Sigh

Remember when I said...

So, it's over. The NC is dead. The DRF ... are an unstoppable juggernaut. They control more than half of player-sov nullsec (18 of 35 regions) even if they choose not to also take the DC's space; they control all the game's technetium if they choose to take the rest; and they have more firepower than the rest of 0.0 combined.

But it's cool, keep partying about the NC being dead. I'm sure things will be so much better now.

You've seen it already, but this is a fucking epic infographic:


Nullsec is dead. The only pvp left is welpcat fleets in delve, and the whole point of those is that they don't matter.

Funny thing about being an ex-nullsec guy, I consider the state of null to be the most important thing in eve. Everything else is either completely trivial, or subordinate to the state of nullsec; and if nullsec is dead, it feels like eve is dead. No more wars, no more epic struggles. What's left, small gang pvp? Sitting in empire making money?

I can handle sitting in empire making money, but unless null revives at some point wealth will become meaningless because there will never be anything to spend money on. And then what's the point?

DRF vs NC: Finis

So, it's over. The NC is dead. The DRF, along with PL - for whose services they can now outbid anybody else - are an unstoppable juggernaut. They control more than half of player-sov nullsec (18 of 35 regions) even if they choose not to also take the DC's space; they control all the game's technetium if they choose to take the rest; and they have more firepower than the rest of 0.0 combined.

But it's cool, keep partying about the NC being dead. I'm sure things will be so much better now.

Not that I'm bitter or anything ^^

DRF vs NC: Well, shit

Had a red pen today for supers and caps. Got 200 caps in fleet and an unknown number of supers logged off. Enemy had 50 titans. We stood down.

Welp.

General update, including DRF vs NC

War news first.

The DRF have taken the rest of vale and geminate, and the sitaution has stabilized. They reinforced a couple of stations in tribute but as far as I know didn't make a real attempt at taking them.

Hitting tribute brought DC into the war on our side. The DRF responded to this with denial of service attacks against NC communications infrastructure (jabber, etc.), proving once and for all that they are cheating scum.

The current situation is that nothing important is being reinforced. We haven't started a counterattack, and the enemy haven't made a serious push into tribute. Fighting is mostly over towers.


In general eve news, CCP have decided to nerf jump bridges by limiting them to 1 per system, meaning you have to use gates alternating with jump bridges. This makes them basically completely useless except as shortcuts; the only way to move safely is with a carrier or nullified T3. I already have them, but fucking over players who are poor, have low sp or don't multibox seems sort of stupid.

The real mystery to me is why they're dicking about with jump bridges instead of fixing technetium and supercarriers, which are actually broken.


As for me personally, I'm at sort of a crossroads where eve is concerned. I haven't been playing lately.

This is partly because I'm a super pilot, and super pilots are permanently on "standby" while anything important is going on. So I got out of the habit of even getting in subcapital fleets at the beginning of the war, and every fleet where I actually got to do something turned into superlag bullshit which made me instantly bittervet.

So, I haven't been playing. I'm also not sure I want to, which is made more interesting by the fact that my corp is closing at the end of the month due to director fatigue.

I'm going to try and get in fleets over the next few weeks to see if I even find it fun any more. If I do, I'll find another corp in razor or MM. If not, I'll probably just let my characters lapse into NPC corps. I'm working on setting up a capital shipyard, and some time to focus on that would be nice; if I move to another NC corp, I'll probably just take combat characters and my holding alt, and leave carebears out for now.


While I was writing this I actually got in a fleet and there was a fight. We lost and I'm not sure what we were fighting over, but it was sort of fun.

DRF vs NC: We're fucked

Yesterday a station came out of reinforced in vale. We formed up about 700 guys and got in system first. When the station came out, hostiles jumped in 154 supercapitals.

We can't compete with that, not even close. So what happens now?

1. The NC dies. Russians take all the technetium, have infinite supercarriers and take over all of 0.0 so they can macro and RMT in peace. Eve dies.
2. The offensive stops at some point. We will keep fighting, of course, as long as we have the will; the dominion system makes taking defended sov difficult, and if we can save one timer out of 5-ish the enemy have to start over. PL's contract will end at some point (rumored to be only for geminate and vale) and it's possible the enemy offensive will run out of steam.
3. DC goes all-in on our side. I don't think even this would actually give us enough supers to go toe to toe, but it would let us offer much more resistance. Maybe even enough to stabilize the front lines.


As for me, now is the time for a partial evacuation to minimize risk exposure. Combat ships and fittings stay, of course; so does isk-making infrastructure, which I keep in one station and ensure it can fit in a carrier. Capitals other than the evacuation carrier, ships I'm not using and other high value assets all go to lowsec.

I'm doing this prematurely, mind you; but prematurely is the only appropriate time and it's as much a psychological thing as it has to do with the actual value of the assets assets. Being prepared to lose space, knowing that you can do it in a controlled manner and that you have resources to fall back on, enables you to face impending doom without losing perspective; whichever way the war goes, it goes according to plan.


What I actually suspect will happen is that the DRF will take geminate and vale, PL's contract will end and NC leadership will remove their heads from their asses and turn all that technetium into supercarriers and/or hire PL.

DRF vs NC: General war update.

[02:21:51] Ezekiel Sulastin > 02:21:37 Combat Your Aurora Ominae hits Pith Usurper, doing 2786850.4 damage.

-Combat operations in tenal

Not a lot of progress one way or the other. Evoke and tri (NCdot) are attacking pure blind a little and being stonewalled by goons, who haven't been involved in the east because they suck.

(I actually love goons, but we're losing stations over here...)

In geminate, the russians bought PL for 600 billion. So far PL have rode bikes and blueballed.

tri/evoke/PL did reinforce about 10 CSAA in vale and tenal, but didn't come to fight when they left reinforced. We're saving the last one as I type this, and since there's no battle report I made a map for you.

Red: Attackers
Blue: Defenders

DRF vs NC: Another superfight that it looks like we lost

Apparently while we weren't watching the DRF reinforced everything in geminate, something like 8 outposts. Today I was reading a goddamn book for the first time in forever (not bitter, grumble) and ignoring subcapital fleet messages when I missed a supers log in message and the first thing I heard was superfite now.

This was in late US time in our staging system, and apparently it went badly for us. Numbers were even in local but what I hear is that our supers were dying and theirs weren't, same as last time. I managed to load system, but didn't even get to warp in before our supers were ordered to log off. I'm hearing that we lost a titan and at least one supercarrier, but there may well have been more before I got on comms.

Talk about troubling. If their super blob can now winbutton in frick'n US time, the strategic situation starts to look grim. Structure app says half our outposts are coming out of reinforced in euro time, half in US and some retard timed one outpost for downtime, so we're almost certain to lose that one and we're really going to have to get the blob motivated to save the others.

I have to admit that I've been neglecting the game a bit -- a touch of bittervet syndrome after the last three times I logged in were all 4+ hour supercapital superlag garbage. I think I'll move a carebear alt or two out here and get in on some subcapital fleets. I've been wanting to try out this shield maelstrom thing, and one of my alts is like 8 days from hictors, which could be interesting. Taking a thousand-dollar supercarrier into laggy bullshit is stressful, even if they are disposable.

EDIT: No super losses are showing, but the finally tally is 1 erebus and 1 aeon lost.

Killboard

DRF vs NC: 20+ DRF supers down in o2o reverse uemon

Including at least 8 titans. But first, a general update.

After we lost all those supers in uemon hostiles were using their own super fleet with impunity while we could only use subcaps. As you might imagine, this resulted in not getting a lot done. There were a lot of fights, many of which we lost isk-wise because hostiles could use triage carriers.

Hostiles hold station systems o2o and and UG-, which have been reinforced constantly since the DRF took them over a month ago. The effort to retake them has been hindered by several factors -- enemy supers, the large number of timers involved in taking space under dominion, and some sort of downtime bug which messes with timers and makes op scheduling hard.

Anyway, after a full month of accomplishing fuck all word went out to superfriends that our glorious leaders had hatched a plan to get our supers back into the fight and get revenge for uemon. Razor subcapitals also moved up from sendaya to help with the planned purge (rzr supers were already in gem).

On tuesday we messed up a sov transfer in vale. DRF made a play for the system and failed.

Wednesday nothing happened. We got in 020 with about 80 supers and 800 other blues and put the ihub into armor reinforced. DRF went to ug- with 80 supers and reportedly support numbers similar to ours. We did the mexican standoff thing for a couple hours and they went home.

After redeyeing that op, this morning I slept through three alarms and missed the formup. I woke up to super fight messages on jabber and got in fleet. Lag was being peculiar, and despite loading grid, launching bombers and activating modules I couldn't lock anything. After a few relogs targets started working and I got on the last few supercarrier kills.

Apparently what happened is that they were tricked into thinking we were jumping out, jumped in trying to catch stragglers and ended up in the middle of our super fleet and surrounded by dictors. After losing a few titans without killing any of our supers they switched damage to dictors and tried to get out. We apparently didn't lose any supers at that time, though several did have to get off the field.

Word is that Raiden. ordered their supers to jump out before the russians did, which I think is a particularly delicious note. I sort of have it out for them, because they have quite a sizable ego without any deeds to back it up and because they have it out for the NC. Right after uemon their leader-or-whatever announced that they would destroy the NC through a war of attrition, and I'm eager to mock their terribleness whenever they get around to actually fighting.

Yaay the destroyer was the FC for this op. I think this brings him up to 15-ish titan and at least 20 supercarrier kills in the last 2-1/2 months.

EDIT: The killboard is showing 7 titan and 13 supercarrier kills, but two titans and one supercarrier are reported confirmed dead without generating killmails. This isn't too surprising since there were three killmails that were never generated after the uemon fight as well. I'm starting to suspect there's a bug with supercap killmails.

EDIT: One NC titan died well after the fight was finished. The pilot had been unable to relog earlier after multiple attempts and the titan refused to disappear from space. Fortunately it was vuk lau's alt and he didn't want that already being replaced titan anyway technetium technetium technetium.

MORE EDIT: The NC titan that died apparently respawned after downtime and was boarded by a red.

Supars

Killboard -- will take time to sync

Probably also dead:
Silus Yarmon (Avatar)
Captain Chomp (Erebus)
Spartanetz (Nyx)

DRF vs NC: 8 white noise supercarriers down

Except I'm not there any more. I'm in the south with the rest of my alliance, trying to get some of the rabble off the geminate bandwagon. Not that I'm mad or anything.

Anyway, yaay the destroyer did a counter-hotdrop and killed 8 WN supercarriers. Off the top of my head that's 18 supercapital kills he's FCd in the last two months. I think this puts us at 13 super kills and 16 losses for the geminate campaign, though of course most of our losses were titans.

EDIT: Youtube

Killboard

Whenever I clone jump out of my supercarrier we get a bunch of nice kills. This time it wasn't actually during the jump clone cooldown, or even when I was online or paying attention, but I start to suspect I could win entire campaigns just by repeatedly clone jumping in and out of the area of operations....

DRF vs NC: NC dies horribly in biggest super fight ever

Our glorious commanders were out running an ahac gang and hostiles brought some capitals. Jabber ping went out for caps+supers, our support killed their support and out capitals jumped in to kill theirs.

After jumping in

We killed a few dreads and carriers there, and once they were dead we warped to another cyno in system where a number of enemy supercarriers had jumped to one of their pos. The first one we primaried was in half armor and got bumped inside, but we got the second.

Nyx going down

That's when things started to go bad. Hostiles jumped in everything. We jumped in everything. Raiden. jumped in everything. Everybody called for everybody to log in everything and everybody jumped everything in. At the peak of the fight there must have been at least 200 supercapitals on grid.

UI off near beginning of the fight

From corpmate, brackets on during the fight

At the beginning only the hostiles had dictors on grid, and while we lost titans theirs could warp out. Eventually things stabilized, half because of increasing lag and half because we got some hics on field and killed some of theirs. We eventually managed to kill 2 titans and possibly a few other things.

First red titan dying

Second red titan dying

Lag started to increase again and more of our titans started going down. Eventually my outstanding calls just stopped completing, and when the oldest was 32 minutes I decided to relog. Before I got back in supers were ordered to jump out, so I canceled the login and logged in a second character on the same account in hopes that it would help the server recognize that I was logged out, and at this point it looks like I'm safe. It looks like we lost 9 titans and killed 2 titans and 2 supercarriers. As I write this hostiles are trying to get out and we are killing some that are blackscreened so it's possible we might get some more kills. Apparently we have a bunch of hostile supercarriers and a titan or two tackled, but the lag is so bad they would take a very long time to kill.

If the NC dies I'm totally blaming it on my curse, though I might change the time limit to 1.5 years.

Battlereport -- very broken but has links to killmails

DRF vs NC: First hours

As mentioned in my previous post, Rebellion alliance (-R-), based primarily in Geminate, was disbanded shortly before downtime today and their space was immediately set upon by drone lands (DRF) forces. Reports indicate that large areas of geminate not controlled by -R- were SBUd.

Combat started immediately after downtime. Three of the six vulnerable stations in geminate were taken by DRF even before friendlies arrived on the scene. Hostiles are reported to have numbered 600 with around 100 supercapitals, much more than we could muster in the middle of the night with no warning.

Similar to the stella polaris sov loss during max 2 our goal here will be to take control of the area and kill TCU which are being onlined. If TCU can be killed before they online, the stations can be immediately retaken by friendlies and friendly TCU anchored; if the enemy TCU anchor we will have to go through the stations' reinforcement cycles to retake them. The enemy will set them to come out in their prime time, which for the mostly EU/US northern coalition is the middle of the night and early morning.

The early hours consisted of subcapital skirmishes, in QKTR (17b killed, 13b lost) and M-M (35b killed, 3b lost). The M-M battle apparently destroyed the bulk of the hostile support, and culminated in a node crash.

As this was going on cyno chains were being run from fountain to tribute, and around 1630 we finally formed a capital fleet and moved to a staging system in the area of operation. Numbers were weak at first, but slowly climbed until we had a full fleet of capitals and supers.

As of now capitals are on standby, support have killed one TCU and are working on others. I'm on different comms of course, but there has been no news of continued resistance after the fight in M-M. Hostiles have about 40 supercapitals standing by right now, down from 65 reported earlier and 100 at the start of the situation. At the moment this is shaping up to be more of a stella polaris situation where we recover all the sov, rather than a major disaster.

We now know that the rebellion disband was coordinated with the DRF deployment, and there is a question as to whether the deployment was because of the disband. If so, it is uncertain as to whether they will pursue a campaign against systems which have sov.

Rebellion alliance disbanded; Fountain roadtrip over

14:12:37 Combat Your Tyrfing hits Serpentis Fleet Outpost, doing 6749.2 damage.

-Combat operations in Fountain

In reverse order

We spent about a week grinding structures in fountain. With the complete lack of organized resistance the region could have been taken by one guy in a bomber, but supercarriers made it faster.

Small numbers

Over the last few weeks the eastern front has been heating up, with several significant DRF incursions into geminate. These were turned back by eastern NC alliances including friendly russians Rebellion and Stella Polaris. In the last week DRF supercapitals have been reported moving to lowsec near geminate and the fountain deployment was cancelled to deal with the russian menace.

One hour before the time of writing the other shoe dropped. What I'm hearing is that an executor-director level spy disbanded Rebellion alliance just before downtime, dropping soverignty in two Geminate constellations including six station systems. Immediately following this large numbers of DRF supercapitals were reported in geminate.

It looks like things just got real. The first response fleets are moving out now, and I'm rushing to get alts and assets into position.

Dotlan -- Rebellion alliance

Fresh off the presses: PL in Delve

Minutes ago PL was spotted moving a massive supercapital fleet to delve. This is of great interest to me as so far nobody has actually attacked delve. My understanding is that even NC leadership aren't aware who, if anybody, is planning to take it. AAA+co have only moved on querious and pure blind, and DC (along with NC superfriends ^^) have not moved beyond fountain.

Do PL plan to take the region, or are they just there for goodfites when somebody else does? Is this a revenge campaign against IT, who are rumored to have stiffed them on the pure blind contract?

The drama!

FAKE EDIT:

(1:40:08 PM) the_mittani: two scenarios for pl in delve
(1:40:24 PM) the_mittani: most likely: punishment for molle not paying them according to contract
(1:40:37 PM) the_mittani: he was 50b overdue last time i checked
(1:40:53 PM) the_mittani: scenario two: molle has shelled out even more to have pl defend delve for him. unlikely, but possible
(1:41:50 PM) ***********: three: they are there to hotdrop idiots using undermanned fleets reinforcing delve
(1:42:36 PM) the_mittani: put one and three together and you have a pl in npc delve situation

Fountain supercarrier roadtrip

Our glorious leaders have arranged a weekend volunteer roadtrip to fountain to help grind structures. Naturally I lept at the chance, having never invaded the southwest before. With recent news that IT is disbanding, perhaps we'll even get to stay on for delve.

We did a couple of cyno trains trains today. Still being on jump clone cooldown I couldn't get into my HG slave clone so I plugged in some LG slaves, a CC3 and a ZET500 before we left -- 60% as good as top-end implants for a quarter the price. It gives my nyx a 9 instead of an 11 doomsday tank - without fleet bonuses and overheating - but I'm not too worried.

Apparently for some ~strange reason~ people expect supercapital pilots to have jump drive calibration 5 (I'm working on it) and as a result I was left behind. I did my own cynos instead, and on the second-to-last jump came across a small gang of blue bombers hitting an offline medium tower. I offered to help, and there were many bffs and lols.

BFF <3

At present there are 6 stations and 14 Ihubs reinforced in fountain. I anticipate a long grind over the next few days.

IT vs goonies

Everybody is following the conflict of course, so no need for background. IT's position is that the loss of X13 and finfleet is just trimming of dead wood; on the other side, mittens just declared that IT is fail cascading and DC will go all in, something that we know they are capable of based on delve war 2.

Two weeks ago I would have put my money on IT cascading (experiencing large-scale loss of space and/or members) by February 1. That seems too early now, but we'll see how it goes -- these things accelerate rapidly once they get under way.

Here's another prediction: Another corp will leave IT by saturday.

Maybe molle will surprise me and manage to hold things together; alliances based on charismatic leaders are surprisingly resilient when the leader is actually leading. I've been through a few cascades though, and internal rot, high-profile military losses and corps leaving are all the ingredients for failure.

PL vs NC: Venal purge

Combat Your Quad 3500mm Siege Artillery I perfectly strikes ... wrecking for 56467.8 damage.

My post about who is winning in venal probably should have been posted a little earlier, because it sure became outdated in a hurry. After killing their titans we started one of our trademark region purges of venal. As one FC put it, "I'm [bleep]ing sick and tired of [bleep]ing around with [bleep]ing PL and their [bleep]ing towers."

Goons, angered that PL broke The Bropact, along with test, have been essential for providing US time coverage, while friendly russians stella polaris and rebellion have provided cover in russian time. We've killed a couple of dozen towers, which has been boring since PL can't compete with our ~massive blob~.

Recent tower kills

As a high point, we did get to drop supercarriers on some PL triage carriers and kill shadoo, who is an FC or leader or something.

Hotdrop

I also, for the first time ever, encountered an unstronted pos during this operation. Thanks PL.

NC vs PL: 8 titans (and one supercarrier) down in Y-W supercapital skullfuck

THIS SHIT IS SO FUCKING REAL !!! GET THE FUCK IN CAPFLEET , PL SUPERS DIEING !

-imperian being totally cool and professional about it

EDIT: Numbers are still uncertain 12 hours after the fight and it appears that at least one supercapital from each side failed to generate a killmail. NC report losing 2 titans (1 killmail generated) and PL report losing 6 titans (5 killmails generated) and 2 motherships (1 killmail generated). I have reason to believe that the second mothership survived but no way to confirm this.


So today we formed up to go reinforce PL towers in h-pa for the umpteenth time. PL formed up to fight us but nothing much came of it as we reinforced a tech pos or two and repped our staging pos in h-p. We moved capitals home and stayed formed up in case PL dropped our subcapitals, which they did, bridging ahax on top of our fotm shield alpha BS fleet as they passed through y-w1q3. The BS were apparently doing pretty well on their own, but we jumped our caps and supers to help our subcapitals, or just to whore on killmails.

PL lit a cyno and dropped approximately 40 supers on us and it was on. I don't know how many supers we had on field at the start of the fight, but we had had 30 in h-p earlier. Jabber broadcasts went out, we went siege green and went on their titans as they went on ours. Both sides lost a titan in the initial doomsday volley.

First PL titan going down

At this point I crashed and couldn't log back in until it was over.

By the time I got back on teamspeak - like two minutes - PL supers were trying to jump out and their titans were dying like flies while we slowly lost a second titan. As of the time of writing initial reports indicate 7 PL and 2 NC titans down, plus one PL supercarrier. And boy is it fantastic to see PL finally overreach and get their comeuppance.

Battlefield at the end of the fight
Almost all the red brackets here are blues -- common bug

Battlereport. Will take time to sync.

"who are winning pl or nc eve 2010"

This was a search which brought somebody here, and it's a long answer question.

Before answering that, one would have to define what winning means. The conflict between PL and the NC cannot be described as a pitched war as PL are categorically unable to take our stations or kill our CSAA; this means that they are not an existential threat.

In terms of objectives the conflict focuses on technetium moons in venal. PL have taken some number of tech moons (I don't know how many, numbers on the street range between 16 and 90) and we try to take them back.

This has not been very successful for us. PL is small and agile; they never fail to time pos for US time, which is a weak time zone for us and their strongest. The typical fight in US time involves us bringing about 150 subcapitals to h-pa, PL's staging system and the location of several tech pos. PL also have 150 in system, but because of their higher level of skill and because they can log 20 titans on at a moment's notice - more supers than we can get in US time - we always lose.


Now, this isn't the complete story. It's not accurate to say that we can't get numbers or supers in US time. Without trying hard we can pull 600 people during euro time and more capitals/supers than PL can get members online during their prime time. Our euro time players aren't usually online during US time, but with a red pen CTA and a few days advance notice they could be induced to be on,especially if the op was on a weekend. We haven't been doing this type of op.

The NC+DC is engaged in two major wars right now, against IT+pets and the drone lands federation, two of the three other major powers in eve. PL and venal represent a comparatively low priority third front, with DC much more interested in bitchslapping IT and the NC proper placing a high priority on protecting geminate from the DRF invasion.

We're winning the two major fronts, with DC et. al unexpectedly continuing to destroy IT fleets on a daily basis and the DRF losing all major engagements and several supercapitals on the eastern front. The most charitable way to describe the PL front, on the other hand, would be "stagnant."

So, who is winning? I guess PL are, since they are protecting their moons and killing our fleets. Again though, they don't qualify as an existential threat.

:NC: vs PL (or, in which I nearly lose my nyx)

In a shocking display of competence in extremis, Hinata has bailed the NC capfleet out, an eventuality which we had not planned for! Alas, our ~goodfites~ will have to wait for the planned 00:45 evetime formup.

-the mittani

As you may have heard if you pay any attention to 0.0 at all, the NC redeployed back to tribute a few weeks back. Since then things have been pretty slow. It's seemed as though leadership was testing PL and trying to find a fleet composition that worked against them. We've reinforced small numbers of towers and only brought subcapital fleets to kill them, which have all been annihilated.

PL members are mostly high-SP pvpers and thus are multispecced, and with the spy and timer situation they have the luxury of switching fleet compositions based on what we bring. We bring battleships, they bring ahax and we die. We bring drakes, they bring pulse abaddons and we die. We almost standardized on ahax, but then PL developed some sort of anti-ahax battleships and killed a fleet of those.

So herpitty derp derp, we have to kill them by blobbing. Today we formed up 200 capitals and went out and reinforced a couple of dozen tech pos. They were in more than one or two systems, too, so my guess is that leadership types are actually serious about taking them at this point.

Flying a supercarrier is nice because of lol-ehp, but actually using it is sort of dull. There aren't any damage notifications, and since bombers can't hit the tower you're on mod incap duty.

SC pos bashing


Suparz!

We ended up in h-pa, PL's staging system, where our subcapitals were camping them in to the station. Euro people were logging off, dreads went home briefly to refuel and subcapitals went back to umi to reform, but we tried to keep system control. This did not work out very well for us.

We got our capital fleet tackled on a PL pos. It took a while for them to really start logging in supers though, which allowed us to get most of our capitals safe. Just as we were trying escape a bunch of people lost their teamspeak connection (there have been accusations of Hijinks) and I didn't get the order to jump, and got tackled in my nyx.

I started getting hit by PL supers and would have been screwed if razor's famous nano apoc fleet hadn't warped in to nuke the dictors. I jumped out with 17% armor, having learned an important lesson about self-preservation.

EDIT: I learned later that there were multiple doomsdays running on me as I jumped out, which would have killed me if they had landed.

Fight


Oh snap

Battle report

EDIT: A nyx loss appears on that battle report. This happened in a later fleet when a PL spy lit a cyno in h-pa and our FC was conveniently disconnected from teamspeak between saying "jump" and what the destination was.

An assessment of the 0.0 political situation

Aka hurfitty hurf durf internet spaceship words.

First, Providence. Because it doesn't really affect anything else. With AAA gone CVA started making progress against the alliances AAA had installed there. Then Ev0ke and Tri (ncdot) decided to invade. As the only real pvp alliances in the area I rather anticipate they will steamroll anything that gets in their way. I'll be glad to see the place finally cleared out and inhabited by an alliance which is competent to hold space. For the first time, like, ever.

The part of 0.0 which is not providence has formed into what may turn out to be a beautiful chain reaction in which every 0.0 entity will become engaged in an active conflict.

First, some background.

Apparently, at some point in the distant past AAA was a pvp alliance. I started playing in late 2007, and this was before my time. In my memory AAA have done a total of three things: Betray goons to join bob, kill CVA with the help of dominion lag and every other alliance in the south, and show up two months late to MAX 2, lose 5 supers and immediately go home.

That's everything. In the space of three years.

A few months ago various forces decided that it was time for AAA to die and invaded them. AAA folded like a cheap deck of cards, lost all their space to Initiative and lost half their members, but did not disband. Stagnant alliances faced with adversity either fail or become pvp alliances, and AAA appears to fall into the latter category. They moved in with stainwagon (I'm looking forward to drawing my next coalition map just so I can call it 'stainwaaagon') and began a counterattack.

CO2 and DT had been installed between Init and Stainwaaagon as meatshields. Init failed to support them and they died without a fuss. Stainwaaagon have now turned their attention to Initiative, and this is where things get interesting.

Initiative is an ally of IT. IT's only ally, in fact, other than pets. Apparently IT have finally realized the value of allies (there's a first time for everything) because they have just announced a full deployment to defend init against AAA.

This moves their forces a couple regions counter-clockwise, leaving only shitty pets in fountain. DC (Deklein coalition) would be remiss to not take this opportunity to attack Fountain, especially since tri and evoke are in providence instead of farming pure blind and cloud ring. I sincerely hope razor joins in if this happens; I've never invaded the southwest before, and apparently IT pets have a lot of really terrible supercap pilots.

If fountain gets into trouble it's likely that IT will go home to defend it, leaving Init to the ravages of Stainwaaagon. If Stainwaaagon win it's possible that they might even open a southern front against IT. If things go well enough we (NC/DC) could even end up working with AAA. This is not an outcome I would have predicted at any point in the past. Ever.

Now, if the NC deploys to the west it could open our eastern front to attack by dronelanders. This isn't a huge deal though, since DRF have an even weaker US time zone then the SC did; the eastern NC alliances may well be able to hold them off without assistance. Even in a worst case scenario we have 4 days' warning for station saves, so we could easily do round trip fleets from west to east.


At least, this is what I would like to see happen in the next few months. I would also like a pony.