Nineteen Weeks of World War Bee

Almost to 20 weeks and I haven’t given up on this weekly post yet.  We’ll see who lasts longer, me or Ban Syrin at INN. (Not that my posts are as detailed as theirs, but I do mark up a lot more maps.)

A bit of news hit late in the week when a disgruntled director in Requiem Eternal decided to defect to the Imperium.  They brought with them a reported a trillion ISK in assets, including a Moreau faction Fortizar and all the ISK the alliance had in its wallet, then disbanded the alliance as they left.

Rest in Peace for sure

That destroyed all their ihubs, dropped their sovereignty, and left almost two thousand pilots without an alliance.

Top of the charts

TEST had to get into its backfield yet again and cover the open sovereignty in the Impass region.  It will now be 35 days before any of those systems can host an Ansiblex jump gate.  The corporations in the alliance are all still safe and there appears to be a move to create a new alliance, Eternal Requiem, but this was another disruption.

On the press coverage front, CCP sat down with Game Rant to discuss the game and the war currently in progress.

Delve Front

Delve has become a back and forth slog over ihubs in a number of constellations.  The map as I write looks like this.

Delve – Nov. 15, 2020

However, if you compare it with my map from last week, you will see various systems in the highlighted constellations have changed hands since then.  In fact, the ihubs in those contested constellations change hands daily, so by the time this post goes live the ihub map of Delve will no doubt have changed yet again.

That has made fights sporadic as both sides seem okay with letting individual systems get flipped, knowing they can just come back tomorrow and flip them back.

That is the way it has been going and likely will continue going until one side gets tired and either gives up or decides on a different tactic.

Meanwhile, the gate camp in E3OI-U continues.  That system, and the systems behind it, have all had cyno jammers turned on in order to protect them.

Other Theaters

There was the potential for a big fight in Querious as the final timers hit for the Imperium Keepstar that was left behind in 49-U6U.  There were plans to defend the armor timer and pings went out to that effect, but the defense operations never came to pass.

The defense was based on a plan Asher Elias had formulated and, when yet another storm came ashore near his home a tree fell and knocked out his power just before the op.  Or so the story goes.

Since it was his plan, nobody else was ready to take up the reigns.  In the end, the Keepstar was destroyed, with the gunner taking out a couple of attacking capital ships, giving the invaders their seventh Keepstar kill of the war.

Otherwise Querious remained a low intensity war zone as both sides set about reinforcing and destroying each other’s ihubs, with many systems left without ihubs.

Querious – Nov. 15, 2020

The Imperium did manage to take back “fake” Querious, the set of systems assigned to the region but which are an enclave within Delve.

Then there is Esoteria, where The Bastion and Ferrata Victrix have been waging a guerilla war against TEST to distract them from their main effort in Delve.  After weeks of holding on to their foothold and Fortizar, they have started making more progress against TEST, adding four more ihubs to the list that they have taken.

Essoteria – Nov. 15, 2020

Adding to TEST’s problems on that front, The Initiative announced that they are deploying to Esoteria to join the campaign.  I may have to start using the whole map of Esoteria rather than just the northwest corner when the force there really gets to work.  I may have to give Esoteria its own section soon.

My Participation

I stood by on a couple of strategic ops, but the enemy declined to show up and we either saved the structure or took the ihub and were done without firing a shot.  As such, my loss tally remained unchanged.

• Ares interceptor – 11
• Crusader interceptor – 5
• Rokh battleship – 5
• Atron entosis frigate – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
• Purifier stealth bomber – 2
• Guardian logi – 2
• Malediction interceptor – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Raven battleship – 1
• Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
• Gnosis ratting battlecruiser – 1
• Scimitar logi – 1
• Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1
• Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1

Other Items

The past week saw some distractions in New Eden.

First, there was the November update aimed at further nerfing null sec, with the Dynamic Bounty system, aimed at making null sec empires spread out (again), and the mandatory Encounter Surveillance System changes, which encourage null sec empires to consolidate, all in the name of making us fight more in the middle of a war that has already set two Guinness World Records.

That got people out robbing banks as part of the new ESS system.  I saw more action doing that than I did in the actual war last week.

Hello ESS Bank!

And then there was the EVE-NT Alliance Open.  CCP is still unable to run the alliance tournament themselves, so have let EVE-NT run one again this year.  That kicked off on Saturday and pitted 32 teams in a double elimination tournament. Both Goonswarm and The Initiative lost their first round matches, making it unlikely that the two alliances will come to blows, something the invaders have been having wet dreams about since the fighting in Fountain started, even in the tournament.

Two losses

Goonswarm actually lost their second match as well, so are out of the tournament, while The Initiative carries on into next week.

While I’m not a huge fan of the tournament, I did watch a bit of it.  Probably the oddest thing I saw was the Rote Kapelle vs Dock Workers match where both teams fielded identical fleet compositions, consisting of 3 Barghests, 2 Caracals, 2 Scalpels, a Stormbringer, a Hyena, and a Stork.  I know the point system and the meta tend to push teams in similar directions at times, but I cannot recall seeing a mirror image fight when it came to hulls.  That Rote Kapelle won handily indicates that fittings, tactics, and pilot skill were the more important factors.

All of that seemed to add up to a weekly PCU that was fair to middling for these times, and this week fell on Saturday rather than Sunday:

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671
• Week 13 – 35,618
• Week 14 – 39,681
• Week 15 – 40,359
• Week 16 – 36,642
• Week 17 – 37,695
• Week 18 – 36,632
• Week 19 – 35,816 (Saturday)

Related

• INN – World War Bee: Week 19
• INN – Requiem for Requiem
• INN – The Soviet Strategy (bad historical analogy alert)
• INN – Beginning of the End
• INN – The Meta Show episode covering Requiem disband
• Twitch – Requiem Eternal CEO address about the disband

Twelve Weeks of World War Bee

The war made it through its twelfth week and shows no signs of abating.

At some point during the weekend before this past one the invaders, who had been calling themselves PAPI, an acronyms whose origin I hadn’t bothered to look up, decided to change their name to the Anaconda Coalition.  The name was announced on Talking in Stations, and the public response was not wholehearted in its support.  Even members of said coalition were mocking the name on Reddit.  The universal agreed upon symbol quickly became a variation of this internet meme based on the Gadsden Flag.

Anaconda, cha cha cha

The Anaconda Coalition name has since faded from use by our foes in most public forums, though the leadership still uses it in their safe space on Talking in Stations.

Querious Front

The action over the last week was largely concentrated in Querious, where the invaders have taken all of the ihubs in the region save for those in what is sometimes referred to a “fake Querious,” as those systems an an enclave within Delve, and that one ihub in NDII-Q, which somehow still belongs to United Earth Directorate.

Querious – Sept 27, 2020

Of course, action is a relative term.  The week did not start off with much action as the invaders stood down a few times, even when they outnumbered us.  That led to a new Fountain Frank video, featuring soundtrack made up of samples from their comms.

Things livened up a bit on Tuesday night when a battle over the armor timer for a Tatara in NDII-Q escalated into a dreadnought fight that found us outnumbered 2 to 1.  The objective went to the invaders as did the ISK war according to the battle report.

NDII-Q Battle Report Header

I actually missed that battle as the enemy had stood down over another objective shortly before there was a ping and a form up for the Tatara.

The next night came the battle over the armor timer of a Fortizar of ours in 49-U6U, about which I have written already.  This is where the war really began in earnest as the first big capital fight, with both sides escalating up to super carriers and over a trillion ISK destroyed.

On the Fortizar in 49-U6U

We were, once again, out numbered by a ratio of 2 to 1 and the losses lined up to that ratio.  The enemy also won the objective.

The fight ran just four hours, which isn’t bad for a tidi slug fest where capitals are dropped, but the servers, struggling to keep up even at 10% tidi, acted up, causing more problems for us than our foes.  The server issues led both sides to decline to drop titans and even the super carriers were pulled back when it was possible.

This sort of battle is going to become more and more common as the invaders move closer to Delve and within range of our capital fleet.

After the clash at 49-U6U things settled down a bit, with no further large scale fights for the rest of the week.

Other Fronts

When things were quiet early on in the week a group from the Imperium slipped into Detroid and reinforced then took out some TEST ihubs.

A little corner of Detroid made empty

They were replaced after not too long, but it was a nice harassment operation behind the front lines.

Later in the week the invaders managed to drop a Fortizar in SVM-3K, which is their first attempt at a big structure within the bounds of Delve, at least that I have seen.

Hostile Fortizar deploying

As a potential foothold, that system would put a lot of southern Delve in capital jump range while being just beyond the single jump radius of our own capital staging.  But it is withing range of 1DQ1-A, where we keep everything else.

Being in our space, it is taking some time for the Fortizar to anchor.  It should finish its cycle tomorrow, if I counted on my fingers successfully.  I imagine we will be looking to destroy it as it anchors, which could lead to another big fight. (Addendum: A small fight, with the Fortizar killed.)

My Participation

I went on a number of fleets over the course of the week, but about half of them ended up with no fight as the enemy stood down or ran off on our approach.  Of course, the 49-U6U fight made up for that.

I also did not lose any ships during the week, so my tally of losses still stands as follows:

• Ares interceptor – 9
• Atron entosis frigate – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Malediction interceptor – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Scimitar logi – 1
• Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Purifier stealth bomber – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1

Other Items

As noted above, I expect we will come to blows over the hostile Fortizar in SVM-3K.

More interesting will be what the enemy plans to do about the Keepstar we still have in 49-U6U.  They have said they don’t want to fight on our Keepstars, but since that is where we keep most of our stuff it won’t be much of an extermination if they don’t attack them.

And, since I have been tracking this sporadically in posts, I might as well keep it up.  The weekly peak concurrent users ongoing tally:

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165
• Week 12 – 36,671

We were up a bit for the week, though that probably has less to do with the war than with the threat to the economy from CCP’s plan to nerf mining even harder next month, but I’ll get to that in another post.

Other articles about this week in the war:

• TAGN – The 49-U6U Fight Foreshadows Battles to Come
• INN – WWB is a Question: “How should EVE be played?”
• INN – World War Bee: Week 12

The 49-U6U Fight Foreshadows Battles to Come

A large battle went down last night in 49-U6U, with over 3,000 pilots in system and a trillion ISK in losses.

Right there in Querious

It was a fight over an armor timer on an Imperium Fortizar, one of the structures we still have in that system in Querious.  I joined up with Lazarus Telraven’s Rokh fleet to go out and help defend the timer.

Rokhs on the move

The invaders had been sending out pings to rally the troops for this fight, no doubt feeling a bit stung when, last Friday, they declined to contest the armor timer on this very same structure even though they outnumbered us.  Their advantage then was insufficient.

Last night they got the numbers, outgunning us on the field by about a 2 to 1 margin.

The fight started when the timer finished its count down.  We had subcap fleets on the Fortizar with fax support for reps.  They had subcaps on hand as well, but started dropping dreadnoughts near us almost right away, the first group landing pretty much on top of the Fort.

On the Fortizar

The Rokh fleet started shooting a TEST nightmare fleet and managed some kills but, as the fight escalated and people kept piling in, the server began to stagger under the weight of commands.  And a struggling server can be a capricious factor.  Back at the KVN-36 fight, the node went down and won us the timer.  This time around the node stayed up, but balked at our super carriers jumping in, with a bunch failing to jump and those that made it getting disconnected.

That stopped the battle escalation in its tracks.  Titans were not deployed and the supers started getting pulled back.  The fight devolved to an attempt to kill as many attacking dreadnoughts as possible.  We were told to stop fighting, tether up, and to get to our Keepstar in system to grab an interdictor to hold down enemy dreads.

That was easier said that done.  I sat for about 20 minutes trying to get my drones taken care of… somebody’s smart bomb managed that for me in the end… my guns to cycle down and for tethering to finally grab me.  And it was a near run thing too.  As I was watching the aggression timer count down the last 20 seconds… at 10% speed due to tidi… a hostile Munnin fleet that was rolling through the scrum decided to target me.  I could see their yellow boxes turn to red as their damage started to land on me.  I overheated my hardeners and hoped for the best.  The timer ended and there was a long wait as my shields dropped below half to almost one quarter before tether hit and I was invulnerable.

I’m going to say that tethering is pretty OP, even when it saves my ship.

Then it was just a matter of getting over to the Keepstar… through a field of warp interdiction bubbles.

Bubble, bubbles everywhere

I spent quite a while trying to motor off in a direction that would get me a clear line of warp to the Keepstar.  I went and did the dishes while that was going on.  When I was back it seemed like every time I seemed to be clear, the server would decide that a Sabre had launched its bubble before I had initiated warp and I would be back to trying to get clear again.

Meanwhile more and more Sabres were being bridged in as bubbles when up all over to hold down hostile dreads.

Bubbles all over the place

Eventually I managed to warp off and made it to the Keepstar, but by then it was getting late for me on a work night.  The battle seemed to have reached its crescendo and was now wandering slowly to its conclusion.  I decided to go to bed.

The Imperium lost, undoubtedly and without question.

We lost the objective.  For all of our dread killing the enemy was able to keep applying damage to the Fortizar and it is now set for its final timer this weekend.

We also lost the ISK war by a two to one margin, with the battle report showing us having lost over 756 billion ISK in ships while the attackers lost shy of 380 billion ISK.

Battle Report Header

Two thirds of our ISK loss can be chalked up to the 16 super carriers that we blown up after  jumping in, a tally that includes a Vendetta faction super carrier.  That Vendetta was 19% of our ISK loss in a single ship.  Luckily the two other Vendettas that jumped in got away, or the count would have been much higher.  But that is the risk you take when you allow your pilots to bring their expensive toys to the fight.  The 300+ interdictors we sacrificed to hold down enemy dreads… we might have gone a bit overboard on that… added another 25 billion to the total.

The bulk of the enemy losses came from the 90 dreadnoughts that we managed to kill on the Fortizar, close to a quarter of the 375 they dropped into the battle.

And yet, even having suffered an undeniable defeat, things are not downcast on our side of the war.

Yes, people are pissed about how the servers decided to roll this time.  The first post up about the battle was over at INN complaining about that.  However, somebody is always pissed at the servers when tidi goes beyond 10% and things just stop working.  Generally both sides are, as it leads to missed opportunities.

But there is also the knowledge that this fight is a sign of how hard the invaders are going to have to work to defeat us.  This fight wasn’t even in Delve.  This fight wasn’t even on a Keepstar.  This fight didn’t even escalate to titans.  This fight wasn’t even all that consequential.  There is another timer to go.

But this fight was just a taste of what is to come.  This was the first trillion ISK battle in what may end up being a series of them.  The question is who is going to get sick of this sort of thing first?

In the slow motion scrum of battle

Since Vily has declared this to be a war of extermination, I am guessing we’re good doing this at least a hundred more times.  What other choice do we have?

Of course, that idea must weigh on him as well.  If you look at who showed up to the fight you will see that, once again, PandaFam was there doing the heavy lifting, as they have throughout the war.  If they get tired of this and go back home… which is what they did during the Fountain War, abandoning TEST to their fate… the invasion will be over.

That isn’t going to happen any time soon, but neither is the conquest of Delve.  We’ll have to wait to see who can last the longest.

Other Coverage:

• New Eden Post – Timeline of the battle
• New Eden Post – Supercapital Showdown and What Comes Next
• INN – The Battle of 49-U6U

Eleven Weeks of World War Bee

When we started this war, we knew that we were fighting this to the end,” Vily told Polygon. “For us, this is a war of extermination. This is a war to the death. We are aiming for the removal of Mittani and The Imperium from Eve Online. […] We are here to purge them.

-Vily, in an interview with Polygon about the war

When, further on down the road, somebody asks what the goal of the war was, I will reference this quote.  It is one thing to say it in your alliance update, or on /r/eve, or in some other dark corner of the internet, but when he has given it to the mainstream gaming press, that is now the benchmark by which he will be measured.

Vily is allegedly aggrieved because he was “fired” by the Imperium, something he explains in that article.  However, people who were around at the time remember him leaving amicably.  And the Imperium has, up through the last CSM election, put Vily on their ballot because he was viewed as somebody they could work with.  Also, there is that long non-invasion pact we had with Legacy when PanFam was their enemy.  Not behavior consistent with the Vily narrative.

Anyway, he and Progodlegend continued to push a narrative that Goons are bad for the game,  forming a huge blue doughnut against us while repeatedly using a scene from 300 where the Spartans claim “warrior” as their profession as part of his narrative.

Somehow the Imperium are the Persians in this scenario, the farmers and other non-combat types who are… completely outnumbered by an overwhelming force attacking their territory?  That doesn’t sound right.

And it is especially suspect when you look at the MER and see who is farming.  But I’m just a brainwashed Imperium line member (per Vily), so maybe I’ve mislearned that historical metaphor.

On the bright site, TEST has changed its tune on operational tempo.  February is no longer the target date for VD Day (victory in Delve).  They have decided they will only need until the end of October, though that might only be the 1DQ1-A victory date.  It only took until week eleven to declare that the invasion has begun.   We will see if they actually attack in Delve some time soon.

The Northern Front

There isn’t a “Northern Front” to speak of now.  All but four of the invader’s ihubs have been removed by The Initiative as of this writing.  They even got the staging Fortizar.  Anything left behind will end up in Hophib via asset safety.  The Initiative even visited there.  Basically, the attackers are gone, we aren’t doing much there other than clearing out the remains, and nobody lives there for now.

The Southern Front

Querious is now where the action is.  Last week I speculated about whether the invaders might be making for NPC Delve given their run of attacks on the northern systems that lead there.

However, their eyes were apparently focused on another target, the 49-U6U system.

They first dropped a Keepstar in 1M4-FK, which seemed a little short of where they might want to be for NPC Delve, though it was a single jump from their staging in Khanid low sec.

Then they put up a Keepstar in P-ZMZV, which definitely ruled out NPC Delve as the immediate goal.  Instead they were using that as a staging to take the ihub in 49-U6U, an operation where they got out 3,000 pilots for node contest.  That was more than enough to take the ihub.

Querious – Sep 20, 2020 – Invasion route and ihub status

The system is important to them because it is on the direct route from Catch to Querious.  Those who have been following along at home might remember that PandaFam and Legacy concentrated all of their supers and titans in two Keepstars, laid down expressly to dock them, early in the war.  That seemed like it might be their invasion route.

Where they started out and the current focus

And then, of course, those ships sat there and did nothing while KarmaFleet camped the gate in 49-U6U with a cruiser gang.

Later the invaders laid down a chain of 13 Keepstars to move the supers and titans all the way around to Fountain to bring overwhelming force to bear on the Imperium Keepstars in Fountain.

Once done there, they moved to Khanid low sec to focus on Querious.  Now their attention has finally turned to 49-U6U.  It seems like they could have force the gate a while back, but maybe they don’t have the thousand titans about which Progodlegend was boasting a few weeks back.

Now, with the 49-U6U ihub in their hands, we can no longer cyno jam the system if we want, so they used their advantage to… make the slowest move op ever, gating one dreadnought at a time through the gate into Querious to jump them to their new staging in P-ZMZV.  They were paranoid enough to be worried about getting caught by Imperium supers and titans that they wouldn’t put more that one dread on grid at a time… covered by three subcap fleets around the gate… but not paranoid enough to just use the chain of Keepstars to jump their caps around into Querious the long way.  It seems odd.

Systems in titan range of P-ZMZV and supply routes

Meanwhile, there is still an Imperium Keepstar and Fortizar in 49-U6U.  They reinforced the Fortizar, but then stood down for the armor timer when they found they did not out number us sufficiently to take the fight.  Who were the Spartans in that scenario?

But they’ll have to fight us on Keepstars and Fortizars in range of our caps at some point.  So far they have only faced subcap resistance, with some dread and carrier support, and had to bring out their own supers to overcome that.  It is going to be fun when we have titans on the structures waiting for them.

My Participation

This week was Slippery Pete week for me, the name referring to a Tengu doctrine fit with the covert and interdiction nullified subsystems.  This allows them to use black ops jump bridges and pass through warp disruption bubbles.  They are slow to align and not at all tanky, but can blap targets out to 200km and warp off before you can get to them.  You don’t hold the grid with them, you warp in on a group attacking a target and savage them from range then warp off, only to return from another direction and pick off more targets.

Petes on the move

I got in a Pete fleet four nights running during the week, and we managed to frustrate hostiles attacking our structures in Querious, saving a Fortizar while bleeding the enemy and making them jump their caps out prematurely, even killing an Apostle, a Thanatos, and a Revelation along the way.

Petes on the Apostle kill

Petes are a lot of fun and inflict a lot of damage for very few losses when used correctly.

I was also on the ops around 49-U6U.  Friday night I was in the wall of battleships there to defend our Fortizar in the system.

Battleships massed

That was the Fortizar timer I mentioned above where were were outnumbered by the attackers declined to take the fight.  So we reinforced the ihub in the system, so now they’ll have to at least form up to defend it because we have a whole SIG dedicated to entosis ready to contest it if they do not.

I was also around for the hostile move op through 49-U6U, though they were so cautious that there was never an opportunity for a fight as they ran their caps through the gate one at a time.

However, later that evening they got careless and Kun’mi and his dread group dropped on a TEST titan, killing it on their Fortizar in 4-07MU.  They responded with a dread fleet smaller than the group that dropped on the titan… I guess all their friends moved already… and a brawl ensued.  I jumped in a Ferox fleet that burned in to support the dreads and got on a few hostile dread kills (and one fax) as we helped clear tackle so our own caps could extract.

A Revelation goes up as we fly past

The battle report shows things fell our way.

Battle Report Header

I ended up getting caught on the gate trying to get out, so lost my Ferox, but it was still a hell of a fight, run and gun and go go go.

So I ended up the week with having been in a few good fights, having gotten on quite a few kills, all for the loss of one Ferox.  My loss total for the war across all accounts is now:

• Ares interceptor – 9
• Atron entosis frigate – 5
• Ferox battle cruiser – 3
• Drake entosis battle cruiser – 3
• Guardian logi – 2
• Malediction interceptor – 2
• Scalpel logi frigate – 2
• Scimitar logi – 1
• Bifrost entosis command destroyer – 1
• Cormorant destroyer – 1
• Purifier stealth bomber – 1
• Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
• Sigil entosis industrial – 1

Other Bits

The invaders remain careful… hesitant at times… and no doubt the titan kill I mentioned above is an indication as to why.

Their leadership is telling their members that we’re already dead, that the end is a foregone conclusion, that victory is theirs to take.  It is all the slanted rhetoric of war, and I would expect nothing less.

But, at some point, they are going to have to get on grid with one of our Keepstars within range of our supers and titans, something that has yet to happen, and put that rhetoric to the test.

Maybe.  I guess.

I mean, Dunk Dinkle was on Talking in Stations saying that they don’t want to do that, that they might never do that.  Instead they want to keep laying down a bunch of Keepstars to try and bait us into fighting on their grid.

I remain mystified about this apparent plan to build a Maginot Line of defensive Keepstars in hopes that we’ll attack them.  It worked so well for the French in 1940.  Or maybe the Italians invading Egypt in 1940 is the better metaphor.  I don’t know, and I might fall back into a “that’s not how invasions work” routine if I am not careful.  Though, if they get one close enough to us, I am sure we will attack it.  We have attacked defended Keepstars before, and won.

It the end, it seems pretty silly.   If you’re going to run a war of extermination (see quote at the top of the post), don’t you have to actually go in and get the people you plan to exterminate?  How are they going to makes us leave the game if they don’t have a plan to blow up our stuff?  How do you achieve the declared victory condition with that mindset?

Anyway, the lack of offensive spirit in our foes probably explains why the Sunday PCU counts for the war remain tepid.  You need a big battle to get big numbers.

• Day 1 – 38,838
• Week 1 – 37,034
• Week 2 – 34,799
• Week 3 – 34,692
• Week 4 – 35,583
• Week 5 – 35,479
• Week 6 – 34,974
• Week 7 – 38,299
• Week 8 – 35,650
• Week 9 – 35,075
• Week 10 – 35,812
• Week 11 – 35,165

I fear we may have blown the horn of Goondor too soon.  The enemy remains tentative.

Other articles about the war this week:

• INN – The Art of War: WWB and PanFam
• INN – The Rhetoric of War: A Double-Edged Sword
• INN – Metrics that Matter
• INN – Retaking Fountain, Plus an Ark
• INN – Legacy SOTA: Math and Maps
• INN – The Art of War: WWB and TEST
• INN – World War Bee: Week 11

(I’d link something other than INN, but EN24 just reposts CCP press releases these days and the New Eden Post has an apparent article quota of about 2 per month, and they blew one of them on EVE Echoes so far this month.)

The Hot Spot in New Eden

I haven’t seen a big red spot on the map like that since Burn Jita. (Though Jita’s was bigger.)

TEST and Pandemic Legion have their own war going on in the south now, while we have our own in the north.  We were all at 49-U6U less than a month ago.  Now there has been not just one, but two battles for this key system in Querious, sitting as it does on the border with Catch.

TEST still holds it, but it is clearly being contested for now.

49-U6U – Another Night, Another Boat Fleet

My people, we are facing heavy resistance tonight in 49-, the most key system in the Southeast. Our TCU has not onlined and the foe are trying to launch towers there; I need everyone to wake up and be prepared for a late US TZ slugfest. We need to win 49- and claim sov tonight, or else this system will go into Dominion Limbo.

The original goon broadcast was by the_mittani to all-all

After the long fleet operations of the weekend, I was going to skip that sort of things for a few days.

Gaff, who had also recently been away on vacation, made it down to Delve and was IM’ing me about cheap Rifters up on contract.  I logged on and grabbed one… because I really need another ship to leave behind after the deployment wraps up… I still have a couple of ships up in Tenal left over from the conquest there… and joined him on the semi-premenant camp of the PR-8CA gate in 1DH-SX.

That gate is sort of the front line for the moment.  The SoCo camps one side pretty much non-stop and we camp the other, each hoping to snag a straggler or infiltrator.  It is the reason that you wait for a titan to bridge you into the on and off camp of 319-3D, as you are likely to get picked off if you try to run the few systems there by yourself.

So I joined the fleet, logged into voice coms, and formed up on Gaff on the gate and zoomed around in a MWD Rifter for a while.

In the progression of things early on in my EVE career, I went almost straight to battlecruisers, spending as little time in frigates as you possibly managed.  This “go big” attitude was formed because the very first post-tutorial mission I picked up in game was Worlds Collide.  So I pretty much went to destroyers as soon as I could, then battlecruisers, and then battleships.

In the drag bubbles at

So, for me, there is still a sense of freshness, or newness in flying a frigate.  I was quite enjoying zooming around in excess of 3km a second around the gate, guns loaded and wondering if I might actually get to shoot something.

And then the word came down for an emergency fleet form up.

It wasn’t the message quoted at the top of this post from The Mittani.  That came later.

No, this was from Dabigredboat and was of the “Get in fleet! Get in a Drake! Get on the titan in F2OY-X! Hurry! Hurry! Fight going on NOW!”

And somehow, I always fall for the promise of a “fight now.”

So I left the camp in 1DH, took the gate to F2O, and mulled over just staying in my Rifter… might I actually get to web/tackle?

I decided to go with the old standard, swapped to a Drake, and got to the POS just as the titan bridge went up.  I had to turn on the MWD to get to it in time to catch the bridge, giving it a bump for good measure.  Hey, it was DBRB’s titan, he can take it.

We bridged into the region, moved a couple of systems, and then set up a camp on the gate at 8QT-H4.  It was then, when we were finally at rest for a bit, that DBRB took some time to explain what was up.

Men who stare at gates

We had a Territorial Claim Unit going online in 49-U6U, an important system in the Querious region as it has an outpost and is on the border with the Catch region, which starts to get into Against All Authorities home turf.  Once the unit finished and went online, sovereignty would change from Cascade Imminent to Goonswarm and we would have a new outpost to work with in a position where it could easily become the staging ground for operations in Catch.

During the period when the TCU is going online, which takes 8 hours, it is vulnerable to attack.  And SoCo decided to try and take it out in hopes of poking the CFC blob in the eye. (Their own attempt to plant one in the system got shot down earlier.)

There was actually another fleet in 49-U set to defend the system and chase off the SoCo fleet.  We were to be the blocking force, to camp a gate on the route through which the SoCo fleet would withdraw, assuming that they would head back to 319-3D where they had been staging so far.

The plan worked, to a limited extent.  The SoCo fleet did not come through en masse, but we were able to pop a few ships trying to head back to 319.  We then pulled back a system, to SVM-3K to give the illusion that the door was now open.  This brought a few more targets into our grasp, though much to the annoyance of the Drake pilots, there were several “Insta-Canes” in the fleet (Hurricane battlecruisers configured to lock and shoot targets very quickly) who managed to pick off almost all the enemy ships before the rest of us could lock them up.  I personally got on exactly one kill report there in a half a dozen tries.  I am going to have to look into that Hurricane fit if I want to kill whore with the pros I guess.

When that dried up, we moved off to try and track down the SoCo fleet.  It looked like a pile of them hit the station 5V-BJI, was in reinforce and which seemed to be having some graphics issues on my system.

Shouldn’t that shield graphic overlay the station graphic?

The SoCo fleet appeared to be leaving or logging off at that point, so we returned to 49-U6U, where they had planted a tower in order to keep a foothold in the system.  It had not gone online and so we warped to it in order to shoot it up.

Chipping away at the tower

This was a large tower and our fleet shooting at it was not doing huge amounts of damage.  Fortunately for us, by this time The Mittani’s call had gone out and had been responded to and further reinforcements were sent our way, including some capital ships.

Dreadnoughts join the shoot

The tower went down, so now I have a structure on this month’s kill board.  Go me, I suppose.

And then we began what is often, subjectively speaking, the longest stage of any DBRB fleet; the gap between when Boat says we are going home and when we actually do go home.  I realize that once he has a weapon in his hands along with access to alliance intel, the desire to smite just one more thing must be pretty big.

So it was the usual routine.  Set destination, all gates green.  No, stop on gate X, gate X is red.  All gates green until gate Y, hold on gate Y.  We need to hold here for a few minutes.  And so on and so forth.

Intellectually, I know he does it for good reason.  However, the fleet in general does not have access to the same intel, so we just get surly and impatient.  We fidget in our seats, punch our siblings, and keep asking, “Are we there yet?”  Minutes start to seem like hours and we’re all thinking, “Just say ‘go!’ already!”

Eventually we got to 319-3D, where we were going to stop… or camp the station… or sit in the safe POS… when DBRB announced that all gates were green back to F2OY-X and we were free to go.  And off we went, a blob of Drakes rushing along, bursting through the eternal gate camp where I started off and back to the station.

This morning I checked as saw that sovereignty had changed hands and that Goonswarm now had a station on the border of Catch.

And as we are getting there, The Mittani seems unsure about continuing on into Catch.

I'm coming to realize that taking Catch would be beneath us. Even IRC would be a more challenging conquest. #tweetfleet #eveonline

— ~Abolish the Police~🌹 (@TheMittani) July 9, 2012

Meanwhile, there is a diplomatic call out to flee the sinking ship that is the unhappy SoCo. (You have to log into the EVE forums to use that link I am afraid. Otherwise you get a 404 error, which seems like the completely wrong way to handle things, but that might just be me.)

So while there is a pretty well written summary of how we all got here in Delve, where it goes from here seems to be, as yet, unwritten, whether it be a great war or not.