Another general war update

AAA went home. I don't know that they actually did anything in the war, but I suppose this is a good thing. ROL and possibly Initiative seem to be the only remnants of the invasion that are active in the north, and at least ROL was here for months before it invasion started. Red Alliance, former allies of ours, are working with White Noise against us in Venal, though the rumored russian invasion of the northernmost regions doesn't seem to have happened.

In the last few days we've been working on taking back some high-end moons in Pure Blind and have apparently taken some minor losses as hostiles hit targets of opportunity; our numbers have dropped as the actual danger of an invasion is gone, so the normal group of ~goodfights~ alliances (plus RA) have taken the opportunity to grab kills where they can. ROL killed another mothership of ours which had jumped to a cyno beacon unscouted (and they used 5 titans to do it, which is more than the entire SC had on the field during the capital fight we lost in h-w). They may just be turning into one of maybe three non-NC alliances that I have any respect for.

We have no wardecs on for the first time in months, so I'm going to take the opportunity to sell off some plexing loot and things in empire, and maybe take a trip out to geminate to firesale stuff that got left there.

Teamspeak Recordings: Killing IT caps

Yo, how is the doomsday on The Kapown going?

The module is laggy, waiting for it...

Okay, just drag another module over it like your cloaking
device or your Miner II and then it should unstick.

-NC using titans

With the war over or on hold or whatever, I can catch up on some non-battlereport posts I've had sitting around for a while. This is another in a series with teamspeak recordings and goes with this post, in which we killed a number of IT caps while taking minimal losses. Teamspeak recordings are, as always, NSFW.


Download/Listen
MP3, 33 minutes, 50 MB

EDIT: Added a title :fail:

IT vs NC: In which there is slight lag

There was a fight in o-y today. The hostiles titan bridged to a snipe spot just as we jumped in via gate. The lag started bad at around 3-5 minutes for modules and got worse, 20+ after we dropped our trademark titan blob and local hit 460.

After maybe five hours local started dropping and eventually we got to go home.

An exciting fleet fight

Aftermath: 1200 km of wrecks

Killboard.This will probably take a day to sync fully. I suspect we'll come out ahead; the FC reports that the enemy kept bringing in more ships thinking they were going to get titan kills and they blackscreened all to hell. We kept bringing in people too but, well, titans. People who came in after the fight started were supposedly taking 45 minutes to load.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Related kills is giving wildly varying results for related kills, from 66b killed for 44 lost (with most losses showing on both sides) to 40 killed and 5 lost (clearly missing most of our losses). The current link (48 for 22) is the best I've found, with losses on the correct side, and it sounds about right; titans make a huge difference against battleships and one of ours got 94 killmails from this battle.

Well that was fun

I was plexing in tenal today when the call went out for supers > caps > BS. Logged into my dreadnaught in h-w and found them calling for 17k fuel, meaning the target was in our figurative backyard. Numbers were low, but fleets were forming at other staging points and FCs sounded excited. We were in a hurry, jumping bridge titans, support and dreadnaughts to the same cyno - risky because a good bump could leave us without a support fleet until the titan could be repositioned. We got lucky though and nobody so much as touched the bridge titan. FCs were pushing for more hictors and dictors.

We jumped in to x-70 where an enemy nyx was outside pos shields. We got an epic (~100 km) bump on it, went siege green, doomsdayed and tried bubble, neut and bump but it escaped. We sieged the pos while friendly supercaps jumped out but one of the titans wasn't capped and was left behind. It got tackled and the enemy started logging people in.

Bumped nyx in armor

Shooting dictors with a dread

For about two hours things were a mess trying to get dictors off the titan while we brought in reinforcements from staging systems. The enemy had a small number of capitals and even a few supers on the field but we took the caps down in short order. Eventually we got enough titans on grid to drive the enemy support off, at which point the fight was pretty well over. I had a little excitement near the end when a bunch of enemy support had me tackled far off the friendly capital blob (I had stayed mostly in the place where we cynoed) and got me down to 70% shield before they were driven off.

Aftermath

Killboard

Warbearing, or: The worst tengu fit ever

EDIT 2010-9-6: This fit has been superceded by one which is better at tanking but less good at scouting.

So let me tell you about this hilarious tengu fit. It has 22k EHP, afterburner and microwarpdrive and each rig is a different type. Oh, and I'm flying it.

What? Well, maybe we should start at the beginning.

At this point I've been at war for more than six months. If you read back through my posts you'll find two in which I talked about carebearing; since Atlas attacked geminate in December I've spent a total of 8 days earning isk.

A couple months ago I realized that there wasn't really an end in sight, so I decided to do some cross-training in order to have one character able to do both capital and subcapital combat.That way I could keep one on the front while carebearing at home. This has finally come to fruition (or it will in 3 days... funny story, my 45 million skill point capital pilot can't fit an RCU2). With the war at what appears to be a lull - sometimes going whole hours between fleets forming - I've had the opportunity to try plexing with two characters.

What I found was that the ishtar sort of sucks for killing things. It would be a lot better with perfect skills - and especially T2 drones - but the slow drones and anemic DPS just didn't cut it. Ships that do actual damage can't tank, and with two characters the only option was to have the scanning and scout ship also tank. This is where the T3 comes in.

This is a multi-role plexing utility ship. It does three things very well:

1. Scouting. It's immune to bubbles and warps in 3.6 seconds; almost no matter what you jump into, the only way you're going to be targeted by something is if you screw up.

2. Scanning. It can scan all signatures including ladar hacking sites, which are the hardest I've encountered. The sisters probe launcher and scan strength rig are necessary for this; with nearly perfect scanning skills the ladar hacking sites can be tricky.

3. Tanking guristas. It's cap stable (the CCC is necessary for this) and tanks nearly as well as an ishtar. Supplemented by a DPS ship it can tank pretty much anything as long as an effort is made to reduce incoming damage. It also has a significantly larger hit point buffer, and can tank the smartbomb in guristas military complex without going into armor.

Someday this is going to look horrible on my killboard, but you know what? I'm not really concerned about that. This setup does what I need and does it extremely well, in addition to being a joy to fly. It's worth every isk to me, and the fact that it's already paid for itself five times over is just icing on the cake.

Utility tengu (right) doing its' thing

IT vs NC: Atlas retreats, IT titan down

So I go to sleep for 6 hours and suddenly everything changes.

Least importantly, the second jump bridge system which was threatened yesterday has been cleared of SBU.

Atlas is going home. Their renters are under attack by Cursed alliance, which I forgot to mention in my last update. Atlas apparent is highly dependent on renters, having few high-end moons despite the vast amount of space they inhabit, and Goons are also moving to assist Cursed. Atlas pets GC and CoW have reportedly had minimal participation in the north for several weeks, so I expect to see them leaving the front entirely soon as well.

IT lost a titan this morning. It's one that had escaped from H-W by resetting a pos password (when they still had towers in the system), which bumped it outside the bubbles surrounding the tower and allowed it to jump out. Apparently it was caught as it was moving back to Delve.

At this point we could just call the war over. I'm going to hold off on that because there hasn't been an official announcement yet, but I don't see how the enemy could accomplish anything at this point. What happens now remains to be seen.

EDIT: I've gone ahead and changed the label for this war from 'great northern war mk 2' to 'max 2'. I was really expecting us to lose when I made that.

IT vs NC: General update

With the H-W campaign winding down we're back to structure warfare, capitalizing on high participation to start to undo the progress the enemy had made in the western regions. As well as saving the EC- and FIO stations we repped a number of pos coming out of reinforced and sieged a large number of enemy high-ends; our timer tool was showing more than 30 reinforced towers at its peak. Many of the towers were saved, but since h-w we've killed (and presumably replaced) 17 large towers, and another 7 are currently reinforced.

Reinforced towers as of a day or two ago

An interesting situation has developed over the last few days with regard to H-W however. According to intel the enemy still have 7 titans and 20 something else (supercarriers or mixed capitals depending on which rumor you listen to) logged off at their dead staging towers. This is a problem for the enemy because titans are a big deal; active titan pilots are a rare commodity, and seven of them would make a huge difference in any capital fight. They can't be abandoned, so the enemy has to get them out of h-w somehow.

Over the last day or so they have been trying to draw our fleet out of h-w by attacking jump bridge systems. At the present time one jump bridge system has enemy SBU anchored and one other has been cleared of SBU. Although the operations in the western regions and saving the one jump bridge system have been accomplished without abandoning the H-W camp, the hostiles have been pulling fleets of about 500. These sort of numbers may be tricky to take on while still maintaining adequate cover in h-w, though we'll see how it goes.


The strategic situation has also continued to evolve. The NC has been joined by a former Providence alliance, who are now running a campaign against Ev0ke, while Ushra'Khan and brick squad have joined the attacking forces and IRC are apparently going to attack Tenal on the 20th. Down in IT space things have heated up as well, with Pandemic Legion and their panda-themed allies being joined by a new alliance formed from an eve community known as dreddit.

IT vs NC: Five SC supercarriers down in H-W

But first, some boring lead-up.

Over the 12 or so hours after my previous update enemy towers in h-w were coming out of reinforced every few hours, and after not too long we finished the last one off. Hostiles were still intermittently logging in to where the towers had been and dying, which brought our total number of capital kills for the h-w campaign up to 59 (plus a titan), while the IT killboard is showing they killed 48.

After all the enemy pos had been taken down the EC- station came out of armor reinforced, so we headed down and repped it. Many hostiles were still logged off in h-w, and they formed up 300 (according to intel) people at the login screen for 2 hours hoping to break out while we saved the station; however, we did a capital-only op and kept support in h-w, so they abandoned this. The next enemy breakout attempt was scheduled to start at 1000 eve time, one hour before downtime.

At 1000 we got about 290 people together and spent the hour warping around and trying to get tackle on an enemy battleship fleet which had logged in. At one point we got good bubbles on a couple dozen hostile battleships as their fleet warped off, and we kept getting kills here and there until shortly before downtime. The hostiles were very focused on the planet 9 moon 2 and p9m3 former pos locations, warping in repeatedly to kill mobile warp disruptors.

Good bubbles for once

Minutes before downtime a hostile ragnarok and aeon were reported on grid. The server went down, and soon we got a jabber alert that the hostiles were calling for everybody to get in and fight.

After downtime we finally formed a proper capital fleet and I switched to my dreadnaught. We got a warpin shortly and landed on what must have been the entire hostile fleet, battleships, capitals and supercarriers though no titans. We started out primarying and doomsdaying enemy dreads, who were attacking a friendly titan, but pretty soon we switched to supercarriers and took down a nyx and aeon in short order.

Taking down dreads


First nyx going down


First aeon going down

The enemy capitals that weren't tackled started cynoing out as the aeon was going down, and capitals stayed on grid to kill the ones that couldn't escape while supercapitals warped out to kill a logged off nyx and support kept a wyvern tackled 180 km from our capitals. When the enemy capitals and nyx were down our capitals and supercaps warped to a logged off aeon and killed it, then to the wyvern and took that down too.

Mopping up enemy capitals out of siege


Second aeon going down

Killboard link

It was a pretty good night, overall.

Longpost: What happened in H-W?

When posting about this war I've deliberately maintained a facts-only style. I'm involved in the war and so obviously have bias, but I recognise that and I don't do chestbeating, trolling or propaganda. In the effort to remove biased language though I've also thrown away content and things I want to write about, and since this is a personal journal instead of a newspaper that stops now. Today we're going to talk about the attack on h-w and why and how it failed. Take it all with a grain of salt, of course; I'm a just grunt and most of what know about the strategic situation is guesswork based on what I see in the trenches.

First off, it was a good plan. It's what I would have done -- really true, although possibly not the best endorsement. I've worried about what would happen if the hostiles attacked h-w and wondered what was preventing it, but I got complacent anyway; I never expected them to put 800 people in staging pos and try to lock down the system 23/7; when it comes to attacking in the most effective way, they did it right.

So what went wrong? Two things, time zones and numbers.

With their famously weak player coverage in US time zones the hostiles didn't have enough numbers to keep us from taking system control during that time. When that happened we were free to bridge in reinforcements, clear the gates, get people out of the station, bring in more capitals and put up a cyno jammer and jump bridge; at this point we could lock down the system and they couldn't get reinforcements in via either titan bridge or gates. They broke our hold pretty easily on the first day, but by the second we had enough in system that this wasn't possible.

As for numbers, our fleets before the attack on h-w were weak. We saved the Stella Polaris stations and FIO, but those ops went down in late US time when the enemy is weakest. Our fleets were adequate for the job, but nothing like the overwhelming response a serious threat to stations should warrant. After a month of POS warfare and the enemy not doing anything interesting we got complacent. The SC seemed laughably ineffective and we forgot they were a serious threat.

Then they hit h-w. The attack was a red-hot poker to the eye for the coalition and we woke up and came together, as we do in times of crisis. The numbers we didn't have before came out of the woodwork, every alliance representing; we are the NC and this is how we roll, one nation, one people. Our numbers in system went from 300 or less on the first day to over a thousand, the hostiles were unable to break our hold on the system for more than 24 hours before station came out of reinforced and the attack was over.

IT vs NC: H-W is doing pretty okay, actually

-Angel_Hun:#IT- do NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT NOT LOG IN to H-W

After the titan kill yesterday the infrastructure hub came out of reinforced and we repped it and killed the two SBU. With excellent participation on our part the system stayed under our control throughout the day; local was over 1600 and mostly blue when the first hostile tower went down at 1800, hostile prime time.

A typical hostile tower during their prime time


I'll bet that tower name is good for your morale

At this point I crashed and couldn't get back in for a few hours. The node died with 2 hours left on the station reinforced timer and I got in when it came back up. At the time of writing the station is being repped and local has 900 blues, so I'm going to call it saved.

Over the last few days some IT pets who didn't come to h-w have been shooting sov structures out west, so there should be some fighting over the next few days. The enemy seem to have gotten over their reluctance to deploy capitals and supercapitals, so something interesting could actually happen.

IT vs NC: Atlas titan down in H-W

Logged in today after work and h-w local was 870. The station had been rebubbled of course, pos reinforced, services disabled and so forth. Local was pretty red and I spun at a deep safe for a couple hours while we moved into US time. The reinforcement timer on the station is for just after 2200 tomorrow - still euro time, and earlier than I'd like. Not sure if managers can change the end of the second reinforcement timer while the first is still in progress but it ought to be about 5 hours later....

Anyway, we started taking down bubbles at around 2300 with the system still fairly red. We got some more blues in, logged in supercaps and had system control by 0030. We sieged stuff, repped stuff....

Clearing the station again

And then we got a leviathan tackled outside an enemy tower.

The pilot logged off in half shield, actually got back inside the pos but apparently his speed was set to 100% for the duration of the 15 minute logoffski timer and he actually drifted through the pos and out the other side, where he died.

I crashed before he got inside the shield and couldn't relog, but I got on the killmail anyway. First titan kill for me.

Titan under attack by NC hull miners (with credit to Beachura)

Killmail

IT vs NC: H-W capital welp

After we regained control of h-w not a huge amount went on for a while. We got people undocked, who mostly logged off for the night. We reinforced a number of hostile staging pos, repaired the station services and some pos modules and got a cyno jammer and jump bridge online.

Around 1300 a fight developed on a stargate where it looks like the hostiles jumped reinforcements in to system. We warped capitals to the gate where an extremely laggy fight was in progress, but held back on supercapitals; the enemy warped capitals and supercapitals on us. Local rapidly climbed from 600 to a peak of over 1200; modules were essentially completely inoperative, though drones worked. With 4 titans and reportedly 10 supercarriers on the field I expect the fight to be an isk-disproportionate loss for us; I'll try and get a killboard link up when they eventually sync.

Brackets AND effects!

Killboard link 24 capitals killed for 44 lost

I eventually got out in low armor and the survivors safed up as reds took control of the system. There are more blues in system than yesterday, and I expect subcapital engagements throughout the day and more repping shit tonight.

On an awesome note, I was scanning in my cloaky alt before the fight started and came across an ibis with a newbie pilot (a real newbie, not a scout). We had a nice chat and he said he had picked the big red blob on the map and flown up here. While we were fighting on the gate he actually warped in, loaded grid, got shot at and escaped intact. Win!

IT vs NC: H-W attacked

As you know if you watch any forums, the SC have finally made their move. They called an all-out coalition CTA and put everythig into our staging system in tribute, locking it down at downtime with 7-800 reds in an obvious attempt to PR- us (perseus has stated as much). Their plan apparently is to put everything into one system for 5 days, take the station and move on to the next; and today and tomorrow are a russian holiday, so their numbers are the highest they will ever be.

The trouble with this is that the enemy is based almost entirely out of russian and european time zones with minimal US coverage. Local peaked at about 1100 today, but started dropping fast around 2 PM PST (11 PM GMT) to around 300 reds. After a couple hours of spinning and waiting for the capitals they had on the station to mostly log off we broke out at 9 PM PST.

(note: when I first wrote this I actually used a future tense and predicted breaking out monday; happily, it didn't last that long)

Immediately after breaking out


Another view of the station

It was snipers vs snipers and we warped out, warped in, bubbled, killed bubblers, that sort of thing. The enemy used their capitals, warping carriers in to rep and so forth. Modules were very laggy for all sides and damage coming in was fairly light. Between this and people being able to warp out, logi were really useful - something of a new feeling for me.

Snipers on the station


Bubbles going down

After a couple hours the enemy logged off and we had system dominance. Word is they will be bringing a fight; if something goes down I'll post about it.

The blog pack: Some statistics

I was curious, so I went through CK's blog pack to grab some numbers (the evebloggers pack being far too large to attempt this). Naturally they're not 100% accurate, but it's not like anybody will repeat the process to prove me wrong.

Types of blog:
15 are general stuff with no real focus
13 are about 0.0
12 are about piracy and lowsec
6 are about highsec (including ninjas)
4 are about wormholes

Other stuff:
12 are in-character or fanfic

13 apologise on the front page for not posting enough
4 have a most recent post which says the author is going afk or quitting

1 averaged more than one post per day over the last month
6 is the median number of posts per month
3 had 0 posts in the last month

EDIT 1/2012: This post used to have the 'nobody cares' label, hence the comments~

IT vs NC: Station saved

X-7 Friday 00.01

RED PEN CTA!

First station about to fall in PB.

LOGISTICS, Battleships, dictors.
BOMBERWING present with FC! (shrapnel)

posted by SirMolle [EVOL] member

Over the last couple of days Ev0ke and Dead Terrorists have been making a push for a station in the far west of NC space, FIO in Fade. They reinforced the station once, and the end of the first reinforcement cycle coincided with the Stella Polaris sov issue so we let it go into armor reinforced while saving the stations in the north.

Today we formed up supercaps > carriers and jumped to FIO. The hostiles had battleships and bombers in system and the situation was a little tense; titans were assigned to doomsday enemy FCs and backup cynos were arranged, but even jumping into a hot grid with upward of 500 in system everybody loaded and enemy battleships were driven off. Although SC was present, according to forums their numbers were quite weak.

After jumping in

We started shooting a sovereignty blockade unit but the enemy reinforced the system's infrastructure hub and the SBU went invulnerable. This meant we had to wait for the station to come out of reinforced, at which point sov structures (all? some? does anybody actually understand sov?) would be vulnerable again.

When that happened we killed the SBU and repped the station. Somebody also dropped SBU in EC- before the fight started, and I think the supercarriers headed home early and took them out on the way.

SBU is going nowhere

IT vs NC: Saving BFFs from evil clowns

Later this evening they pinged jabber for supercarriers > caps and we went north to kill enemy TCU which were coming online. The situation with the stella polaris stations is that the sov dropped (they say the automatic bill payment failed to work) and White Noise flipped three out of four stations to their control and dropped TCU. The TCU take some time to come online, and once they do it would force us to go through all the stations' reinforced cycles to get them back. We needed to make the enemy TCU die and Stella Polaris' ones live in order to prevent a serious setback there.

We jumped into the destination system with 12 minutes left on the TCU anchoring. Blue subcapitals were on field and ten hostile supercarriers were hugging the shields of their pos. We put damage on the TCU and they put fighter bombers on us, which we smartbombed away. The TCU went down with less than 9 minutes left out of its' 8 hour timer.

The rest of the evening was spent killing the other TCU and flipping all the stations back to Stella Polaris ownership. At the time of writing I'm heading back to tribute, but a number of carriers and supercarriers are staying in Branch until the last Stella Polaris TCU come online about two hours from now.

Perseus has an account of the fight from the perspective of SC subcaps, which is pretty neat.

IT vs NC: General update

In the last few days the SC has purportedly formed into a single, large front and have been attacking tribute directly in m-o and e-o, even dropping sovereignty blockades. This has resulted in several large fights when we killed the SBU, although no enemy capitals have been deployed.

Today they hit e-o again and dropped SBU. I formed up with a reinforcement fleet of about 170 a while after the fighting started and we bridged into system and warped to a grid with abundant reds and a second blue fleet. Local was a little over 600 and we stayed on grid for maybe ten or fifteen minutes before the reds warped off and left system; then we cleared the SBU and headed home. It was just another subcap fight so I didn't get any screenshots worth posting.

Killboard

In other war news, according to forums the NC lost a CSAA. Not sure what was in it. Also, Stella Polaris lost all their sov to not paying bills or something. White Noise grabbed either 1 or 3 of their 4 stations, so taking that back while simultaneously fighting in tribute and playing with pos in pure blind will make our job a bit more difficult for the near future.

More carrier combat

Today I got to play pee-vee-pee with a pos repping carrier again. We went down to Pure Blind to rep some stuff and hostiles showed in slightly larger numbers. They were sniper fit and our battleships were close range, with fighters assigned for bonus damage.

We repped one pos without incident, hostiles entered system and we sat on the shields of the other with fighters assigned while waiting for it to exit reinforced, with our subcapitals in the safe pos. When the hostile fleet came on grid we would rep each other and pos guns while the subcaps warped to the enemy fleet at zero. Unfortunately we apparently forgot to bring dictors and weren't able to catch very many.

Blues landing on enemy snipers

The tower came out of reinforced and our subcap fleet stopped warping in for whatever reason. Hostiles primaried the tower and we put shield reps on it, racing damage vs reps.

Racing against damage to rep the tower


Using carrier reconfiguration mode to hotswap mods

After a few minutes they weren't making a lot of progress so they switched to close range ammo, warped on us at ten and tried to kill carriers and bump us inside the shields. I was swapping modules like mad, hardeners for flux coils and adding reppers. They had a thanatos into structure before we got enough reps on it; I was running all four that I brought with me.

Defensive burst!

EDIT: And when that didn't work they left and the pos was repped without further incident. Forgot to mention that part.

Oh frak, more supercapital kills

...and I can't even take credit for them.

To start off, PL killed another nyx. I wasn't even going to post about it, but then they kept killing expensive stuff.

In the southeast, "somebody" has apparently donated 10 billion isk worth of sovereignty blockade units to Brick Squad. I'm not sure whether this was contributory, but brick and PL killed an AAA-pet hel yesterday. AAA dropped 20 carriers to save it but it died anyway. Then they self-destructed the carriers.

Finally, a few NC took a road trip down south to killmail whore on an IT CSAA. IT has understandably declined to confirm/deny rumors that it was building a titan, but it dropped capital construction parts when it was killed so there was definitely a supercapital being built.

EDIT: Breaking news! ROL killed an NC wyvern. Apparently it jumped to a cyno beacon without a scout.

In which pos repping is not boring

I went out with a pos repping carrier fleet today to somewhere in Pure Blind. We repped one tower uneventfully and started on another when an enemy subcapital fleet entered the system and we had to warp back to the pos which had been repped. We had a small medium-hull blue fleet in system and hostiles were in long-range battleships.

Command pinged jabber for numbers and goons formed up as well. Shortly thereafter we aligned back to the pos and warped, but were too late to save it.

As we landed we lit cyno, goon carriers jumped in and various friendly subcapital fleets entered the field. The hostile fleet initially bubbled the carriers but warped off after a few minutes. Later our FC had us align to a stargate and warp at zero. We landed on the enemy subcapital fleet, who had aggression, and the ones we couldn't lock down scattered.

The op also produced this frankly hilarious (if true, naturally, but you can't make this shit up) teamspeak snippet. NSFW of course.

Killing on the stargate

EDIT: You might note my hilariously terrible carrier fit here. I forgot to bring a combat fit :fail:

Teamspeak recordings: Killing Alazais

This is the first of a series of posts with teamspeak recordings. These will likely not be of interest to somebody who has been in a real fleet, but rather to people who are curious as to what goes on in a fleet fight. Teamspeak recordings are always NSFW, just so everybody's aware.

This recording is from this fight, in which we killed Alazais' triage carrier (everybody has seen the triage video right?) and some other expensive toys. Subsequent posts will mostly be capital fights, although I'm hoping to get a good one with an embarrassing loss at some point.

Download/Listen
MP3, 5:04, 7.4 MB

IT vs NC: The first month

After the first month of war we've reached a convenient summarizing point, so I'll give my impressions about what's happened so far.

Subcapitals: There has been a huge amount of fighting, and all sides have lost vast numbers of ships without actually accomplishing very much. Everybody's killboard shows their own side winning, so I'm going to call it about even.

Capitals: We're doing very well here, with 200-230 capital kills and 50-60 losses. 200 is a lot of caps, but IT alone is said to have brought upward of a thousand; it ain't over yet.

Supercapitals: Zero losses, 4 kills: ROL titan, 2 motherships (init and CO2 I believe) and an IT mothership and CSAA killed by PL this afternoon. Such small numbers of supercapital kills won't make an appreciable difference in a fight, but are interesting from a morale perspective.

Sovereignty: The 3 stations in Cloud Ring have been retaken by Ev0ke. Goons are saying that they left to go live with TCF (recall that TCF and goons were two of the three RedSwarm Federation members back in the day), which you can choose to believe or not. I can confirm that goons are active with both capitals and subcaps in Pure Blind.

Moons: Over the course of the last month we slowly lost around 30 high-end moons. Then over the last two days, with IT mostly busy elsewhere, we've killed 19 large towers and another 13ish are currently reinforced, which should account for all the high-ends. IT seem to be back though - we had to skip the last tower we were sieging today in x-7 because they formed up a larger cap fleet - so I'm hoping for a fight when the towers come out of reinforced tomorrow.

Forecast: The enemy are apparently going to try to increase interalliance cooperation and form actual coalition fleets. Assuming their go-getting attitude hasn't been blunted over the last month and PL stops being a significant distraction in Delve, this should make them more effective during part 2. So far we're doing much better than I or anybody else had expected, but it's not over yet.