In Reavers Asher used to always talk about “putting money in the bank” for our preparatory operations. We would spend evenings flying around, shooting structures, setting timers, and laying the groundwork for potential battles.
And, of course, having deployed to Fade to bring war to Fraternity and its WinterCo allies, we were clearly going to be out putting money in the bank on a lot of structures in Pure Blind and Tribute. So I was right there and ready to go when Asher wanted to take out some fleets for that purpose.
There were a couple of fleets going out, but I went with the Leshak fleet that Asher was leading. It is a sign of Asher’s reign that we’re getting some interesting and expensive doctrines in the mainstream of the Imperium. Leshak’s were once something that were tolerated in a couple of fleet comps, then became a SIG specific fleet comp for structure bashes, and now it is open to everybody who has the ISK.
Leshak fleet on the way
I do not have that much ISK to spend, so I joined up on the logi side of things. A tech II logistics cruiser is more in my price range.
The Leshak is fun to watch. Triglavian ships have a single beam weapon that spools up damage over time. Asher warped us in a wall formation to our first target, a Fraternity Keepstar, and I tried to capture what it looked like with a host of red beams reaching out to hit the structure.
Red beams reaching out
Unlike lasers, the beams are on all the time, so there is a convergence of them on the target all the time. Because of the way EVE Online targeting works, you quickly get a sense of the points on a hull or structure that weapons are allowed to hit.
Or everybody is just aiming for that one spot
And the damage output from a wall of Leshaks is pretty fierce. We burned through the shield timer on two Keepstars in record time.
We also spent a little bit of time reinforcing a Fortizar or two.
Brackets on, walls of battleships hitting a Fortizar
We spent some time traveling around to our targets, setting up timers that will come up deep in alarm clock time for those of us in the US.
Leshaks moving again
The locals did a little to respond to our efforts. They were waylaying some stragglers who fell behind at one point and Vily was out with some bombers trying to catch us on gates with a bomb run.
Bombs landing as a fleet gates away
We made our rounds, did our shoots, then got a ride back towards home on a titan.
Sending us home
We happened to arrive back at the same time that some titans from The Initiative were landing back on our staging Keepstar as well.
Everybody landing between the uprights
They had been out doing their own reinforcement ops. All told, we set armor timers on four Keepstars in Pure Blind along with a series of smaller structures.
But the big newsworth item that got pinged out for our op was that we somehow managed to ALL be aligned for a warp.
Asher lets everybody know about our achievement
This seems like trivia, and it certainly isn’t the FIRST perfect fleet warp I have been a part of, but when you have a full 255 member fleet with a battleship doctrine in time dilation… because pushing a few full fleets around Pure Blind was dragging the servers down… and having everybody actually paying attention and doing the right thing at the right time, that is a rare event. There is almost always somebody who didn’t hear or had to step away or for whom the UI failed to register the align command.
Of course there was the ping and now a Reddit thread, which includes an image from the internal new post about the miracle warp. It was an event.
Somebody also happened to catch a screen shot of our fleet ball in the Cloud Ring nebula looking like a menacing eye.
The Leshaks are watching
Now we just have to get back online for the next timers which will be around 10:00 UTC on the day most of the US leaps forward into Daylight Savings Time. That means… it will be either a really early morning or a really late night for those of us in the US.
We will see who shows up to fight over the timers soon enough though.
Addendum:
Somebody put together a quick video of some of the structure shoot ops.
You can, if you look carefully and the quick camera moves haven’t made you ill, spot Asher leading the Leshaks, and a couple of the battleship walls including the one I have a screen shot of above around the Fortizar.
Move ops continue to run from Delve. It takes a while to get everybody online and moved to the front lines. A full week of daily move ops is pretty normal for a coalition sized move, and some people will still miss their ride and have to find their way northward.
Those still hanging out in Delve thinking that they can perhaps rat and mine in peace while war rages elsewhere have been in for a bit of the usual surprise. I may not know how wed Pandemic Horde is to defending its allies in Fraternity and WinterCo, but they have been much more active out of NPC Delve, hunting for those who think running CRAB beacons during war time is a good idea.
At the front, things have been developing slowly. Fleets have been going out and the stage is being set, but there have not be any titanic, tidi inducing clashes since we have arrived. There haven’t been any critical, red pen ops yet.
But there was one op I had to go on the other night because of who was going to lead it. I mentioned back in November that Progodlegend, former CSM member, the person who declared the “million dollar battle” back in the day, one time member of TEST leadership, and a key figure in the PAPI’s 59 week war against the Imperium in 2020 and 2021, had joined Goonswarm. He was going to take out his first fleet for the Imperium.
That seemed like it might be an event, so I made sure I was around when it was time for the fleet. (Asher pinged this op out in advance to Reavers; we’re still special.)
So when the fleet was pinged out I was already logged in and ready to join. But the game wanted to know if I was really ready.
I keep the log window open by default…
I was, in fact sure, and once I was in I could see that Asher was going to be in the back seat for this, PGL’s first Imperium op.
The fleet command structure
That was pretty soon after the ping. The fleet expanded beyond 200 characters before too long and, with that, the required jokes were made. Would we be fitting rigs and how many interdictors would we need to avoid being yelled at, both related to moments in the last war that were repeated often.
PGL, as expected, took this all in stride and, once we were set, led us off into Deklein… which is always an odd experience, that having been our home from until mid-2016, so I have a ton of out dated bookmarks for staging POSes and jump bridge arrays… and into Venal where we caught titan bridge.
I only include this pic because we don’t see a Levi all that often
Our destination was Tribute and the system of UMI-KK… once again, a system of memories. Once the capitol of TNT’s holdings in the region, I remember taking it from N3 Coalition back in 2012.
Destination in sight
This time around it is at the edge of Fraternity’s holdings and we were there to blow up an Ansiblex jump gate that had been reinforced previously and hopefully get a fight.
We went in along with a fleet from B2 and another from The Initiative and setup around the Ansiblex.
The Ansiblex in sight
We spread out and put drones on the structure while a Fraternity HAC fleet sat on the Keepstar watching us. There was also a report of bombers lurking, looking for a run on us, which was why we were spread out and had bubbles around.
However, we brought too many ships for Fraternity to untether and try to stop us. Their fleet stayed on the Keepstar and we whittled down the Ansiblex.
Watching them watching us
Once it was destroyed we lingered a bit, then started a careful extraction from the system.
Another legendary moment from the last was was PAPI attempting to extract a HAC fleet from 3-DMQT and getting caught with MWDs on burning for the gate by a pack of bombers whose runs managed to destroy most of their ships before they were able to jump. It was an ignominious feat and one that PGL was clearly seeking to not repeat as we left UMI-KK by small groups.
We managed to extract safely. There was no massacre… well, unless you count the cost of going through B2 Coalition Ansiblexes. The prices seemed to be outrageous compared to what we pay back in Fountain and Delve.
Using a SCUM Ansiblex
Asher assured us that the prices had not been cranked up by B2 in order to soak their new allies from the south, but were just the normal prices. It turns out that ice products are more expensive in the north.
Otherwise it was a low intensity op with a kill mail, which everybody enjoys. PGL as an FC was clear in communication and got us there an back. That is about all I ask of an FC. Would fly with him again.
Saturday saw more than 3,700 ships in a single system engaged in a sprawling fight that went on for over seven hours. The thing is, there wasn’t any huge objective to be won. The fight was centered on a Brotherhood of Spacers (B0SS) alliance Fortizar anchored in Venal, and NPC controlled region of null sec. Fraternity, which controls the regions around it has been pressing into the region which is where a lot of pirate faction missions.
In fact, if you look at the Monthly Economic Report for October, which started reporting on loyalty points, you will see that Venal is at the top of that list. So it is lucrative NPC space and Fraternity would like to keep others from living there.
So they were set to form up, along with their PAPI ally Pandemic Horde, and commit capitals and battleship doctrines to overwhelm BOSS, which is small relative to either of those groups. It would be very hard for BOSS to defend against those odds.
New Message from ‘@Gobbins’ (Gobbins [HORDE]) in “pandemic-horde.discord” –
@everyone **PREPING: MAX DUDES TOMORROW EARLY EUTZ, SAT 16:00 EVE TIME**
Maximum girth full form. Capital move ops are also posted if you want to pre-move your caps.
This time we have ensured that all parties involved are fully organized.
But other groups, such as the Imperium, very much like to see Fraternity and its allies thrown back, the way they have been in Pure Blind in their war against Brave and its coalition. So it was that I saw on Friday afternoon a ping noting that there might be a big fight on Saturday and we should be on around 17:00 UTC if we wanted to join in.
Having some free time, I showed up and got in the first fleet, led by Asher himself. We were going to be using a revised version of our war time Sacrilege doctrine, a missile spewing Amarr armor tanked heavy assault cruiser.
He also explained the plan. Pandemic Horde was going to be there in a Paladin doctrine, which are marauders, an expensive tech II battleship hull. We were going there to kill paladins knowing we could probably break even on ISK exchange if we traded ten Sacs for each Paladin we killed, and more if we managed to pod the pilots, since the doctrine requires a set of Amulet implants, which can run to near a billion ISK on their own. (Like this pod.)
As third parties, we were going there for kills and were not all that concerned about the objective which was, after all, just an armor timer on a Fortizar on the other side of New Eden. We figured the attackers would win the timer and we would just be there to make sure the price for that win would be high.
So off we went. Our fleet filled up quickly and we ended up having three full fleets headed north from Delve.
Sacs on the way
The locals, who were also forming up to resist the Frat/Horde attack, gave us access to their Ansiblex jump gates to help us move through their territory, though the toll on some of their gates seemed a bit high. We’re spoiled in the Imperium, the land of low fees.
How much to jump through?
It took a while to get all the way up to Venal, even with jump gates. There is always this criticism of null sec that we can get all the way across New Eden in minutes. And we can with some planning if the fleet is 50-100 people tops. Shoving somewhere on the order of a thousand ships through the pipe from Delve to Venal… well, time dilation follows you wherever you go. We were a constant wave of time dilation as we moved through Fountain, Cloud Ring, into Deklein (and all those familiar systems), and finally to Venal. There were stops to let people catch up, stops to change the route, stops because the same people in Cloud Ring with that one gate camp dropped bubbles, and more stops to let people congregate when we needed to take a titan bridge.
Sacs waiting on a structure before the next leg of the trip
Some work and coordination was required to get us all up there.
Using a local structure to bridge us forward
It took us well over an hour to make the move, but we arrived just in time. We were all settling in on the B0SS Fortizar with a little over six minutes left on the clock.
Time to spare before the fight
So there we are on the Fortizar and Asher is giving us our game plan. We can see the Horde Paladin fleet out there and we’re setting up to go get them, with assignments for tackle and targets and tracking disruptors, and this is all going to be more fun because there is a metaliminal plasma firestorm in the system which, among other things, includes a debuff to turret tracking.
Storm Effects
It also effects missile explosion radius, but that won’t do much to heavy missiles against battleship hulls, but the tracking thing will make us harder to hit, and all the more so when we add our own tracking disruption.
We are primed and ready to go. The timer has counted down, the hostiles are shooting the fort, the capitals on the hostile Fortizar have sent their fighters to help the structure shoot, we just have to anchor up on Asher and go get some Paladins. But then something is going on with the hostile capitals.
What is happening off to the right there?
Rather than getting stuck into the Paladins, Asher aligned us towards the hostile capitals and then we were warping into them.
The hostile caps stacked up in bubbles, made so red by the storm
We went in, found a Nyx we could tackle, and started in with the energy neutralizers and missiles and suddenly the hostiles had a scenario they didn’t seem to have anticipated. We had no capitals of our own, but now we were up close with their caps and they were starting to de-aggress and call in fax support.
So we were in there, holding down first one, then a few supers and blowing up faxes as they arrived. The tidi by that point was so bad, and we were putting out enough damage because other fleets were on grid with us, that I couldn’t even lock up and shoot some of the faxes before theyd been blow up. There were over 3,700 people in the system at that point.
Local says 3,713, and Tidi went back to 10% pretty quickly
I still managed to get on 15 of the fac kills, but I saw a number of additional faxes blow up before I could get a shot off.
Meanwhile, the hostile subcaps, who were shooting the B0SS Fortizar were being called to come get us off of the cap fleet, but our dictors were in between us and them dropping bubbles to keep them from being able to warp to us, keeping them out of the equation for a lot longer than we had any right to hope for.
Bubbles on grid keeping us safe
While we had to let the Nyx go because some subcaps eventually leaked through and we had to deal with them, we did manage to grab onto a Hel super carrier and slowly grind it down even as more faxes were coming in, even as some of the caps were jumping out.
Our Hel, up close
We took long enough to kill it that it apparently became a topic on hostile Discord that the Hel was holding out against “900” heavy assault cruisers, a declaration by Norus, the leader of Fraternity.
I also liked 0Musky calling us blobbers when their operation was set from the start to get as many of their own caps and battleships on grid to win the battle and teach the locals a lesson. Can irony be too rich?
During that the word came to us that our bringing the battle to the capitals had drawn away enough firepower from the B0SS Fortizar that it repaired. The hostiles had lost the objective, and the ISK war was going very much against them, with it looking close to a 4 to 1 ratio in our favor.
At that point it was possible that the battle could have ended. The objective was secured, and combat after that would have been a bit gratutious. We could have tethered up and made plans to go home. We did, in fact, tether up for a short bit. But we had been promised Paladin kills and were being kind of whiny about not getting any. So we found some Horde Paladins to tangle with and got the promised kills.
We also got stuck pretty deep into a fight. While there were only around 3K people in system, that is still a lot of people and the grinding of multiple fleets together commenced.
In the thick of things
The exchange of losses became a lot more even, then weighed against us as many of the hostiles were staged close to hand while our losses ended up back in Delve. My own ship went up in the middle of the final great subcap scrum and I was left motoring around in my capsule, ignored while there were so many more lucrative targets about.
Capsule in the thick
If there isn’t a rush to get back into the fight, as there was when we were on the defense in Delve back during the war, I tend to try to get my capsule out, even if I don’t have implants, just to deny the hostiles one more insignificant kill. Also, hanging around meant I got credit for ships I had hit earlier but only blew up after I was unshipped.
I managed to slow boat my way to the edge of the bubble field, past the eerie wrecks of capitals littering the grid, list by the light of the storm and the ongoing explosions.
Dead Minokawa wrecks
I docked up in one of the structures we had access to and jump cloned home. Silly, but I felt like it was a minor achievement.
By then the fight was almost over. I had re-shipped back in Delve, but people were kind of tired. It was past midnight for the Euros and the fleet had run for over 6 hours by that point. We were done.
The results were still heavily in our favor. As third parties in a fight like that, we had the luxury of claiming any victory metric we cared to. As it so happens, we secured the objective and won the ISK war, so came out well no matter what we chose to point at. The battle report puts our ISK ratio closer to 2 to 1, but it was still quite the win.
Battle Report Header
There are a few variations of battle reports out there and they all seem to have the sides wrong in some way. I chose the one with the least amount of wrong. I also grabbed that image not too long after the fight, so another billion ISK of losses has shown up, but it get s the point across.
400 billion is a decent sized fight. It wouldn’t have ranked very high in the World War Bee battles, but for a peacetime conflict over a minor objective, that is a lot of ISK expended. Going back to the “blobbing” claim, the defenders did outnumber the attackers, which is never a good sign for the attacking side. On the other hand, the attackers came with capitals and supers, which should have pushed things their way if things had gone right.
As for lessons being taught, the locals had thrown together a video about the battle even as it was ending.
It was a fun time all the same. I am glad I had the time to travel up there and take the fight with our fleet. People will complain about 10% tidi grind fests being literal cancer, and if every fight was like that the game would be in trouble. But having a fight like that every couple of months… it is good, gets people worked up, and generates a shared experience that we can talk about when we meet up in person.
And, of course, it is nice to have a New Eden experience worth writing about. It has been kind of quiet for me since the war wrapped up over a year ago.
The only real downside to the whole affair was the Photon UI. I had it enabled because the finally fixed the Neocom issues and I am getting used to its quirks. Certainly improved readability on large screens was not on the list of issues for CCP to address.
But in a big fight under heavy tidi parts of the Photo UI become pretty much unusable. It lags, it breaks, it doesn’t respond. I had the outstanding calls window open and things like issuing commands to drones didn’t even make it there half the time. Meanwhile, CCP still believes that it the game is going at 10% then the UI should respond at 10% speed as well, and the Photon UI, in addition to its other sins, really seems to have problems with that. Overall, I was unhappy with its performance relative to the old UI. Basically, under tidi, you get all the same old responsiveness issues, plus some new bonus Photon UI exclusive issues.
Oh well. Maybe CCP will get to that before we have another war.
Every October I stop and note the anniversary of the founding of the Reavers SIG, a group within the Imperium in EVE Online. I usually forget the actual founding date (October 15th) and have to go look it up, but a post always appears.
Reavers forum bee
It is, by reputation, the SIG that does not exist or talk in local… except when it does. Or when we have Brisc Rubal along. He talks in local and flaunts the dress code, but when you’re a space famous CSM member you can get away with that sort of thing.
Unlike past years, I don’t have any posts here about the SIG to fall back on to help flesh out what happened over the last twelve months.
Then again, the last year or so hasn’t exactly seen EVE Online at its best. I wrote about the year of disappointment, where CCP promised to make things better… and then under-delivered, made things worse, or have yet to deliver. That is how you end up with charts like this one from Jester.
2019-2022 comparison
And I have a tough time seeing that trend being reversed with what CCP has promised, even if they deliver above and beyond.
Meanwhile, the Imperium has been off its game as well. Two attempts to get stuck into something in the southeast led to us being over extended and needing to retreat.
And Asher, the leader of the SIG, has his own set of responsibilities. He was sky marshal, leading the Imperium’s military through World War Bee, which kept him busy enough. But after the downfall of The Mittani, he became the overall leader of the Imperium… at a time when the game was seeing a decline in players, putting a bit more pressure on him to “do something.”
It isn’t as though Reavers have been completely dormant. There have been experiments and plans and we are even now deployed and looking for things to do.
Testing out… AOE ratting
The Imperium itself is in peacetime mode right now. The main fleets are back in 1DQ and homeland defense is the majority of pings these days. It is the time for the small groups, the SIGs and squads, to find their own missions.
So, while we haven’t been as active as back in the days when Asher only aspired to be the 23rd best FC in the Imperium, Reavers… like EVE Online… aren’t dead yet. We will see what the next year brings.
FI.RE and PanFam has been dogging this retreat, camping the route, and trying to make move ops as annoying as possible. By the time I had written that previous post I had already moved all of my assets out of Tenerifis to Catch. And it is a good thing too, because our Tenerifis staging Keepstar was destroyed not too long after.
Only three Keepstars have been destroyed in 2022, and all of them belonged to the Imperium at the time of their destruction… though that one back in January hardly counts against us. Army of Mango gave us that loot pinata, and we had fun blowing it up. (I’m on the kill mail for that Keepstar for sure. Also, this whole war was due to the power vacuum left between us and FI.RE after Army of Mango self-destructed.)
I had also moved my more expensive ships home. But I still had a few left in Catch and PanFam seemed intent on chasing us all the way home. The allied Keepstar in GE-8JV had a PanFam Fortizar anchored on grid with it and had its armor timer set the last time I was there. So it was both time to leave and not a good time to go alone.
My one valuable ship left behind was an Eagle heavy assault cruiser. I would have asked somebody in a capital ship to carry it in their SMA hangar, but our Eagle doctrine requires a bunch of module refits in the cargo, and you can’t have those in the cargo hold if you want to put the ship in an SMA. It was easier to just fly it than try to sort that out.
So a move op came up one evening last week and I happened to be online and ready to go. I figured I could get it and my other ship, an Oneiros that I had YOLO’d across Catch to get to the deployment (then never used) back home and be done with it.
That was when I ran into some problems.
The first was solvable, but a bit embarrassing. I could not find the move op fleet in the fleet finder. I refreshed it, logged out and back in, and it would not show up. I finally asked on voice coms if the advert for the fleet was up and eventually the FC asked me to X up in alliance chat to contact me directly. It was then he asked if I had blocked him in-game. I checked and… yeah, I had done that. I seem to recall some fleet during World War Bee where I might have had enough of him spamming fleet chat. Anyway, it is never a good move to have to tell the person who is leading you home that you have blocked them.
That solved, I ran into the second problem, which was that my second account had lapsed. For the war I had taken advantage of CCP’s multi-account price offer to subscribe it. However, when I did that, it was a non-recurring offer, so when the time ran out, the account went Alpha clone and I couldn’t log it in with my main online, or even fly the Oneiros even if I could. And I wasn’t going to resubscribe for one move op. So figured I would deal with the Oneiros later.
The move op itself was not particularly eventful. It was slow, given that it is only ten gate and Ansiblex jumps back to 1DQ, but PanFam had a fleet out to mess with us and we had some stragglers and the occasional disconnect. Still we got home safe and sound.
Eagle on the way home
That done, I looked an realized I had an alt on my main account parked in the GE-8JV Keepstar and he had just enough skills to fly the Oneiros. So I swapped around logins to contract it to him from my lapsed second account, then got him in the ship. Most of the modules were online. He could get it home with the next move op.
Or… I could just YOLO that ship again and get home right then and there. It was late, there were only 11K people logged in, and I had been lucky flying that particular hull in stupid circumstances previously, so why no just go for it?
This was a bad idea, especially with a PanFam fleet known to be out and about… but maybe they had stood down. So I undocked and off I went.
The Oneiros flies again
And I made it, though not without some anxiety. The game seemed to be in one of those moods where it didn’t want to flag blues in local as blue, so everybody had no status, so they could have all been hostile. But nobody tackled me on a gate and I docked up safely in 1DQ.
Then I looked at his assets and realized that he had been out in the Keepstar in Catch because he had flown out there in a Vigil, and that Vigil was still out there. I supposed I could have just left it there, but I contracted it to my main who still had his death clone set there, logged him back in, claimed the ship, death cloned back, and decided to make the run again.
This was a very bad idea. I can occasionally get lucky and make a run through space and make it, but when I get cocky and decide to repeat it, I get nabbed by somebody who noticed the traffic and set up a gate camp about half the time. It never pays to push your luck.
On the other hand, this was a T1 frigate that I was never going to bother retrieving from asset safety if it went there, so what the hell. Better to lose it now than have something sitting in yet another station I was never going to visit again. So off I went.
The Vigil on the move
The Vigil made it home safely as well. I was done with my evac from the war and had everything back at home.
At the fireside yesterday Asher noted that we were now in peacetime mode in the Imperium. We are not, as a full organization, engaged in operations outside of our space. It will be back to SIGs and squads and small group actions or homeland defense fleets for those looking for a bit of action.
He did make it clear that we would be defending the Keepstars on the periphery of our empire with maximum efforts if it came to that. [Edit: Well, not that one I guess.] But for now, the war is off and we’re back in Delve.
On Thursday we got a big announcement. Asher Elias, long time bloc level fleet commander and the Imperium sky marshal during World War Bee, was stepping up to lead Goonswarm Federation, and by extension the Imperium, filling the leadership vacuum left by the departure of The Mittani.
Welcome to the new regime.
You think darkness is your ally. But you merely adopted the dark.
I can’t actually remember why I threw together that Asher/Bane mash up image last year… there was probably some running gag on one of his fleets… but it was the only image of his character I had readily to hand. And a new leader has to project a fearsome image, right?
Long time readers of this blog might find the name familiar. Including this post I have 105 posts tagged with “Asher Elias” going back to a rupture fleet he ran back in 2014 where we got bombed into oblivion.
He has more positive mentions as leader of the Reavers SIG within the Imperium, founded back in 2015, which I happened to stumble into just as it was being formed, something that changed the game for me.
Reavers forum bee
I blame Asher and Reavers for my continuing to play EVE Online for the last seven years or so because going from main fleet to a SIG that did special operations and its own doctrines kept null sec alive and interesting for me. A couple of times over the last few years I have thought it might be time to take a break… and then a Reavers deployment comes up and I am back in the game again.
In addition to being sky marshal and running the Reavers SIG he has run the Goonswarm alliance tournament team and currently stands as the pilot on the most kill mails in all of the Goonswarm Federation alliance, standing at 26,691 kills as I write this.
The GSF top five pilots based on kill mails – GinFOX is catching up
Known for his meticulous planning and audacious schemes… which includes trying to boosh subcaps into optimum range of a HAW dread to helping put together Operation Ehno, the attempt to trap and kill PAPI supers at YZ9-F6… he play the null sec fleet operations game at the highest level.
If there was anybody more unlike The Mittani when it came to the game, it would be hard to find them. Mittens bragged about never logging in and playing the meta game, using the weekly Meta Show to harangue our foes and call them names in order to enrage them and get them to come at us.
Asher, while he has his own Twitch channel, is probably better known there and on YouTube for his League of Legends videos. He is mild of temper and not prone to throwing insults or creating bad feelings.
In a prepared speech he read today (which you can listen to here or read here or at the end of this post) after TheAdj announced he would be taking over the reigns of the alliance and coalition, he charted out a different path forward. Rather than going on weekly shows to mock our foes in order to get them to hate us, he said we would be pursing an in-game strategy of actually attack them and taking their space in order to get them mad at us.
As part of this the Imperium will be taking more risks, because risks lead to the type of fights that make this game memorable, that make ongoing tales of null sec worth writing books about.
He said during his speech that the Imperium had previously been following a line of simply not losing. As an example, he said that after the twin battles on the Keepstar at M2-XFE he said our foes were demoralized, their titans trapped, and were worried that we would take out their Keepstar in NPC Delve, cutting their safe route into Delve. They were alleged to be surprised that we did not move against them, choosing instead to abandon our defense of the Helms Deep systems and any pretense of attack in order to sit and camp their titans until they revived the morale of their line members and resumed grinding down Delve, and freeing most of their trapped titans in order to resume the offensive.
Asher, sky marshal of the Imperium, whose job was to coordinate and plan the strategy of the war, was forbidden by Imperium leadership from attacking the PAPI Keepstar in Delve.
The war could have been won, decisively, with an explosive battle, rather than being dragged out for months and months until the enemy finally retreated in dismay, undefeated in battle, but worn down by the long siege of 1DQ1-A.
The reason for the decision to leave the Keepstar alone was that to attack it contained an element of risk. It would have been a gamble, and nobody at the top wanted to roll the dice. So the war went on.
So part of Asher’s comments were that we would, as an organization, be taking more risks and committing more heavily to war. His speech was followed up by a call to deploy more forces to the front in the war against FI.RE in Tenerifis and Immensea. Capitals and supers were being moved. The war was going to be dialed up, with the possibility that this escalation might bring a response from other groups. We shall see.
But it is a different message with a different tone. We will let the weight of our forces do the talking.
The only downside to this is that the responsibilities of state will likely keep Asher from being able to lead Reavers ops. But I can say that the leader of the Imperium knows who I am. And if you tackle my jump freighter, you can be sure I’ll mention that I know Asher Elias.
We don’t know how long he will remain in charge, though he did say in an interview on Theta Thursday that he wasn’t going to stick around for a dozen year like The Mittani did.
It has been a while since I have been in a fight in the was that was worth a post, but last night we had quite the time. It was time to get Munnins out to shoot things.
Muninns out for a shoot
It started with an innocuous ping from Asher calling for a Muninn fleet. It was only about 10:30pm local time for me, not too late to join in on something on a Saturday night.
Asher calls
There were about 100 people in fleet when I joined, which swelled up past 150 before we undocked.
When we did undock, we warped over to a titan that bridged us into NOL-M9 in Delve, a system with some history, both old and recent. In fact, it had been the focus of a clash earlier in the day when PAPI forces tried and failed to kill an Imperium Astrahus in the system. That structure, now safe, was where we landed. Once assembled, we moved over to a PAPI Fortizar which we started shooting. The plan was to try and reinforce and to see if we could draw a response.
Asher kept us appraised of PAPI’s ping status, the joke now being that they have to ping multiple times to get enough pilots into a fleet in order to come fight us. On our side pings went out with links to The Count from Sesame Street to indicate how many pings they needed.
Six! Six fleet pings! Ah ah ah ah!
Eventually that number would far exceed how high The Count usually takes his numbers on the show.
They put a Falcon on the Fortizar, on tether but as far from us as they could, which seemed to indicate that they would be bridging in an opposing fleet soon. As the likelihood of its arrival grew, Asher had us split out one gun from out stack to keep on the Fortizar while the rest would be for the battle.
A Ferox fleet joined us, along with some bombers, and PAPI eventually dropped Muninns of their own along with carriers and fax support. It became a fairly even exchange between the Muninn fleets, but we still managed to set the armor timer for the Fortizar.
Muninns and Carriers around the Fort
And then, with the timer set and no need to split guns any further, Asher noticed that one of the faxes was off tether. So we loaded up short range, high damage ammo and he brought us in very close, inside the PDS range of the structure, where we took a shot and one of the faxes… and managed a kill.
A fax kill
Then we managed to grab another. Then another. And finally a fourth. Four faxes down.
Four Faxes Destroyed
That turned what was already a bit of smug… we managed to ref one of their structures while in combat when they had capitals on the field… into a very smug moment for us. Asher warped us off the Fortizar and back to our Astrahus, the job done.
The battle report fell in our favor, helped along by those four faxes. We got the objective and won the ISK war.
Battle Report Header from NOL-M9
Asher pointed us back towards home in 1DQ1-A and the Muninns and Feroxes started gating back. But before we got too far, Asher asked us to respond in fleet whether we would like to just go home and stand down or if we wanted to try and reinforce another structure on the way. We voted to reinforce.
Mind1, who was doing the Saturday night show, got in our fleet and joined in the fun, streaming our progress and laying down a motivational beat. Did you know that the Imperium has its own official DJ? It is a glorious thing. You should check out his stream.
So we stopped one system short of home, in T5ZI-S, the home staging system in Delve for the PAPI coalition, the place where all of their members are supposed to be and where all their ships and supplies are stored. We were going to hang out in the lion’s den and shoot a structure. We would see how awake the lion really was.
Not very.
After a while shooting the Fortizar without a response, Asher moved the Muninn fleet over to their main Sotiyo engineering complex, pretentiously named “Forge of Heroes,” in order to see if that would provoke PAPI to action.
Shooting the Sotiyo
You can see in that screen shot, below the Sotiyo, their Keepstar in the system. That is their main base. We were that close to the heart of enemy and for a long stretch the only opposition we faced was the gunner in the structure shooting bombs at us.
I have trouble visualizing something like this happening one gate over in 1DQ1-A, our home, where the presence of bads tends to draw an eager response from people looking for combat.
The first response from PAPI was to get out carriers and HAW dreads to make sure we didn’t take out any of their cyno jammers. Fighters were sent to cover those as that is all that stands between them and the looming menace of our titans and supers. Progodlegend, the leader with Vily or TEST, got out on the Sotiyo to assess the situation, but didn’t do much otherwise.
The Fortizar was reffed by the Feroxes, who then came over to join us on the Sotiyo. The hostiles eventually joined us as well. Asher had us strip a single gun out of our stack yet again to keep on the Sotiyo and then we started going after the hostiles. They brought a Ferox fleet of their own and it was on.
Time dilation hit 10% at points and there were nearly 1,200 people in the system, but the biggest frustration was that my guns would cycle fast enough so I ended up only getting on every second or third kill mail, the hostile Feroxes were blowing up so fast.
We stayed in range of the Sotiyo and kept one gun on it while blapping hostiles as quickly as our guns would cycle. The Muninns went relatively unscathed as the hostiles were more focused on support ships and the easier to kill Feroxes.
Combat on the Sotiyo
The Sotiyo was reffed, the armor timer set, after which we saw ourselves out, warping to the gate to 1DQ1-A and jumping through.
Through the gate to home in 1DQ
The battle report was more even this time. In the scale of the war, these losses were pretty minor.
T5ZI-S battle Report Header
Strategically this did not change anything about the war. It was a Saturday night lark and the enemy is likely to get their act together and form up to defend the armor timers of the structures we reinforced. There is little danger of any of them being blown up.
When it comes to demonstrating morale and responses however, this was another stark illustration as to how low things seem to have sunk for PAPI. We did something on a whim in their main staging system that they haven’t been able to manage in our home next door in all the months since they set down that Keepstar in T5ZI back in November.
PAPI, as a coalition, theoretically out numbers us by a ratio of three to one. But even in their home they could barely get together equal numbers after sending out nearly 50 pings to get people into fleets. (The Imperium ping count for the same time was 23, at least half of which were images of The Count or The Mittani smugging and sending out battle reports.)
I am reminded of the tale of why the cheetah doesn’t catch the gazelle nearly as often as you might suspect. The cheetah is just running for his lunch, the gazelle is running for its life.
The Imperium remains motivated despite the odds because we’re fighting for our survival. I am not sure what PAPI is really fighting for at this point, but if it is for their lunch then they don’t seem to be very hungry.
The likelihood of a another fight soon over the Keepstar in M2-XFE diminished greatly last night when the Imperium flipped the ihubs in the entire NJU-QV constellation which includes that system. Shortly after the second fight that saw PAPI forces face a lopsided loss when the server was unable to handle their forces attempting to jump in after the Imperium had setup more than 4,000 ships on Keepstar to defend it, Imperium pilots went out and reinforced the ihubs in the constellation. The timers came up last night.
The Delve NJU-QV constellation in green
The Imperium, motivated by PAPI’s misfortune, formed up four fleets and a large number of entosis ships to contest the timers. PAPI was reported to have assembled a force capable of contesting the timers, but stood down rather than do so. As the evening progressed, one ihub after another fell until the constellation was back in Imperium hands.
The Delve NJU-QV constellation restored to Imperium control
Much was made of the taking of the NJU-QV constellation previously, as it cut the Imperium off from the Fountain region and was to serve as the springboard of PandaFam’s re-invasion of that region. The latter petered out, but there were still multiple Imperium Keepstars in the constellation that faced the threat of destruction once PAPI waited out the 35 timer and was able to deploy cyno jammers to keep the Imperium from jumping in when the Keepstars were contested. However, that went astray when a newbie Imperium pilot reportedly kept shooting the cyno jammer. Per Asher Elias:
You may not know this but the M2 ihub jammer was stopped by a couple month old :shobon: newbee shooting the jammer to pause it. This new player is directly responsible for nearly 300 dead enemy titans. Every ship counts.
That led to a bit of classic Goonswarm propaganda being updated yet again.
Every Ship Counts
That opened a hole that allowed the Imperium to kill their cyno jammers and deploy three of their own. While the Imperium could not jam the system, the cyno jammer mechanic only allows three to be deployed in a single system, so we had a flash of the old “defensive SBU” tactic of the Dominion sovereignty days, which helped the Imperium to get setup on the Keepstar for the second fight.
Meanwhile, the Keepstar grid in M2-XFE remains bubbled and camped by Imperium forces eager to get in on another super or titan kill. I lucked in on an Avatar kill when a FinFleet pilot decided to risk it and log in. Chance was not with them.
The Keepstar camp gets another kill
Despite a persistent PAPI claim that all the supers and titans from the second fight either died or where ghost kills and restored to the T5ZI-S Keepstar, bubbles and dictors have been deployed above the Keepstar as well as below it. And the upper bubbles have yielded some kills. I watched a Nyx that managed to log out during the second fight get warped right back to its logout spot in the midst of all those bubbles, where it too was blown up.
The Nyx in its final moments
Some half-hearted attempts have been made to try and free the trapped capital ships left behind after both fights, but the promise of more kills has kept the camp strong so far and any form up by the hostiles has been met by a counter-form by the Imperium.
For the moment the Imperium has been able to check PAPI’s momentum in Delve. But that does not preclude them being able to get their act together again and continue their onslaught. The war isn’t over yet.
Here we are on the first Monday of the new year. A lot of us are back at work.
And the war?
The war is now at about the six month mark. That is a long time for continuous operations. The great war lasted for three years, but was a series of intense periods of fighting broken up by quiet periods where both sides rebuilt. We’re still fighting and have reached levels of destruction never before seen in New Eden.
I was worried that the week between Christmas and New Years would be quiet, so had a couple of small items to hand to fill out this opening section of the weekly post, like the fact that Asher Elias, 23rd best FC in the Imperium, is now at the top of the kill mail list for Goonswarm Federation Alliance.
Asher in first position
He passed Bratok Srayona, a pilot nobody could really recall, and who was active between February 2012 and August 2017. They apparently went on a lot of fleets and got on a lot of kill mails. He was the epic line member of the alliance in his time. I must have flown with him, looking at some of his kills, but never knew him.
Then there was the fact that the Imperium began issuing war bonds to support the fight. This has been viewed by PAPI as a sign of weakness, a last desperate attempt to stay in the fight, a sign that we were on the brink. But it raised more than a trillion ISK in the first hours of issue, so it will sustain us for a bit. One billion ISK will buy you one bond with a return rate of 10% per year, with payments due on the first of the month. That one bond will earn you about 8.33 million ISK every time the first rolls around. [edit: changed from 8.4 to 8.33 million ISK]
But all of that was eclipsed by the battles over the Keepstar in M2-XFE where, during the armor and hull timer fights, the two sides may have destroyed more than 300 titans. (~250 for the first fight and maybe as few as 50 or as many as 170 for the second.) CCP is going to have to do a dev blog to give us an official count because, unlike the presidential election, there are actually some irregularities in play here.
No matter what though, trillions of ISK went up in flames as the Imperium and PAPI clashed in the battles that so many were hoping for. It was an epic week in New Eden. The Monthly Economic Reports for December and January are going to be interesting.
This includes the titans from the first M2-XFE fight, but not the second. The balance of loss remains fairly close, with the Imperium losing 16.5 trillion ISK to PAPI’s 15.9 trillion. For January though, PAPI might already be close to 10 trillion ISK in the hole. And there are, as of this writing, still a significant number of PAPI capital ships logged off on the Keepstar grid in M2-XFE that are being camped around the clock by Imperium forces, so there may be some more losses when PAPI makes a serious break out attempt.
Delve Front
Titans exploded in huge numbers in M2-XFE, a system previously of no particular consequence that has now entered the realm of legends. There are a number of articles specifically about that event and, rather than retelling the tale here, I will link to them specifically at the end of this post.
With much of the week spent focused on the Keepstar in M2-XFE, the map did not change dramatically.
Delve – Jan. 3, 2021
A few ihubs changed hands, the most important likely being the one in PUIG-F, where an Imperium Keepstar is anchored. Taking that ihub back reset the 35 day clock on PAPI being able to install cyno jammers and reduce the structure without the Imperium being able to drop supers and titans to defend it.
And then there is the metaliminal storm, which has wandered into the Helms Deep defended systems. This is actually a bonus for the Imperium as the storm disables the ability to cloak, so there won’t be any sneaking up on an anomaly to light a covert ops cyno for a hot drop.
Catch Front
At the beginning of last week I was pretty sure this was where the action would be. The Initiative and Reavers and other Imperium groups were out and setting fire to the place. The Watchmen Alliance was falling apart and its sovereignty was collapsing. We were reinforcing the ihub in Brave’s capital system and getting fights over it. Good times were being had.
Catch – Jan. 3, 2021
Even the two metaliminal storms seemed to be on the move in the region… and an incursion popped up in The Watchmen space, like they needed something else on their plate. And then on Wednesday all eyes turned to Delve and M2-XFE and operations went mostly quiet in the region.
One interesting item did come up later in the week. With all the focus on M2-XFE, The Initiative put the TEST Keepstar in 0SHT-A into the hull timer. We could have another Keepstar fight this week… just in Catch. We’ll see if anybody shows up for it tomorrow.
Other Theaters
Querious remained a secondary point of conflict, as ihubs were reinforced and occasionally changed hands.
Querious – Jan. 3, 2021
The biggest win for the Imperium was the GOP-GE ihub, as that system hosts another Keepstar of ours.
Over in Esoteria the insurgent forces continue their work against TEST, expanding their reach a bit further while eyes were on the big titan fights.
Northwest Esoteria – Jan. 3, 2021
My Participation
I somehow managed to stumble into the right place at the right time all week. I was in the fights in Catch early in the week and then managed to show up just at the right moment in M2-XFE for the first fight, witnessing the opening titan salvo as I tethered up at the Keepstar.
Titans open fire with Doomsdays
And then I was back again for the second fight, where we were able to pick off PAPI titans as they loaded into system, leading to a lopsided slaughter.
The PAPI titan blob with faxes being whittled down
So I had a few more “I was there,” or at least “I can say I was there,” experiences in New Eden.
I also lost a few more ships, including two more Ares interceptors moving around Delve and a Scimitar at one of the fights in GE-8JV, which brings my total war losses so far to:
Ares interceptor – 15
Crusader interceptor – 5
Atron entosis frigate – 6
Rokh battleship – 5
Drake battle cruiser – 4
Malediction interceptor – 4
Scimitar logi – 3
Ferox battle cruiser – 3
Purifier stealth bomber – 2
Guardian logi – 2
Scalpel logi frigate – 2
Raven battleship – 1
Crucifier ECM frigate – 1
Gnosis battlecruiser – 1
Bifrost command destroyer – 1
Cormorant destroyer – 1
Hurricane battle cruiser – 1
Sigil entosis industrial – 1
Mobile Small Warp Disruptor I – 1
Other Items
CCP gave us the option to make My Year in EVE Online videos, which had the option to include the most valuable kill mail you were on. And then, two days later, M2-XFE happened and a lot of us had an even more valuable kill mail for the year that wasn’t in the clip. Oh well.
That battle though, it managed to pop up the peak concurrent user number for the week, getting it close to the 40K mark. CCP Explorer put the count across the three key systems as well past 13K, giving Delve 37% of all pilots logged in at the peak.
Pop. in T5, M2 and 1DQ peaked at 13,770 pilots (37% of the server pop. at the time), of which about 12k were in M2 or trying to get into M2 from T5. Both the M2 and T5 nodes were super-loaded and the respawn is simply the result of node-to-node cross timeouts.
If the servers could have handled it, we would have almost doubled the world record set at FWST-8. However, the servers were not up to that task, not by a long shot.
Remember that when somebody says null sec is a tiny fraction of the game that nobody cares about. The fight itself made for the third highest concurrent peak of the war, reversing the downward trend we had been seeing over the last few weeks.
We had been warned to be on hand for possible fleets yesterday. The armor timers for three Imperium Keepstars under PAPI cyno jammers were set to come out and we were going to try to make them pay for the effort this time around.
I was busy during much of the day, but I could see the pings coming up announcing fleets. It looked like the enemy was going to try for the Keepstar in M2-XFE. The other two Keepstars were ignored and repaired while both sides focused on the remaining one.
When I finally had a chance to log in I flew out in an ECM burst Malediction just to take a look. Both sides were grouped up, two masses of titans and supers facing each other, the Imperium fleet on the Keepstar and the PAPI fleet below it, shooting the structure. The timer had been paused at just about the 10 minute mark.
My arrival
As I was scooting around, tethering up, and looking for some way to be annoying, the Imperium titans, which had been tethered, opened up with a doomsday barrage on the PAPI fleet.
Titans open fire with Doomsdays
That was the point that the battle became real. There were over 5,000 names in local, a number that grew past the 5,500 mark as the battle carried on.
Exchange of fire
At that point I flew my Malediction into the midst of the hostiles and set off the ECM burst. I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to commit to the fight. But then my wife and daughter went out together and I decided to join one of the subcap fleets. I parked my interceptor in one of our structures, destroyed my pod to revive back in 1DQ1-A, where I grabbed a Rokh to join Mister Vee’s fleet.
While M2-XFE had cyno jammers setup by the hostiles, they were bringing them down now and then to jump in reinforcements, which allowed us to jump in our own reinforcements. Since the system was running at 10% tidi, the five minute up/down cycle of the cyno jammer lasted almost an hour for those of us jumping in from normal speed space.
I got in and joined the fun, shooting fighters and subcaps of opportunity. Tidi worked in my favor as my ECM burst hit a titan that was blown up after I returned in the Rokh, so the game counted me on the kill mail. It shows my ship as a Rokh, but my weapon as an ECM burst. I fulfilled my goal of getting on at least one titan kill. (I also got on the 10 billion ISK MTU kill mail.)
But then there was a call for boosters for the titan and super fleets. Asher pinged out to Reavers to get some boosters, so I went to answer the call, which took me out of the fight for almost two hours. I went to dock up and leave my ship so as to self-destruct again to get back to 1DQ again. However, by that point the server was under a lot more pressure, and docking took a long time and left me with a black screen that took a long time to clear. The client went unresponsive and I have to exit and try to log back in. That took ages, but eventually I was back in and in my pod. Then it was time to self destruct. That took a while as well.
I may have pressed the button a few times
Eventually though I ended up back in 1DQ where I had a Damnation command ship ready to go. The cyno jammers were down again, so I was able to take the slow bridge back to M2-XFE, where I got in one of the capital fleets and started boosting.
My Damnation in the orange of another explosion
With that setup, I felt ambitious and got out my main alt and flew him over in another interceptor. As he flew over I contracted the Rokh to him, and he was able to dock up, collect the Rokh, board it, join Mister Vee’s fleet. That took about an hour to accomplish, but I managed it, after which I set him up on my little second monitor in UI-only mode and shot targets of opportunity as I heard them called. Along the way I tagged some hostile titans with him, and now he his on more titan kill mails than my main.
The command ship had a target painter, so I was able to get on a few kills with my main, but all the big toys were out of range of that.
The hostiles won the objective, reinforcing the armor timer and setting the structure up for the final timer. That will come out in about two days. But the fight kept on going.
The exchange of kills was fairly even, favoring PAPI by a few kills for much of the fight, but as the evening drew on past midnight Pacific time and towards downtime, which hits at 3am where I live, the exchange of titans began to favor the Imperium, though ships from both sides kept blowing up until the server shut down.
Ships still exploding around the Keepstar
The tally for this fight will be huge. I am writing this as the battle is winding down, so the final numbers have not settled, but for titan kills I last saw 10 Leviathan, 18 Avatar, 87 Ragnorak, and 126 Erebus titans destroyed. That is almost 250 titans down and there will no doubt be more on the list once things settle down.
But this battle far exceeded B-R5RB back in 2014, the previous high water mark for the Tranquility server, when 75 titans were destroyed. This fight went well beyond that, though the destruction was much less lopsided than the earlier battle.
Expect follow up posts about this fight. Not only were many titans destroyed, but the total cost of the fight will easily exceed 20 trillion ISK according to early battle reports. (Edit: Now that things have settled down, adding the report header.)
Battle Report Header – Updated as new kills have shown up
To put that in perspective, the total destruction in Delve in October, which saw five huge fights in NPC Delve, only amounted to about 11 trillion ISK according to the October MER. (11 trillion ISK was also the amount of destruction wrought at B-R5RB, so this fight eclipsed that in ISK as well as losses.)
And there will be some clean up to do after downtime, as many people just went to bed after that and they will need to have their capitals, supers, and titans extracted.
Another historic day in New Eden. We shall see what the post battle repercussions lead to. This should certainly inflate the December MER.
Addendum: Now that I have had a bit of sleep and zKillboard has caught up, the titan loss totals look like this:
Imperium Titan Losses:
Erebus – 66
Ragnarok – 42
Leviathan – 10
Avatar – 5
Vanquisher – 1
PAPI Titan Losses:
Erebus – 63
Ragnarok – 50
Avatar – 14
Leviathan – 1
Total Imperium: 124
Total PAPI: 129
Total Titans Destroyed: 252
[Edit: This is getting updated as kill mails show up. ]
You can tell which titans are considered the least tanky. Both sides shot the Erebus and Ragnaroks first. The first titan to die belonged to the appropriately named Titanic Death, while the last was Sandrin Stone, who blew up just before downtime kicked everybody out.
To expand on titan numbers, the count of them on the battlefield was:
Imperium:
Avatar – 317
Erebus – 137
Ragnarok – 135
Leviathan – 82
Vanquisher – 2
Molok – 2
Total 675
PAPI
Avatar – 248
Ragnarok – 193
Erebus – 111
Leviathan – 90
Molok – 2
Vanquisher – 1
Komodo – 1
Total 646
Combined Titan total: 1,321
That is a lot of very expensive ships thrown in on a Keepstar armor timer.
For the battle report, the difference in the ISK totals pretty much comes down to that Vanquisher faction titan loss on the Imperium side. Otherwise it was a pretty even exchange on the titan front. Now we will no doubt see both sides going on about how the other cannot afford to replace their losses.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 