Eve

[Jonathan]

In-game security status for systems ranges from 1.0 to 0.0. You start in 1.0. The more valuable stuff is only found in the lowest security systems. In 0.4 and lower, there are no cops. In 0.0, there are no laws.

I'm in Queens of the Stone Age now, part of the Anarchy Empire alliance. We're very organized pirates who occupy a chunk of 0.0 with NPC sovereignty (instead of player sov) called Syndicate. We control a constellation more or less, though the Russians run the complex (dungeon) in the middle of our systems despite our best efforts to get rid of them. We don't have POSes and we don't own stations, we just use the NPC ones. It's a great situation for a casual player who still wants to be part of 0.0, since not claiming any stations/POSes means we can't lose stuff while offline.

The Somethingawful forum corp is very very large and is the blob of the anti-BoB forces, with the Russians (RA) and Germans (D2) providing the capital ships. The lesser coalition forces are a mixture.

[Jonathan]

Most of the systems in the game are player controlled 0.0 systems, though a large part of the population stays in the NPC controlled empire region.

NEW EDEN - The southern regions of New Eden have become engulfed in an epic war that has seen former enemies come together against a common foe, the Band of Brothers (BoB) and Lotka Volterra (LV). The war threatens to upset the balance of power in the galaxy, and has so far seen some staggering losses on both sides. BoB has long since declared that dominating all non-secure space has been their long- term goal, and no alliance has yet been able to stop their advances. Only now has a Coalition emerged to attempt to halt them in their tracks. The question remains; can they succeed where others have failed?

At times referred to as the "Great South War", the conflict has pitted a majority of alliances against a numerically inferior but in the main, more experienced foe. This war is no different from the ones that rage daily in our homes and far-flung systems alike; except that the manner of which it is being fought is reminiscent of the old Corporation Wars that lurk in the shadows of history.

The pod pilot community has long become accustomed to the rise and fall of entities, be they corporations that have written themselves into history with their actions or alliances with the power to be that story. With the four Empires involved in their own perpetual struggles and unwilling, or even perhaps unable to stop the onslaught, it has fallen upon the capsuleer pilots to self-govern. The growing concern amongst those few remaining independent alliances and the lingering discontent displayed by those displaced by BoB's to date, rarely impeded advances have culminated finally, in all out war.

To fully understand the complex political situation, we shall be offering an in-depth analysis of the conflict from a variety of perspectives. Covering the war from the view of the pod pilots fighting, report on why they chose to be at war, and why they chose the side they are on.

The current Coalition consists of:

* Red Alliance - RA

* Against ALL Authorities - -A-

* GoonSwarm - OHGOD / GS

* Tau Ceti Federation - TCF

* Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate - IAC

* Curse Alliance - CA

* Dusk and Dawn - D²

* RAZOR Alliance - RZR

* Imperial Republic Of the North - IRON

* Morsus Mihi - RAWR / MM

* Knights Of the Southerncross - KOS

* SMASH Alliance - SMASH

* Triumvirate. - TR

* Sparta Alliance - -SPR-

* Pandemic Legion - -10



with the BOB Allied forces including:

* Band of Brothers - BOB

* Lotka Volterra - LV

* Firmus Ixion - FIX

* Xelas Alliance - XS

* R i s e - RISE

* Corelum Syndicate - CORELI

* Axiom Empire - AXE

* Exuro Mortis - OSNAP

* Aftermath Alliance - PANIC

* Mercenary Coalition - MC (contracted by BOB)


Fighting has still been very intense on both sides, with major losses of both territory and ships. Of significance is:

Southern Front Battlefield Theatre - Querious

Coalition forces have attacked multiple systems in Querious, with 9CG6-H being the focal point of their offensive. At this time no stations have changed hands, despite almost daily losses of starbases around the region. Both sides have devoted much of their resources to the defence of their own starbases, understanding their tactical importance as both regroup points for fleets and safe havens for capitals, essential for a foothold in the region.

FIX are believed to have hired KIA alliance (exact figures are unknown, but unconfirmed sources have put the mercenary alliance's bill at 5.7 billion isk for their services) to attempt to sever the Coalition forces supply routes to Querious.

ED-L9T

So far a BoB/FIX capital fleet has engaged and destroyed 6 RZR/MM/IRON Dreadnoughts for the loss of one large tower and three more placed into reinforced mode.

Eastern Front Battlefield Theatre - Detorid, Wicked Creek, Tenerifis, and Omist

Coalition forces destroyed a Lotka Volterra capital shipyard. Widespread rumours alleged that a Titan class ship under construction was destroyed - the numbers of those involved reaching staggering proportions lends credence to the assertions. Red Alliance reinforcements ultimately prevailed on the field and the loss of the Allied shipyards seems to have dampened LV's will to fight and set off a negative chain reaction that now has the predators of Eve likely hunting for a new home.

N3-JBX/KZFV-4

An LV and BoB fleet moved to assault KZFV-4 and was repelled by a larger IAC fleet.

[Jonathan]

All those coalition alliances have at least 1000 people in them, and the large ones like Goonswarm (the SA forum alliance) have over 3000. This is easily a 25,000 man war. A single system can support around 800 peaceful ships. The nodes tend to crash with 300-400 in a battle. With the hardware and software upgrades last year, 200 man fights (100 or so on a side) are pretty commonplace now and not subject to crashes. They have plans to pull out the dual-core Opterons in place now and put in something beefier and add more software optimizations to break the ~300 man limit.

Heck, even as a pirate I was in a ~30 man fight the other day, and 10 is the norm.

[Jonathan]

Interesting move by the somethingawful leadership. They're opening up all their space. I'm surprised they're not limiting the movement of capital ships.

Dear Ally of GoonSwarm,

On March 1st GoonSwarm begins a "Free Trade Zone" program throughout all the space it holds. This means that anybody who has +5 or greater standing to GoonSwarm may trade, mine, produce, and rat in every belt and every station that GoonSwarm holds.

There are only three rules that your pilots must follow when in GoonSwarm space:

1) You must not shoot anybody or be a jerk to anyone who is friendly to GoonSwarm. We will announce a webpage soon that has all relevant positive standings for your convenience.
2) You may not deploy any POS in our space.
3) If a GoonFLEET member (not GoonSwarm, just Fleet) asks your pilot(s) to leave a belt, they must.

That's all. You may rat, mine, produce, trade, whatever to your heart's content in GoonSwarm space beginning March 1st. Feel free to post this on your forums or corp/alliance mail.

Please contact Vile Rat, Blitter, or Remedial for any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,
Remedial

[Jonathan]

http://www.gamersinfo.net/index.php?art/id:1598

Short summary: Linux client in 3 weeks, Mac (x86 only?) client to follow soon afterwards, DX10 client for the summer more than likely. Also, they've got gameplay video of walking around that they're showing at GDC (warning: tight catsuit on female avatar).

[Jonathan]

http://pewpew.info/?a=pilot_detail&plt_id=19551 - my win/loss stats
http://ineve.net/skills/character.php?c ... cxMDc5NDM4 - my skills

Meh, I really haven't had time to play recently. Just been changing my skills and making some cash on the bid/offer spread, which doesn't take much time. I would have had two Cyclones except I lost one trying to move into my new 0.0 home. 8 man lowsec gate camp, and I was semi-afk. I mashed some buttons before I exploded, but it really didn't help. If I had been actually flying the ship, I would have flown back to the gate to jump and probably would have been fine. Oh, well. I've been making enough money that I was able to refit immediately. The only downer was that I threw all my Cyclone guns into that Cyclone that exploded. Guess I shouldn't put all guns into one Cyclone.

My alliance decided not to be FREGE's muscle but CoW's instead, so now we have a new region with stations. Just need to get some ships in there... There was a corp op to run a bunch of ships down, which I foolishly didn't take advantage of.

I like killing stuff as a team.
...
Which is why I liked DAOC. Even though I played an assassin class, it wasn't just about me going around killing people by myself, I also did reconnaisance as well as teaming up with other assassins and so forth.

I've decided to train up interceptors. Interceptors fill the role that Alan described as being fun in DAOC. They're fast scouts designed for PvP, and they do equally well solo, in inty gangs, or as scouts and tacklers for heavy firepower gangs. Inties also have the added bonus in Eve mechanics of being cheap and easy to train for. You could fly interceptors effectively in 0.0 fleet ops as soon as your two week trial is done.

If it's not completely obvious already I totally played this game wrong for the first nine months or so. I joined a carebear corp, trained craft skills (7% of all my skills are in industry), and didn't train up frigate skills. Instead I spent all my time and effort developing my PvE builds. The proper way to enjoy Eve is to start a Soldier with good perception and intelligence and train Racial Frigate V. With max frigate skill, have your choice of cheap interceptors for solo, small gang, or large fleet PvP, super cheap T1 frigates for messing around and having fun in (some of which are quite powerful and can kill T2 frigates when properly fitted and flown), and assault frigates for PvE and anti-interceptor work. An assault frigate is slightly cheaper than a battlecruiser, much easier and cheaper to fit, and just as effective at missions and asteroid belt PvE.

Fortunately, Eve's skill system means I don't have level 60 in a class that isn't good for PvP. All my fitting, capacitor, navigation, gunnery, and tank skills will help out when I fly interceptors. Even more important, those times I want to fly my Cyclone around some more I will be more agile, fast, and quick to lock because of the skills I train for interceptors.

[Jonathan]

And because I know you guys enjoy reading these types of things:

Statement Dusk and Dawn

Today D² lost an Erebus class Titan.

Because there are still a lot of questions about these recent events, here are some points from our persepective.

The Erebus pilot had planned to log out as he had things to attend to out of game, in order to do this he jumped back from the front line to a more secure system. He had not been involved in any fights or attacks for the three hours prior to this.

It seems that the Erebus was being scouted by a internal Spy who has since been identified. This character was flying a cloaked Anathema Covert Ops frigate. Shortly before the Pilot was going to log off, he uncloaked and used a Passive Targeter to lock the Erebus and fired a single shot on him. Seconds after this, the Titan pilot logged.

So the aggro timer was increased without our pilot noticing.

Minutes after this it was reported that the Titan had not disappeared, so the pilot attempted to log back in.
Unfortunately there was no chance for him to save the Titan, due to a well executed plan by BoB who had jumped in their Capital Fleet and Support.

We always knew it was going to be a dirty war, but once again, Band of Brother prooves, it can always get more dirty.

Edit: here's the third party writeup.
Your first titan costs ~170B, or about $20,000. Marginal cost is maybe half that.

[Jonathan]

http://freenet-homepage.de/winchip2/200 ... .25.25.jpg

Heh. Now that's a fight.

[Jonathan]

http://www.asdk33.dsl.pipex.com/hello.jpg

Cute.

[Jonathan]

Curse Alliance got pushed out of Great Wildlands by Cult of War. Anarchy Empire has been invited to hang out with CoW in GW, so we picked up and moved. It remains to be seen if any of CA's scary friends will take offense to this action, but for now the coalition is occupied with other things, as the screenshots above show. Those are screenshots of 60+ dreadnoughts sieging a capital ship array array which Goonswarm intelligence believed Band of Brothers was building a titan. Several dozen coalition dreadnoughts were killed, but the ship yard was destroyed.

Anyway, GW is a nicer 0.0 region than the last one we hung out in.

[Jonathan]

http://pewpew.info/?a=kill_related&kll_id=23769

It is possible I may have to give up this game on account of being too stupid.

[quantus]

d00d, you lost 4 ships?!

[Jonathan]

After a year of playing this game, today I learned that if your guns are hot with no active targets, left clicking on anything will lock and shoot automatically. Including a space station, which will fight back.

The other ships were because I was trying to loot the first, but I didn't have an aggression timer so I couldn't tell when it was safe. Eventually I got someone in the alliance to do it for me.

[Jonathan]

http://www.eve-tribune.com/index.php?no=2_14&page=1 - page 1 of a three page battle report

Summary: BoB owned a pair of capital shipyards in an otherwise undefended system. The coalition forces determined through a combination of spies and covert surveillance that one of the shipyards was building a supercapital ship. BoB threw up all the defenses they could muster around one shipyard. The coalition put that shipyard in reinforced and blew it up several days later, but at the cost of fifty dreadnoughts lost.

Several days later BoB revealed that the other shipyard had just finished building a mothership and the destroyed shipyard was empty. The coalition fell for a trap.

[quantus]

The lesson: If you're not absolutely certain what to blow up, blow up everything.

[Jonathan]

http://pewpew.info/?a=kill_related&kll_id=25742

Damn it all, I've got to find some time to play so I can get on the winning side of fights like this one.

[Jonathan]

http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/Latest.jpg

The red blob in the lower right is the Something Awful forum goon alliance and friends. The little pink blob labeled COW nestled next to the red blob is my alliance's friends. We shoot the Goons a lot.

The blue BoB forces have stalled the Goon progress on the southern front while pushing up into the northern coalition's territory.

[Jonathan]

http://go-dl1.eve-files.com/media/corp/ ... luence.png

RIOT and our allies Cult of War and INFOD have abandoned Great Wildlands. We attempted to take the outpost in BWF in the Geminate region from Smash/R0adkill, the two allied alliances which control Geminate. COW POSs were put up in BWF to grab sovereignty from R0adkill. However, R0adkill/Smash killed our POS in the few days before sov transferred. I really didn't get a chance to join the attack or defense in BWF because the attacks were all planned for European time, and the POS came out of reinforced in European time as well.

RIOT's new orders are to fly fast-moving small gangs into Geminate, avoid their blobs, and disrupt their NPC, mining, and hauling. Since this is what I do anyway, I'm pretty pleased. Hopefully after a few weeks of this we can try BWF again and take it.