I had finally gotten home, and clone jumped to our staging system just in time to catch Oxygen leading a Hurricane fleet to the battle for the M-OEE8 ihub. Oxygen got us out to a titan within bridge range of the 1P-VL2 constellation where the biggest battle in ages was playing. We landed on the titan and waited for a bridge.
Waiting for Jay to bridge us…
And waited.
And waited.
And then somebody linked a post on Reddit.
It was, of course, initially dismissed as a troll. No doubt somebody made a fake account to look like TheJudge. Then I clicked on the name, just to see if it had been freshly created and was greeted by what looked like an authentic history. It looked to be real.
As we sat there, watching the entosis tug-of war swing towards the hostiles, The Mittani sent out a broadcast:
It appears that after spending the entire day with us fighting on their behalf to defend their home, C02 has chosen to reset the entire coalition in approximately the next 30 minutes. That’s a pretty impressive backstab, and it’s apparently all our fault. This is a shame, but there’s no question of right or wrong on this one: we’ve expended a tremendous amount of blood and treasure defending C02 assets in Hakonen and Tribute over the past two months, and this is the spit in our eye after an all-day defense of their homeland.
Apparently C02’s senior leadership met this morning and decided to play this card regardless of how this M-O fight went down. That explains why we discovered this morning to our shock that there were no cynojammers in the target constellation, and that they knew they would flip on all of us even as we were doing our best to be loyal defenders of their territory. It also explains why the hostiles had their capfleets ready and waiting; they hoped for us to risk our supers, in hopes of C02 turning on us. The easter holiday off, the invitation of every random Eve 3rd party to join an otherwise irrelevant ihub timer: all becomes clear. This was a planned trap, one which we thankfully were not dumb enough to stick our super fleet into. This is why it is all the more crucial that we evacuated the LAWN/Bastion superfleet from Vale.
So there it was. Circle of Two let us fight for them all day against impossible odds as every hanger-on within range joined in the fight. Another hammer blow against The Imperium.
Battle Report Top – CO2 gets its own column, as their losses aren’t ours or our foes really…
I would have included the whole screen shot, but the list or organizations arrayed against us scrolls of the page and around the block, and I can’t get the link to work because the battle report generator and the kill board are still working overtime to catch up and generate the final numbers. I’ll put a link here when it settles down. (Turns out that there were so many foes on the list that the URL is too long for the site to parse correctly. The battle broke the battle report generator. Best I can do is link my start point. You have to click ‘Analyze’ yourself.)
So there we were on the titan. The reason we hadn’t bridged was that nobody would light a cyno for us. CO2 wouldn’t, having just publicly announced their betrayal, and no Imperium pilots were keen to bridge in more fellows to be sacrificed for naught. So Oxygen turned us around and brought us home. The ihub was lost, but it wasn’t our problem any more.
Now Tribute has been laid open to our foes and it is TNT’s turn on the front line.
Tribute – March 28, 2016
We shall see how well we are able to defend now that the front line is yet closer to our staging system. Vale of the Silent fell to us back in the day without a fight, but now we are in territory I recall battling for back in the day. UMI-KK, the TNT capital, was our staging foothold in the region after it fell back in 2012. which let us advance from QPO-WI.
At least the evac from Vale seems timely now, as CO2 turning into a hostiles before then would have cut LAWN and Bastion off from the rest of the coalition. Small favors. And the war goes on.
Meanwhile, all of this is likely good news for CCP.
A bloody spaceship battle with thousands of players always attracts attention in the gaming media and gets new players to try out the game.
Skulls for the Icelandic skull throne
We shall see if this battle, which by the count of the battle report I rolled up, had more than 5K individual pilots involved at various points, gets any press come the morning. It has all the usual internet spaceship drama.
Elsewhere on this:
The Ancient Gaming Noob 