Tag Archives: Circle of Two

Circle of Two and its Legacy of Betrayal

We are at the five year anniversary of Circle of Two Alliance (CO2) and its betrayal of the Imperium at the battle of M-OEE8. Much digital ink has been expended in defending CO2’s actions on that day when, after fighting all day… as the battle was still going on… CO2’s leader GigX sent one of his FCs… not having the guts to do it himself… to tell the Imperium they were leaving the coalition. They didn’t just leave coalition either, they aligned themselves with the Moneybadger Coalition and took up arms with our enemies to attack us.

One particularly whiny correspondent over at EN24 seems especially invested in pitching a scenario where CO2 was not simply justified in their betrayal, but trying to force that square theory into the round hole of it being the only real option they had. They couldn’t wait until the fight was over to leave, as decency might have suggested, or couldn’t just exit the war without joining the enemy, as other alliances in the Imperium somehow managed to do. They did everything exactly as they should have, according to at least one revisionist scribbler.

But here, five years down the road, with the distance that provides, you can decide for yourself if CO2 made the right call.

Certainly things went better for them initially. The Moneybadger coalition, lavishly funded by the soon to be banned RMT bankers and their casino money, was certainly welcoming. CO2 got to keep their stuff as they joined in attacking the erstwhile allies. Meanwhile the idea of the undying enmity of the Imperium, by then living in the back of the Quafe Factory Warehouse in Saranen, seemed of little concern. We were soon in retreat to Delve in the south. There was a threat to follow us down, but we were beaten and shrunk and not deemed a threat.

And then the Moneybadgers turned on themselves which, to give them credit, they said they would do. PanFam set itself against CO2 and TEST, now allies in Tribute and Vale of the Silent, a conflict that built up slowly but which culminated in another battle in M-OEE8, this time to witness the destruction of the CO2 Keepstar and the exit of CO2 and TEST from the north. CO2 simply postponed their fate by betraying the Imperium.

In the south the Imperium setup to support the Russians in the regions where CO2 and TEST were attempting to invade, but after one big fight the Russians decided they did not have it in them and came to an agreement with the invaders. Soon the Imperium and TEST were neighbors, with CO2 on the other side of TEST. But TEST viewed PanFam as the real threat and came to an accommodation with the Imperium.

The Imperium, however, was still eyeing CO2 and happily worked with PanFam when the opportunity arose to knock out some CO2 titans.

And then came Judgement Day.

Sitting around on the former CO2 Keepstar

The Imperium orchestrated the betrayal of CO2 by The Judge, who was unhappy with how GigX had been running the alliance. Even TEST, their allies from the north, were happy to jump on and help out in the dismantling of CO2. This seemed to be the end for the alliance as GigX was caught in game threatening The Judge with physical violence… something about cutting off his hands… which got him banned from EVE Online.

But the tale was not quite done.

Through subterfuge and CCP complacency GigX managed to get back into the game using an alias for his account, though he was quite open about it with the game itself. He tried to get the band back together and set up shop in Fade after Pandemic Horde decided it was a bad neighborhood, what with the resurgent Imperium now in control of Fountain and roaming around next door in Cloud Ring. But GigX didn’t mind. He seemed to feel that his new allies… he was now running with Darkness and Guardians of the Galaxy… would have his back.

Their presence brought the Imperium north with CO2 as the primary target.

They held out for a bit, but soon enough they were losing structures, including their home Keepstar. The war saw five Keepstars blown up in a single day, though only two of those belonged to CO2. The war went badly for them, the lost their space and were in full retreat into the arms of PanFam for protection when CCP finally got around to applying GigX’s ban to his new account, effectively killing off the alliance once more. (They are still trying to rally support to get GigX unbanned.)

It remains an open question as to whether or not you can kill an alliance in EVE Online against its will. Alliances tend to die from internal collapse. That may be helped along by external factors, but many alliances have suffered huge defeats but had some nucleus of members stick with them to see them restored to some stature within the game again.

But the tale of CO2 going forward from the betrayal at M-2OEE does show that your behavior and reputation as an alliance, and as an alliance leader, does matter. GigX and CO2 showed themselves to be fair weather friends and continued to pay a price for it over time.

So if you see somebody thrashing away with some rationalization about CO2 doing the right thing five years back, just remember what came of that choice. When you make the bed, you get to sleep in it.

Is Circle of Two Dead or Just Mostly Dead?

It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There’s a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.

-Miracle Max, The Princess Bride

It is difficult to kill an alliance, or a corporation, or any player organization in New Eden. You can blow up their ships, pod their pilots, take down their structures, have spies or traitors disband organization and steal their assets, and camp them into an NPC station and sit on them for weeks and they’ll just come back once you’ve tired of the whole thing.

Player groups, successful player groups, exist outside of the game. A change of pixels on a screen doesn’t change what holds that group together. Yes, not everybody will hang tough through bad times. The opportunist and hangers on and uncommitted will defect when times get tough. We have seen that time and again, an alliance or a coalition will suffer a staggering defeat, be erased from the sovereignty map, lose a significant percentage of its members, and yet somehow come back again. I’ve been through that. I made the trek with Jay Amazingness from the north to Delve after the Casino War to help carve out a new empire after our total defeat.

So when it was announced back at the beginning of last month that Circle of Two had decided disband, complete with a SoundCloud recording of the meeting, I was a bit skeptical.

Circle of Two

Over at INN they quickly had an obituary posted, summing up the tale of the fall of CO2 in something of a victory lap. That’s going to be a bit awkward if we find out, as we did over the summer, that CO2 had enough left in it to stage a comeback.

Meanwhile, over at EN24, Seraph was back again on his coming up on three year attempt to rehabilitate CO2’s reputation by trying to argue that the Imperium actually betrayed CO2 and that everything CO2 ever did was totally justified. It is a long winded and completely irrelevant piece, but it is apparently all he has since he keeps re-running it. No doubt he hopes that if he says it enough times it might become true.

The problem there is that even were his spin agreed upon by all sides as objective fact, it would make no difference. He would do better to ape Marc Antony in Julius Caesar than keep up with his hair splitting irrelevance because his words won’t win back a single system of sovereignty nor restore any of the Keepstars that has CO2 lost since that fateful day.

The optics of the day, the optics of the betrayal, the optics of which played out before hundreds of Imperium pilots, will not allow that. In the midst of the fight, while the battle for the M-OEE8 was still going on, while Imperium forces were fighting for them, with more on the way, the leadership of CO2 sent a messenger… declining to stand up and say it themselves… to tell the Imperium leadership they were pulling out of the coalition.

I had rushed home from work early and was sitting on a titan in a fleet waiting to be bridged in to continue the fight when word started to filter down. A post on Reddit first got passed around, but was dismissed as a troll. Then there was an announcement from The Mittani about CO2 having decided to leave no matter what happened in the fight. I was there on coms and people were angry that CO2 let us burn through the day while already half out the exit.

There can be no walking back that particular offense. Not in the eyes of those who were there, and the word quickly spread through the ranks.

All of which I add to remind people that it didn’t have to be that way. They could have said they were leaving before the fight. They could have let a decent interval pass after the fight and said they didn’t want to carry on. Other alliances left during the war. The Imperium isn’t out hunting down RAZOR with a burning passion for leaving.

CO2 would have had to have been blind to not be able to see how this would play out, how this would anger line members and leadership of the Imperium alike. They clearly didn’t think it mattered. The tide was against the Imperium. We had already pulled back into Saranen as the Moneybadger Coalition overwhelmed us. GigX no doubt thought we would be destroyed.

He should have read my first paragraph. He should have studied the history of the game. Alliances have been smashed on the rocks of defeat many times, only to come back as strong if not stronger. Instead, CO2 seemed anxious to join the winning side, to share in the spoils, and to get some of that soon-to-be-banned casino money.

Their respite was short lived. Eight months later I was there to see CO2 lose their Keepstar in M-0EE8 as their erstwhile allies sent them packing for the south as well. I was there as we camped their ratters in Impass in what was alleged to have been cover for the first planned internal betrayal of CO2. It did not go off, but we still made their ratters and miners suffer. I was there in the fleet on the stolen Keepstar after Judgement day, when The Judge switched side and betrayed CO2, an act that got GigX to threaten The Judge so flagrantly that CCP felt they had to ban GigX for life.

One of the enduring images from Judgement Day

At that point it seemed like the alliance was dead. But then it came back again, appearing in the north where it found a couch to sleep on as it got itself back together.

Then there was the recent was in the north which saw a resurgent CO2, led by GigX (who wasn’t hiding his attempt to skirt his ban very well), drop into Fade. That is a region with history, the place where the Casino War could have been said to have started, the home of SpaceMonkeys Alliance who were involved with the ISK being taken from the casino cartel, which got the casinos to hire mercenaries to camp them in their region until they paid back the ISK It was there that CO2 popped up, on the periphery of the expanding Imperium. They dropped a Keepstar and setup shop in that space and it was like waving a red flag before the bull of the Imperium.

They landed in Fade towards the end of May 2018, taking over from Pandemic Horde, which had moved east, away from the Imperium and into The Vale of the Silent. Around the middle of June CO2 hit its post Judgement Day peak, with over 4,000 pilots in the alliance and some 70 odd corporations.

That ended badly for the north in general and CO2 in particular. By the middle of July the Imperium was already trying to kill the Keepstar in DW-T2I. That attempt failed, but the stage had been set and the outcome seemed inevitable. Two months later, the Keepstar, just one among several to go, was destroyed. CO2 gave up Fade and retreated back under the cover of their one again allies in NCDot and PanFam. GigX was banned yet again. And there was the question as to what CO2 would do next.

Which brings us to the announcement of the alliance disbanding.

Once that came about I subscribed to the RSS feed over at DOTLAN EVE Maps for the alliance so that any changes would pop up in my reader. (Just click the Feed button.) I was waiting to see if the alliance would actually close, would officially be no more. The numbers have certainly been in decline. (If not in Deklein, right?)

CO2 Stats… also, the blank spots where DOTLAN was down

But as of my writing this, the Alliance still lives. It has a little over 500 characters in it across 24 corporations.

Stats as of Dec 28, 2018

Most of the larger corporations spread out amongst the alliances in the north, with Pandemic Horde being a popular destination. But there are still corporations lingering behind, like Moms of Doom, which now makes up almost 20% of the alliance. However, the remainders don’t seem too active, though a few individuals still flying the flag are on the zkillboard.

So back to the question at hand, is Circle of Two dead? Will it die eventually? Or is there a revival in its future? Does it have the sort of name and reputation that can bring people back to its banner?

Addendum: An odd move on the ticker a few hours after this post went live.

A Five Keepstar Day

While I was at work the Keepstars I highlighted earlier in the week were destroyed. The EU time zone team got some shiny kills.

The Keepstar lineup on zKillboard

While I only mentioned four in my post it turns out that there was a fifth ready to be knocked off down in Tenerifis which TEST took care of. The five kill mails:

All told that is at least a trillion ISK in losses inflicted in a single day without much in the way of resistance.

The question is now what happens next in the war?

Four Keepstar Targets in Fade and Pure Blind

Ops have already run in order to reinforce the remaining four northern Keepstar in Fade and Pure Blind. The are scattered across two zones, so I ended up using the multi-region map for the area that is available at DOTLAN.

And then I flew out to take a peek at each of them just to see where the timers stood. I have a general idea as ops area already on the calendar, but sometimes you just want to know the exact time. So off I flew, first to C4C-Z4 and the first Circle of Two Keepstar.

Circle of Two Keepstar in Fade

From there I zipped over to DO6H-Q and the NCDot Keepstar.

NCDot Keepstar in Fade

Then I headed down into Pure Blind to 3V8-LJ to find the second CO2 Keepstar.

The CO2 Keepstar in Pure Blind

Then I made the last leg of the trip over to 7X-VKB to see the Darkness Keepstar.

Darkness in Pure Blind

All four are set to go this coming Wednesday, September 19th, at various early hours of the day. At least early for me, sitting here on the West coast of the US.

Map of Fade, Pure Blind, and Cloud Ring – Times are in UTC

I doubt I will make it onto any of those kill mails. But their destruction seems inevitable as northern forces draw back deeper into their own territory. The question is whether or not there is a war once these are destroyed. I am sure there will be some lesser structures to clean out of the area. But once cleansed, the Imperium isn’t planning on moving in and they will stick around if CO2 comes back. So who will end up in Fade?

Circle of Two Loses Another Keepstar

As I posted on Monday, the sights of the Imperium were set on the CO2 Keepstar in DW-T2I. The destruction of this Keepstar has been an operational plan since July, when the first opportunity was thwarted by ignorance about cynojammers.

Lots of work since then led to the situation on Wednesday evening when the Keepstar, no longer under the protective umbrella of a cynojammer, came out of its final timer.

The question was whether or not there would be a fight.

Given that there was no defense of the previous timer and that the Imperium had picked off a number of jump freighters hauling cargo that smacked of an evacuation, it seemed likely that no defense would be offered.

But spies were also reporting that the north was trying to rally together a defense, with various organizations sending out pings looking for a maximum effort. However, the north is not like the Imperium. It does not have a unified communications and command structure. So not every entity is on board with every plan. And rumor had it that CO2 was not planning to defend the Keepstar. Whether they saw it as a futile effort or because The GigX, the rumored return of the perma-banned GigX, was himself (or herself if you’re into the “Mrs. GigX” story) banned shortly before the CSM summit, it appeared that they were not going to show up. And it is understandably hard to get motivated about defending something when the owners have given up.

We however were planning to show up in force. In part that was to ensure if any defense operation managed to coalesced that it could be dealt with, but also because everybody wanted to get on the kill mail for the Keepstar.

There was actually a list of CO2 structures to destroy on Wednesday, with the Keepstar as the final course. Operations opened with a pair of Baltec fleets forming up to run bridge out and take care of a pair of CO2 Fortizars.

Baltecs Bridging Out for the First Shoot

I managed to get online and into Apple Pear’s fleet in my Oneiros to go along for the ride, combat drones loaded to be sure I had a chance to get on the kill mails myself.

The initial ops were unopposed. The Fortizars were empty and the shoots were quiet enough that one could focus on other thing in the long silences between Apple Pear’s instructions. We were close enough that people packing drones were able to join in on the shoot.

Drone Dyson Sphere around the Fortizar

We hit both without incident or interference.

After the two of those down we went back to 6RCQ-V to stand down for a bit.

Aligned out as a Fortizar explodes

Not too long after that it was time to form up for the main op. This saw over a thousand people logged into our staging before we started to head out. Again I managed to find a spot in Apple Pear’s Baltec fleet with my Oneiros. The fleet filled up and was sorted out in very short order at which point we were undocked and on our way.

We took a gate to meet up with our titan and were then bridged directly to the Fortizar on grid with the Keepstar in DW-T2I.

The Keepstar in the distance

The Keepstar still had more than an hour on its timer, but there were other activities planned for us. There were three other structures coming out of their final timers in quick succession before the grand finale.

The first was an Azbel.

On the Azbel

Once that was down we moved on to wreck a Tatara mining platform that was already being hit.

Tatara wreck before being quickly salvaged

There was a pause after that to wait for the next target, a Sotiyo whose timer had a ways to go.

Circle of Two Sotiyo

Once that timer hit we warped over to it… all of these structures were on the same grid, so you could see them from our Fortizar perch… and commenced to bash that.

The Sotiyo was like some sort of pinata. When it died almost 40 empty Magnate frigates spilled out or were destroyed… or both… as my kill board got credit for them. 40 more frigate kills for me and everybody else who was shooting the Sotiyo I guess.

The Sotiyo wreck

With the Sotiyo down the preliminaries were over and only the main even awaited us. We perched back up, tethered on the Fortizar and watched the super carriers get themselves situated.

Fleets tethered up on the Fortizar

The plan was the same as it was the previous Saturday, with the super carriers launching fighters and sending them over to a command destroyer which formed the first of a chain of such ships that would AOE micro jump drive the ball of fighters to the Keepstar in 100km leaps.

This involved a lot of cajoling as controlling fighters isn’t completely intuitive and there is always somebody whose Nyx starts slowly trundling towards the target or whose fighters are headed off into space or end up inadvertently attacking somebody. I feel for them. I did the capital ops class on using fighters then forgot half of it within a day. It is something you need to do a bunch for it to become second nature.

Still a lot of fighters ended up on the command destroyer.

Fighters swarming – Picture source unknown

That screen shot was linked in a ping. I don’t know who took it, but it shows lots of fighters orbiting, ready for an MJD to take them closer to the Keepstar.

Fighters were in place when the Keepstar timer finally ran down. The attack on the structure began as we all sat and watched.

The plan was to keep as many people away from the action until the last minute when everybody would jump in or warp to the Keepstar to get in their hit before it died. So we just sat and watched, TiDi free, as the fighters chewed up the structure. There were about a thousand people in local.

Then, as the Keepstar got down to 10% the word went out. Cynos were lit. We aligned to the target. And about a thousand more ships landed in the system looking to get in their hit. A host of titans jumped into our path as we slowly warped to the Keepstar, the tidi slamming down on the node, bringing us to 10% speed.

Titans blocking the view of the Keepstar

We flew on through the titans, and I spotted a Molok as we passed. Things were slow enough for me to notice that.

That is a Molok, look at the paint job

We landed just 30km off the Keepstar. I had prepared for this, loading up a sentry drone in my drone bay. As I came to a stop I dropped the sentry drone, targeted the Keepstar, and engaged. I saw a few hits recorded… and then my client crashed. I hadn’t turned down my graphic settings and I am sure the client went beyond the 32-bit RAM allocation limit and terminated. I was on grid and close proximity with a lot of ships.

All those ships, all visible

Fortunately this wasn’t as bad as some of the big fights. I was able to log right back in and re-join the fleet. I had not even warped off as I was still being warp scrambled by the Keepstar, something it does for 30 seconds when you start shooting it.

However, my Bouncer sentry drone was still in my drone bay, so something had gone out of sequence. I dropped it again, locked up the Keepstar, and started shooting it again.

I also zoomed out my camera to maximum distance and turned it away from the fight in hopes of fending off another client crash before the Keepstar died.

I also did the control-shift-alt-M command to bring up the client monitor to see how my memory usage was doing. I was riding on the edge there.

My memory numbers after logging back in

We had the order from Apple Pear to align back to the Fortizar, so I pulled the Bouncer. However, I wasn’t sure if I had hit the Keepstar again after the re-log, so I launcher a Warrior II and sent it after it, willing to sacrifice a light drone in order to get on the kill mail. Then I aligned and waited for things to go “Boom!”

The Keepstar was done very shortly thereafter. I was even able to recover my Warrior II. The Kill mail shows me… and a lot of people… having done zero damage. But we got counted, which was what mattered.

And then began the unwind, the return to the Fortizar, the recovering of fighters, the capitals jumping out, and then finally the subcaps being bridged out. Some impatient people decided to gate home and got caught by gate camps. It was better to be patient.

So I managed to get on six structure kills in my Oneiros and never had to rep anybody.

Most Valuable Recent Kills

The Tatara was apparently significantly under valued. A ping went out from Tuzy about the Tatara that explained how much the tech II rigs on it were actually worth:

I was just looking over the battle report today from all the structures we killed and I wanted to call this out to everyone. Take a look at this Tatara kill. https://zkillboard.com/kill/72384288/ I noticed it’s value was ~ 10b isk so I immediately looked at the rigs. Aha! But what did I discover? This was a 92 billion isk structure. Take a look at the rigs….both are T2. Zkillboard drastically undervalues them because these rigs are simply NOT sold anywhere in game. Anyone who needs these specific rigs are large, rich alliances – all of whom build them themselves. Go to https://eve-industry.org/calc/ and type in those rig names. That Reproc rig is 66 billion isk. That reactions rig is 15.9b isk. So you can add another 82 billion isk to this killmail to our tally for the day.

So we can add that to the value.

Through all of this, no defenders stood to. There was a fleet of NCDot and other locals in interceptors hanging around, but they seemed as interested in getting on the kill mails as anything.

And now with that accomplished, with the Keepstar in CO2’s capital system destroyed, we get to ask, “What next?” CO2 has other citadels in Fade. Even another Keepstar.

We passed this while killing the Fortizars

But from what I am hearing CO2 is trying to pack up their citadels and it is now a race to see if we can blow them up before they get carried off. Then there is the NCDot Keepstar in DO6H-Q. The ihub has been cleared there, so that might be on the list of targets as well.

After that… well… Mittens says that we don’t want Fade, so we’re not going to take the sovereignty. And we don’t have anybody lined up who wants to take it. But we also don’t want CO2 to have it, so I suspect that we will stay deployed in 6RCQ-V until we’re sure that CO2 has moved elsewhere.

The destruction of this Keepstar took place on the anniversary of the last year’s betrayal of CO2 by The Judge which ended up with the Imperium buying the CO2 Keepstar in 68FT-6 from him, then turning around and selling it to TEST.

This is on top of the events of late 2016 when CO2 lost a Keepstar at M-OEE8 when NCDot and Pandemic Legion decided to take Tribute after the Casino War had ended.

As an alliance, they have not had great luck with Keepstars. But their leadership made their bed, so they get to sleep in it.

Other coverage:

INN
Reddit – GotG turns on CO2

CO2 Keepstar in the Cross Hairs

Talk has already started about what various groups are going to do after the war in the north lapses. In part this has been predicated on the assumption that once Circle of Two has been driven out of Fade and their structures destroyed that victory will be declared and the Imperium will go back to accumulating its huge pile of wealth in Delve. However, during The Meta Show on Saturday The Mittani did suggest that we might stay in the north so long as we were getting fights in the Fade region, so we may be sticking around for a while.

Fade forces disposition… for the moment

Either way we have a couple of tasks left. Back in July the CO2 Keepstar in DW-T2I was saved from destruction when the Imperium apparently didn’t know who cynojammer mechanics worked.

I guess we know the answer

That was a setback to the Imperium drive to hit CO2. There were other targets though, so the Imperium went after the NCDot staging Keepstar in X47L-Q where the armor and final hull timer battles saw dozens of titans die along with the citadel.

There were also NCDot and PL allied Keepstars in low sec that were take out.

On the southern front, the was seems to have petered out with Fraternity attempting to anchor and subsequently losing a Keepstar of their own. What with all of that and the two Keepstar battles in the south earlier, it has been the war of the Keepstars.

During all of that there has been an ongoing entosis campaign in Fade as the Imperium has attempted to remove cynojammers as a factor in the region, allowing it to drop its super captial force at will. The pressure has been on and the north has formed up to defend the critical infrastructure hubs that allow cynojammers to be anchored. But the Imperium has pushed forward, system by system, until last week when the ihub in DW-T2I was finally taken.

With that task complete, the CO2 Keepstar was reinforced very shortly there after.

On Saturday fleets assembled for the second of the three events needed to take down the Keepstar, the armor time. Most of this had been happening in EU prime time during the week, when I have been at work. But on Saturday I was able to get to the staging system in 6RCQ-V. With the ping fleets were assembling and filling up.

I managed to make it into one of the Baltec fleets, with Thomas Lear in command. Asher the Sky Marshall was in overall command of the multi-fleet operation. We started moving out in a relatively short time span given that more than a thousand characters were logged in and in fleets. The captial ship component jumped off on their own while the subcaps flew off to titans for jump bridges.

Waiting for our turn to bridge

With no cynojammer available to keep us out, we bridged straight into DW-T2I. Looking over at the timer on the Keepstar, it was clear we were there early.

Armor Timer Counting Down

We were clearly not leaving anything to chance.

In previous Keepstar fights the armor timer had been heavily contested, so we were there and on grid with the structure to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues on that front.

On arrival we tethered up on the friendly Fortizar that had been anchored on the same grid as the Keepstar and waited for instructions.

Watching the Keepstar

We had not been hanging off the Fortizar for too long before Asher announced from the command channel that the locals were not going to defend the timer. There would be no fight, no tidi, no clash of capital ships.

It was also about then that I think people began to notice that Asher had the Real Ultimate Power theme song running on speakers in the background throughout the operation, as every time he keyed up it was there to hear. The YouTube version of the song had been discovered earlier in the week and I am pretty sure he had been playing it non-stop ever since. Like ninjas, Sky Marshals are also mammals and are also fight all the time.

Except when the enemy doesn’t show up.

While the enemy was now not expected to take the field we still piled into the system, likely both as a show of force and to keep the locals from changing their mind.

A few tasks were handed out as we waited for the timer. Our fleet warped over to an Athanor mining platform in the system to reinforce it.

Baltecs shooting a structure

Being in Reavers, shooting structures is practically a way of life. With a full fleet though that did not last very long. Soon we were back hanging off the Fortizar on our tethers wondering if anything would happen as the timer for the Keepstar counted down.

A supercarrier fleet jumped to the Fortizar and tethered up above us with heavy interdictors putting up defensive warp disruption bubbles around the supers to keep anybody from warping directly on top of them.

The supers in their orange hictor bubbles

Fighters from the super fleet were tasked to do the actual attack on the Keepstar and most of the voice coms traffic involved getting their fighters deployed and to the right location. Even that coms traffic died off after not too long and things were pretty quiet.

I took off my headset and let coms play through my speakers while I made a snack.

As I ate that I started to sketch out some ideas in a blog post draft that eventually took form and became the post about acquisitions and CCP that went live on Saturday. I suppose it is a productive fleet if I end up with two blog posts out of it.

The timer came out and the supers hit the Keepstar. As expected, there was not much in the way of resistance. A few CO2 pilots undocked to try for targets of opportunity and a Pandemic Horde interceptor fleet shadowed us coming and going, but neither were going to change the expected result. The Keepstar itself was gunned and managed to pick off Xenuria when he strayed too close and got hit by the PDS. But the fighters were successful in getting through the armor of the citadel and the timer for the final event was set.

Count down to destruction

That timer puts the final fight on this coming ~~Thursday~~ Wednesday. With the timer set in DW-T2I we withdrew back to our own staging in 6RCQ-V.

Rumor has it that the final timer will not be contested either as CO2 is already well under way evacuating assets to the Keepstar in DO6H-Q. However, the ihub in DO6H-Q was also taken by the Imperium over the weekend, leaving the Keepstar there unprotected by a cynojammer. It seems quite likely that we will stick around until that too has been destroyed.

Focus on DW-T2I in Fade

After the climactic battle over the NCDot Keepstar in X47 the headline level events in the north dried up a bit. The war carries on though and, while titans aren’t occluding the sun in mass blobs as often, things are happening.

Mostly docked up and waiting for that next apex battle

Things are once again focused on the Fade region where Circle of Two lives. Given CO2’s position at the top of the list of Imperium enemies after their betrayal in the Casino War means that it is no surprise that we are camped on their doorstep. The defection of The Judge and the subsequent downfall of CO2 in Impass, which included GigX being banned from the game, was not enough. CO2 is back on the sov map and, more importantly, GigX is back, perma bans being transitory things I guess.

And so everybody is formed up in and around Fade.

Fade forces disposition

CO2 remains in DW-T2I with their Keepstar, which we failed to kill previously due to not understanding how cynojammers work.

Other northern forces are staged in DO6H-Q where NCDot now has a Keepstar.

The main Imperium staging is at the Keepstar in 6RCQ-V, planted there back in July.

And then there are the Imperium SIGs and squads in NPC Pure Blind, where we have been knocking about, dropping on local ratters and miners, and deploying structures since at least last November. Longest deployment ever. My annual Reavers review post is going to be all about Pure Blind.

The target for the Imperium remains, as I expected, the CO2 Keepstar. But to be able to go after that we have to disable the cynojammer which means killing the infrastructure hub in DW-T2I so that our mighty blob of titans can drop on it the way it did in X47.

Doing that means entosis warfare and all which that entails. The Imperium has been chewing on the near end of Fade, attacking both ihubs and TCUs. If you look at the Fade map at DOTLAN you will see a couple more systems have been turned since I made the map above. But all that has been a mere clearing of the brush between the Imperium and its target. It is the ihub in DW-T2I that is the real objective, the necessary first step towards destroying the CO2 Keepstar.

We had a shot at the ihub on Saturday. Early evening on Saturday EU time, and mid-morning Saturday at my end of the world, pings went out for form up for a run at the ihub. It actually came about an hour earlier than had been announced, but I was up and wandering about the house, so saw the ping and was able to get into a fleet just before we departed. The Baltec fleet was full when I got on, but there was also a Jackdaw fleet coming along, so I joined up there in a Jackdaw. I had one of those handy already and didn’t want to buy a Scalpel just to fly logi. I am already accumulating ships in 6RCQ-V, something that happens every deployment.

Anyway, I wasn’t in fleet for long before we were undocking and getting to a titan to bridge out towards our destination.

Watching the Baltecs bridge out as we approach

After jumping through we followed the Baltec fleet through a gate and into CR-IFM where a fight erupted around the gate. The locals and their neighbors had formed up in greater numbers than we expected, their Muninns all over the place.

Battle around the gate, little Jackdaw sticks visible

While we were killing things, we were not exchanging well, and the Baltec fleet logi seemed to be taking an especially hard pasting. Apple Pear, who was leading the op, had us align to a friendly Raitaru in the system and burn out of the bubbles, shooting any hostile interdictors that showed up. We cleared out, leaving the field crowded with targets for a bombing run by pilots from Initiative. That tipped the overall ISK exchange in the fight well in our favor accoring to the battle report.

Battle report header

However, any thought of contesting the entosis event for the DW-T2I ihub went out the window. A weekend in the EU evening time slot was just about optimum for the defenders, who tend to be stronger than us in that time zone.

On the Raitaru Apple Pear had us dock up and log off.

Ships disappearing into the Raitaru

The plan was to go away for a few hours and then log back in to make our way back home when the system wasn’t camped and ready for us. And so we logged off and went and did whatever it was we had planned for the day.

The ping for the extraction came a few hours later with a five minute warning to get in or be left to your own devices. Of course, I only walked by my computer and saw that about ten minutes after it went up. At that point I should have just kept walking and come back late in US time to fly out on my own. But I thought that if the fleet was leaving then they would be headed towards Cloud Ring and our staging I might be able to head the other way towards Pure Blind and slip out.

I undocked and even as I started into warp I knew I had made a mistake. Despite having a perch well off the gate already bookmarked I warped straight to the gate and landed in the bubble I fully expected to find when I got there. Dumb once again yields a dead ship. At least I had an empty pod and was sent home the fast way.

In any case, I was headed the same direction that the extraction fleet was, so all eyes were on my route and looking for stragglers, so it was a poor choice. The nice, clean DOTLAN region maps don’t really show the distances between the systems in space. If you using the jump planning map you’ll see if you’re going to bridge out there are places in Pure Blind closer to Cloud Ring that the systems at that end of Fade.

The morning’s operations were enough to put the system at the top of the list for kills in 0.0 space.

CR-IFM leads the way

Not a huge battle, but the biggest one on Saturday.

Operations picked up on Sunday where we repeatedly clashed with the locals, killing enough Munnins that I have to wonder if the price on those are going to start climbing. In the end we managed to entosis the ihub in DW-T2I again, so we are set for another clash. This time it will be on Tuesday in EUTZ, when I am at the office. I will miss it, but I am sure everybody will carry on without me. We will see if a weekday time slot works out better for us. We only have to win the ihub fight once to move on to the Keepstar while the locals have to win it every time to keep it safe.

Imperium Ignorance Saves the CO2 Keepstar in DW-T2I

After laying down a Keepstar in Cloud Ring last week, the Imperium went straight to work on Circle of Two, reinforcing their Keepstar in DW-T2I the next day. The Imperium staged in Cloud Ring meant that most of Fade was in capital range, if those capitals took the gate between the two regions.

Fade Map with Locations noted

With the Keepstar in DW-T2I reinforced, the next big even was set to be the armor timer. To destroy a fueled citadel you have to go through three battles. The first is the shield layer. You can attack at any time and if you get the citadel’s shields down to zero, a timer comes up. When that timer finally counts down the citadel goes into a 15 minute repair cycle. You have to form up and shoot it again, this time shooting its armor layer down to zero. By applying enough damage you can stop the repair cycle and get through the the final timer. When that comes up you do the same thing again, only shooting away the structure. If you succeed, the citadel blows up. If you fail, you get to start all over again.

So it was the second round, the armor timer, that came up yesterday. It was set to hit at a little after 19:00 EVE Online time, which is UTC. However, because fleets had to move and get in position, the call to form up came a good four hours before then.

That was before I got out of bed here on the west coast. I turned on my computer to find fleets already forming and heading out from Delve. But that was okay. I wasn’t interested in heading out with main fleet for the long drive there and back to visit CO2. I hung around waiting for something to form up in Pure Blind.

And I was rewarded for waiting with a fleet ping from Dabigredboat.

Some might not consider that a reward. Boat can be an acquired taste. But he works hard, gets you in the action, and tells you what is going on. Plus, he was handing out free ships. We were going to head out in Tengus to snipe targets of opportunity and run down disconnects. I was happy enough to be in a Tengu again that I bought the snappy new Ghostbird SKIN for it.

55 PLEX well spent to my mind

Meanwhile I already had an alt online in a stealth bomber in DW-T2I to watch what was happening with the Keepstar and the system in general. CO2 had been busy. Both of the gates into the system were heavily bubbled, so any fleet trying to gate in to contest the timer would have to get past that.

The P-33KR Gate

You can just barely see the Keepstar in the background of that screen shot, through the dense layer of bubbles laid about the gate. The array of bubbles was big enough that if I pulled back to get them all in the screen shot, the gate and the small bubbles around it become difficult to see.

The same gate from a distance

Everything seemed to be coming together for a big fight. While Boat was arranging a black ops bridge up to DW-T2I my alt sat and watched CO2’s allies start to show up. Darkness and their coalition brought a Tempest Fleet Issue fleet.

Darkness in a ball

Ranger Regiment brought an Ishtar fleet. NCDot brought a Machariel and a Cerberus fleet. CO2 undocked a fleet of Megathrons. And capitals began to form up about the Keepstar.

Boat got us a bridge into system and we went off to safe spots to cloak up and wait for something to do.

Tengus on the way

In system Boat was keeping us up to date about what was going on while also looking for something to shoot. We went and tried to pick off some transports that were parked near the O-CNPR gate. We didn’t get a kill, but we scared them off at least.

Then Boat said we were going to go try and shoot the cyno jammer in system.

This was the first of many times I would hear the words “cyno jammer” during the op.

Boat explained that the previous day and evening the Imperium spent time putting up POS towers on every free moon and reinforcing the towers that CO2 or anybody else had deployed in the region. This was to keep a cyno jammers from being deployed. A cyno is a beacon which lets ships with jump drives travel to it. You need a cyno lit in a system in order to jump into it.

A cyno jammer, as you might imagine, blocks cynos from being lit. The ones on a POS jam the whole system, and CO2 had one in DW-T2I.

(Cyno jammers do not block covert cynos, which only black ops capable ships may use, such as our Tengus, which is how we got into the system.)

So Boat warped us over to the POS with the cyno jammer and had us start shooting it. Very shortly a Minokawa force auxiliary logged on just outside the POS, close to the cyno jammer, and started to repair it. CO2 had prepared for an attack on the jammer and, later, more Minokawas were spotted on the POS. The Minokawa was repairing faster than we could inflict damage, so Boat warped us off and we went to our safe spots again.

As we sat around I turned up the volume on the INN stream of the event and heard Boat talking about the situation. There, and on our own coms later, he explained that somebody running the preparatory ops believed that cyno jammers would not function on reinforced POSes.

This turned out to be a fairly wide-spread belief. Progodlegend, on the same stream, said that they had just done the reinforce thing to Fraternity recently. However, it appears that Fraternity just didn’t try anchoring a cyno jammer on a reinforced POS, no doubt because they believed the same thing.

GigX however, knew better it seems.

If we had known some simple contingencies could have been put in place, like leaving behind some logged off dreadnoughts to knock out the cyno jammer quickly to let fleets start pilling in. But we didn’t so we were stuck.

That left the only way in to the system for the converging Imperium fleets… with more capitals on the way than the defenders had ships on hand… with one way into the system; through the O-CNPR gate. But, as I mentioned, that gate was heavily bubbled.

The O-CNPR Gate

And it wasn’t just heavily bubbled. It was also heavily defended. The direction scan of the vicinity of the gate showed the following:

O-CNPR Gate DScan

Yes, you cannot possible read that unless you click on it. But among the things on the list were 425 battleships, 124 super carriers, 35 carriers, 683 fighters from the carriers and super carriers, 504 drones from various ships, and a titan.

That titan, just sitting in a bubble waiting to boson somebody

So while it was possible that the Imperium could have thrown everything through the gate and eventually muscled past the defenses, it was going to be a slog. Defending on a bubbled gate like that is referred to as “water boarding,” because it is torture that the attackers cannot escape. With more bubbles no doubt set to be deployed and inderdictors on the field, a hostile fleet could be kept writhing in that mess for hours. Certainly they could be held in check until the repair cycle on the Keepstar finished up.

Instead everybody turned around and went home.

That was it. GigX won the day and saved his Keepstar.

As far as I can tell the biggest fight in the whole event was a smart bombing drop by NCDot on an Imperium Jackdaw fleet. They did kill a lot of ships, 64 according to the battle report. However, they lost 20 of the black ops battleships they used, destroyed by their own fleet’s smart bombs, which left the cost of the operation at roughly ten times the ISK of the hostiles they destroyed. Not a good trade.

Battle Report Header from the Black Ops Drop

That was fine for everybody else. However those of us in Boat’s fleet were still in the system and he was on the INN stream talking about events as they unfolded. However, the stream wrapped up pretty quickly once it was announced that the Imperium was not going to show up.

Boat did not forget about us, though he forgot about his titan in the super fleet for a bit and almost got left behind. He got a black ops battleship in to send us all back to Pure Blind, staying behind to cover two people who had gone AFK long after some FCs would have left them to their fate. I got one last look at the Keepstar before we bridged out.

Still 35 minutes left on the clock

I was glad again to not have schleped all the way up from Delve in a Baltec fleet only to have to turn around and go home again. But that was still shorter than having a fight before the return trip, so a bunch of people got some of their day back.

The Mittani held the weekly Fireside Chat on coms where he explained what went wrong and how we were going to go back to doing things the old fashioned way, grinding and suppressing the region until CO2 retreats.

Not our most brilliant hour. Reddit will be filled with comments about Goons being dumb and not knowing POS mechanics for a while.

I guess we know the answer

But everybody knows about that POS mechanic now for sure, so if if anybody else falls for it… well, more of the same on Reddit I suppose.

So the war goes on. We still have a Keepstar of our own on the border of Fade and SIG and Squads are still roaming north from Pure Blind. The fun is not over, but it may be a while before we pave our way to the Keepstar to do anything more than keep it reinforced. I suspect we’ll keep reinforcing it to ensure that CO2 can’t pack it up and move away.

Meanwhile there was no saving the TEST Keepstar down in 4-GB14 in Immensea. They couldn’t even use GigX’s cynojammer trick since hostiles had already grabbed the ihub for the system, and if you don’t own the ihub you can’t setup a cynojammer. And so that Keepstar died. It wasn’t their capital Keepstar, but losing one hurts no matter what.

And then there was the Provi Bloc Keepstar, anchored down in 9UY4-H, which went online successfully. This event also involved a cyno jammer, that being the EVE Online word of the day. Hostiles sacrificed dreads to incapacitate it, but Provi just finished it off and anchored a fresh one, leaving the attackers without an easy way in. Even being able get the cyno jammer offline doesn’t mean you’re good to go.

[Update: Or maybe Provi repaired the jammer. I’ve heard both stories now.]

So it was quite a day for null sec Keepstars, with one successfully defended, one destroyed, and a new one online. And we all know just a bit more about POS mechanics, just in time for them to go away at some point in the near future.

Others on this topic:

INN – Short Live Blog of the DW-T2I Event
NER – Video about the day of the Keepstars
Reddit – Outsiders Guide to the War
NER – Battle for the 9UY4-H Keepstar

CO2’s Keepstar Reinforced in DW-T2I

As expected, with our own Keepstar safely installed in 6RCQ-V the night before, operations directly against Circle of Two in Fade began.

Fade is not a big region, and while CO2 also holds a bit of Pure Blind as well, the bulk of its holdings are in Fade, including its capital and Keepstar in DW-T2I. So that system and Keepstar are not far from where the Imperium’s own Keepstar is now planted as well as being close to NPC space in Pure Blind where Imperium SIGs & Squads have been based for the last few months.

Fade Map with Locations noted

Fleets were called up for various tasks last night, including Reavers.

I actually missed the initial ping, but reports were that nothing really happened and I managed to get online and catch up with the fleet as we headed off to DW-T2I. There we hung out for a while on one of the Raitarus we have anchored in the system, waiting to see what CO2 would do when another group started shooting their Keepstar.

We spend a lot of time hanging around structures

While somebody was at the helm of the Keepstar and using its weapons to hit the attackers, no resistance showed up in ships, so we were allowed to run off and shoot something on our own. Our target for the night was the Draccous faction Fortizar that replaced the station in system when CCP did the great outpost conversion back in early June.

CO2’s Draccous Fortizar

We approached this with some caution. We were not a big fleet and a Fortizar’s defenses are not without teeth. But nobody was at the helm and when scanned we found that only the default fittings that came with the conversion, the rigs and services, were there. Without defenses we were clear to fly around and let our drones reinforce it… and goof off a bit.

HarleyQ trying to catch up to us

Aside from a lumbering point Proteus falling behind the fleet… somebody may have webbed him… the shoot went without incident. The armor timer was set to go early on Saturday.

Draccous Reinforced

After that we warped over to the gate that would send us in the direction of home. That gate is on grid with the CO2 Keepstar and we stopped to watch the attacking fleet for a bit. There were some titans with fax support with Megathrons and Ravens along for the shoot as well.

Titans in defensive bubbles, battleships just barely visible

Looking at the related kills over on zKillboard, it looks like the Keepstar defenses were able to pick off some of the battleships, but none of the capitals were in danger. And, looking at some of the kills, at least one was blue on blue. I don’t know what Kun’mi did, but all the pilots on the kill mail for his Nestor are in the Imperium.

The Keepstar didn’t have much further to go. It was down to the last few percentage points of shield when we arrived, so we saw a bit of shooting before it was reinforced.

Keepstar reinforcement timer

After that we were off for home, the evening’s work done.

The next attack, the armor timer, is set to come out on Saturday… if I am doing my calculations correctly… at about noon Pacific time, which is 3pm Eastern time, or 19:00 EVE Online time. that makes it an evening event for the Euros and an afternoon fight in USTZ.

This puts the fight in contention with the final timer for the TEST Keepstar down south, so I suspect many of the possible allies of CO2 will punt on the armor timer to get in on a potential Keepstar kill at the other end of New Eden. We shall seem come Saturday. Meanwhile ops continue in the north to suppress the locals and reinforce other structures they have about.

The Keepstar Fight at 6RCQ-V

There is a war on. Or a war is on. Another one.

Over the past weekend The Mittani said we would be mobilizing and come Monday INN announced that the target was the northwest end of null sec. Pandemic Legion had been moving its capital fleets down to the southeast of New Eden to assail TEST, Brave, and the rest of the Legacy Coalition.

That move left a vacuum up north, a serious reduction in the number of capital ships the locals could bring to bear on any invader. The Imperium plans to move in and fill that vacuum. Pandemic Legion and NCDot are seen as the biggest threat to the Imperium, so with PL away and just NCDot and the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition left to watch their homeland, an opportunity was seen.

Of course, Reavers and a few other SIGs and squads have been up north since at least November of last year hunting the locals and trying to bring them out to fight. We’ve seen change over that time, with Pandemic Horde moving from Fade to Geminate, Mordus Angels collapsing in Pure Blind, and most recently, the resurrected Circle of Two taking up the space in Fade. The locals have occasionally put some effort into trying to suppress our operations.

Our station wrapped in bubbles at one point

But more often than not they avoid us, leave our structures alone unless we’re on a break for a couple of weeks, and only form up for final timers on their structures or when we’ve got another Rorqual tackled. I am sure there is a not unreasonable idea that if we get bored we’ll go away. But Reavers live to shoot structures and do things that seem boring, knowing that it can all lead to a fight if we persist.

Anyway, once Imperium forces were on the move from Delve northward the first objective was to setup a deployment base. So a Keepstar citadel was dropped in the system 6RC8-V in the Cloud Ring region.

The first staging in the war

The Gallente Militia alliance Federation Uprising owns the territorial control unit there, so they get their name on the map, but The Initiative owns the infrastructure hub, and since they are part of the Imperium any structure we drop there takes just 24 hours to come online. (It can take days if you drop them in hostile systems.)

The location is right on the boarder with Fade, where Circle of Two lives. If we were allowed to plant a Keepstar there, that would put them under a hostile capital and supercap umbrella. We could drop forces on CO2 which they would be hard pressed to resist.

It became vital that the locals kill the Keepstar as it came online. That is the point of vulnerability. After it is online and can be armed it becomes much more difficult to take out. So a big battle was brewing.

Fortunately for me this was all set to happen in the evening my time, which is the middle of the night EVE Online time.

I was already up in the north so planned to go with the SIGs and squads deployed there. I did, however, fly an alt over to 6RCQ-V and put him on grid with the Keepstar just to make sure I could keep an eye on what was happening there.

And that turned out to be a good thing. While fleet after fleet was getting called up and ready to move from Delve and Fountain to the fight, we undocked to take care of other business.

Undocking our Ishtars

While all eyes were on the Keepstar our fleet ran out and dealt with smaller structures. We covered a Raitaru on grid with the hostile Keepstar in DW-T21, CO2’s capital. It was in its final timer and we were there to make sure it got through that so the hostiles would have to start over reinforcing it.

We also reinforced a CO2 Astrahus on that grid, giving the locals something to form up and defend later.

Hitting the Astrahus

We then started in on a CO2 Sotiyo, which was gunned, hoping to reinforce that as well.

The view from the Sotiyo, our fleet boost visible in the distance

The Sotiyo was going to take a while however, and before we got even half way done there we were called off to help support the main fight by setting up to block hostile reinforcements. We managed to knock-off a Gila and a few bombers while doing that. We never actually went into the 6RCQ-V system.

That was probably a good thing, because in 6RCQ-V things were happening. As the timer counted down on the Keepstar a cyno went up and the Imperium supercap fleet began to land on the structure.

Titans visible on the Keepstar

And then another cyno went up and a second group started landing.

Some more titans arriving

And then a third cyno went up and then a fourth as super capitals arrayed themselves in and around the Keepstar.

And even more titans start landing

There ended up being a lot of titans on the field, possibly as many as I have seen on the field since B-R5RB.

So many titans

What is hard to see is the super carries mixed in with those fleets. They are big ships when compared to subcaps, but they seem so small when mixed in with titans.

Meanwhile the locals were forming up as well, with CO2 dropping a Muninn fleet into the system.

Muninns landing near the gate

Likewise Darkness and other GOTG groups formed up an Ishtar fleet and was circling the gate to Fade as they waited for the timer to count down.

Ishtars with the Keepstar in the distance

More and more people kept piling into the system, but things were not too bad… and then the shooting started.

My alt got knocked offline a few times during the fight, but things were not as bad as during the 9-4RP2 fight, the so-called “million dollar battle” where getting back in was pretty much impossible. If your client died… and I could see my client grabbing more and more RAM until it expired… need a 64-bit client… you could get back in with a bit of patience.

But this fight wasn’t as hyped as the 9-4RP2 battle was, and we were well shy of the 6,142 players in system that earned that fight a Guinness record. The peak I saw when my alt was in system was just past 3,800.

3,813 and 10% tidi

The fight itself involved the hostiles using Gilas and Ishtars and some long range fit dreadnoughts to stop the timer and start chipping down Keepstar. They were successful for a while, getting enough damage on the citadel to stop the timer with 10 minutes of online repair to go and they did break it down to 85% of its hit points.

But the weight in numbers was against them. While they got out in front of things, the titans and super carriers had been joined by a dreads and subcaps who chipped away, cutting back the attackers until the repair timer started up again and the outcome became inevitable.

Titans firing on attackers

Once the timer started up again the prospects for the attackers dimmed and they began to extract.

The Kirkland Protein Star about to go online

Tidi was still bad though, but my main was on the other side of the gate in Fade trying to catch some hostiles coming and going.

Asher, whose ongoing Kirkland Protein Bar meme helped name the Keepstar (though the name changed a couple of times), was not there to the Reavers. He is now the Sky Marshall, the overall commander and coordinator of fleets and in charge of strategy. I am glad he has an opportunity to move all the pieces on the map. There are not many games where you can drive the actions of literally thousands of other players. But I do worry a bit as the position tends to burn out those who sit in the Sky Marshall chair during a war. I would miss him if he left the game.

Zed Starshine was leading us for the evening. He has led us on some ops before. He got us out to our targets, then to block the comings and goings of the locals, and then the hell out of the way when the hostiles packed up to head home en masse. Our little fleet wasn’t going to stem that tide, we’d just be a snack for them on the way. So we got home early and never had to face any tidi.

The Keepstar went online.

With a big flash

The capitals and super caps didn’t have to head home. They were home. They could dock up and be ready for ongoing ops against CO2 and GOTG.

The fight itself saw more than a thousand ships blow up.

Most violent system on DOTLAN

Most of those ships belonged to those attacking the Keepstar, as the battle report indicates.

Battle Report Header

[Corrected that battle report as I had CO2 on the wrong side initially.]

The ISK count wasn’t that big however, barely a titan’s worth of ships destroyed. TEST and Brave, who are now allied with us against PL and NCDot, sent forces north to join in and cover the Keepstar coming online.

But once that Keepstar was online the situation in the north changed. 6RCQ-V is close enough to CO2’s capital and Keepstar in DW-T2I that the super fleet can just take the gate into E9KD-N and then jump straight there. And you can bet that their Keepstar, and all of their structures, are clearly in our sights. If they stand there will be more fights.

Rumor has it however that they might pack up shop and head to Venal. There are still NPC stations there, places that cannot be destroyed. That is, however, just a rumor at this point, as is the rumor that Slyce might join them.

But if they hang around there will be more titans on grid and more battles over structures in the weeks to come. Maybe even another node killing, 6,000 player, “million dollar” battle.