Battleship - A Different Animal

I've recently got into flying my first Battleship.  Up until know, I had fallen into a pattern with my security mission ships, but I've found things are different when you move up to L4 missions with a Battleship.

For Frigates, Destroyers, Cruisers, and Battlecruisers on L1 through L3 missions, I had fallen into the pattern of using long range weapons and kiting from a distance.  This works pretty well for a newbie like me using T1 gear with limited skills.  I somewhat naturally tried the same thing when moving up to Battleship, but things were suddenly very different.  It just wasn't working.

My pattern didn't work because a Battleship is a different animal.  They are slow, making it difficult to stay at distance from enemies.  As a newbie with limited skills, my DPS was low and L4 enemies were stronger than anything I had encountered before, giving them plenty of time to catch up to me.  And as you move up in size, battle range increases to the point where sometimes, when I was at distance, I would find that my enemies were outside of the control range of my drones, preventing me from using their much needed additional DPS.  I was hurting, and hurting bad.

That's when it dawned on me, perhaps later than it should have.  I tried keeping the enemies at range, but they were generally getting in pretty close anyway.  So why not switch from long range weapons to close range weapons?  I checked, and sure enough, most of my fights were ending up within range of the close range weapons anyway.  Time to switch!  With close range weapons, tracking is better, DPS is better (which was badly needed), less MWD is needed, and even the power grid and CPU requirements were less, though I don't know if that would always be the case.  Forget kiting.  This is a Battleship.  A cruise missile Battleship might be a different case, but if you are not using missiles, then tank up, fight close, and blast away!  From my experience, this just works better as a T1 newbie at the Battleship L4 mission level.

Point of interest:  When I first fit my Battleship a few days ago, it had 305 DPS with light drones.   After switching to close range weapons, medium drones, and getting a couple of more skills under by belt, I'm now up to about 425 DPS.  Still not that good by most Eve player standards, but a heck of a lot better than it was, and I'm probably missing fewer shots too.  However, if you use medium drones, it's good to keep a few lights in the bay as backup for the occasional really fast and agile frigates; I've run into some rogue drones like that.