites also have triggers for additional defender spawns and/ or an escalation. The size of ship allowed in Unrated Complexes does not follow a predictable pattern; each site, even of the same difficulty but from a different faction, may have a different ship size limit.

Blood Raider Temple Complex

The Blood Raider Temple Complex is another variant of the Dark Blood Fleet Staging Point . It is much harder than its staging point counterpart and requires several people in well-tanked ships. The escalation for this site is the Blood Raider Temple Complex (The Inner Sanctum)

DED rated complexes

DED complexes are a type of cosmic signature that has been rated on a difficulty scale of 1/10 to 10/10 by CONCORD's Directive Enforcement Department . Lower rated sites contain weaker enemies, and limited ship class access. DED rated complexes are found using Core Scanner Probes, or are received as an escalation from a combat anomaly. There are no 9/10-rated DED complexes, however some consider the <Faction> Fleet Staging Point to be their equivalent.

The structure of a DED rated complex is very similar an Unrated Complex, and usually involve gated deadspace pockets with multiple groups of enemies.

Unlike other combat sites, DED rated complexes do not have additional enemy spawns; all enemies begin on-grid in each pocket. Many DED rated complexes also contain locked gates that may be unlocked by a certain trigger. This makes blitzing possible, as not all enemies need to be cleared to proceed. The sites also always contain one or more overseer structures or overseer ships that can drop deadspace modules , a pirate ship BPC or very rarely a faction module. The overseer that drops deadspace modules will always drop 0-5 modules. Each possible deadspace module has same chance to drop and no more than one module of same type can drop at once. Some DED complexes contain additional targets that have a very low probability to drop a Faction module. Additionally overseers always drop Overseer's Personal Effects that can be sold to NPC buy orders to earn ISK.

DED rated complexes do not normally escalate, but DED rated complexes that are received as an escalation from an anomaly may receive another escalation to the same site or a second part.

The difficulty rating of a complex determines maximum size of ship class that may be used to engage. Starting from frigates at level 1/10, the ship size that can enter a site goes up by one size category with each increase in rating, maxing out at battleships at level 5/10.

6/10 sites: Please click on the numbered superscript for additional information regarding the rating of these sites.

• ^ a b This site has also been observed in null-sec
• ^ DED 5/10s cannot naturally spawn in high security systems, however they can be received as an escalation that spawns in a high security system.
• ^ a b There is no rating displayed in warp-in popup text.

Chemical Labs

Chemical Labs are Cosmic Signatures, and may be found by scanning with Core Scanner Probes. Even though the probe scan window categorizes these as "gas sites", they are actually combat sites. To access all possible rewards you will need to hack containers using a Data Analyzer module. You will also need to take care of the hostiles unless you can tank them all while hacking.

The Production Facility and digital sites spawns in null security space only, while all other sites spawn in low security space.

Details of these sites are not well documented. Most contain two waves of enemies and containers that need to be hacked, and the sites are restricted to specific regions, though the region in which each site spawns is not entirely known. The regions listed here may not be the only region containing the particular site.

Combat relic sites

Combat relic sites are extremely rare combat sites that are only found in certain Nullsec regions. Though they are cosmic signatures and seems like relic sites, they appear to Probes as combat sites. These particular sites are often harder than normal, gated, and only allow up to T2 Battleships to enter.

• Ancient Ruins Only found in Catch (especially in 9HXQ-G constellation)
• Bloated Ruins Only found in Wicked Creek (especially in 760-9C constellation)
• Crumbling Ruins Only found in Vale of the Silent
• Festering Ruins Only found in Fountain
• Forgotten Ruins Only found in Delve
• Hidden Ruins Only found in Cloud Ring
• Wispy Ruins Only found in Feythabolis (especially in I-3ODK constellation)
• ISHAEKA Tactical Response HQ

This is a scannable cosmic signature found only in the Monalaz constellation. It is very hard and requires a very strongly-tanked Marauder or T3 cruiser to even potentially run.

Expeditions

Expeditions (also known as escalations ) cannot be found by scanning, instead they "escalate" from Unrated Complexes. When a certain trigger condition is met, there is a small chance (about 5%) that a pop up window will open explaining that the details of the location of another enemy site has been found. This site's information can then be found in The Agency , available from the NeoCom panel.

When the site listed in the Journal is completed, there is a chance that it will escalate further, leading to yet another site. Most expeditions have four such parts.

The locations of the sites provided by an expedition are random, often appearing several jumps away from where the expedition was obtained. Many expeditions may spawn their fourth site in lower-security space than where they began.

The exact method for escalating to next part of expedition is not known. But based on observation the following seems to hold:

• The probability to escalate further is 50%. This would mean that the probability to reach the fourth location is about 12.5%.
• The system where the next part is must have lower true security than the current system. (This may no longer be true)
• If no systems with lower true security are found within search range (unknown) the escalation ends silently with no failed escalation message.

COSMOS sites

Certain constellations contain COSMOS combat sites, which are connected to COSMOS missions but may be accessed at any time. These sites appear as a static complex beacon that is visible in the Overview. COSMOS sites can be located using the Star Map and the "DED deadspace reports" or combat signatures tag setting. Not all static DED sites are combat sites, some of them are landmarks or Epic Mission Agent locations.

COSMOS sites are static and do not move. Even the ones that can be scanned are always in the same location.

The static COSMOS sites re-spawn periodically (some only at downtime). These offer reward items, which may be required for COSMOS missions and/ or be materials used in building Storyline modules , Faction modules and/or rare items. [1]

Gated COSMOS sites follow the same ship size restrictions as DED rated complex sites. Un-gated COSMOS sites have no restrictions.

COSMOS sites can be found in COSMOS areas:

• Amarr COSMOS
• Caldari COSMOS
• Gallente COSMOS
• Minmatar COSMOS
• Angel COSMOS
• Blood Raider COSMOS
• Guristas COSMOS
• Serpentis COSMOS
• Dev blog introducing the Contested and Besieged Covert Research Facilities
• ^ Rakogh Citadel in 3GD6-8 drops Pashan’s Turret Handling Mindlink
• Exploration

Navigation menu

Personal tools.

• Login with EVE SSO
• View source
• View history
• Recent changes
• Random page

EVE University

• Alliance Auth
• Editing Guide
• Categorization
• What links here
• Related changes
• Special pages
• Printable version
• Permanent link
• Page information
• Browse properties
• This page was last edited on 16 August 2024, at 10:17.
• Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike unless otherwise noted.
• Privacy policy
• About EVE University Wiki
• Disclaimers