Another Set-Piece

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Bob alarm-clocked their fleet for two days straight in 9-9 in an attempt to hold sovereignty there by destroying our POSes. As it turned out, they failed. This was seen as a major test of strength: they had to show up, and we had to defend.

This happened again this morning in the 66-PMM system. The situation there was that our allies UNL had a bunch of POS towers claiming sovereignty which were coming out of reinforced mode (and therefore vulnerable to Bob finishing them off) from 5am onwards.

Bob would get sovereignty back tomorrow anyway: they've been spamming large towers into the system to claim sov ever since UNL made their move. But the important thing here is that this would reset the sovereignty counter.

If we defended successfully, it would be a month before BoB had cyno-jammers in the system. Without cyno-jammers they daren't use their titans, for fear of getting hot-dropped by angry Russian dreadnought. Without using their titans, they almost always lose at POS warfare.

So BoB had to keep their cyno-jammers up, and they had to destroy our POSes as they exited reinforced mode between 5am and 9am.




The first part failed when we sent the fleet pictured above in to attack their cyno jammers. Those were taken down successfully, despite BoB's attempts. Now they could only deploy their titans if they were sure they could defend them from counter-attack. Otherwise it was a straight fight between fleets.

Next, we, along with the Russians and the French, sent in our battleship-heavy fleets to defend the POSes as they emerged from reinforced. It was easy to imagine the state of mind of the BoB pilots as they got up early on a Monday morning before work, having pulled favours, burned holidays or faked sickdays to attend, to discover that the cyno-jammers were down and they were going to have to fight for the system instead of watching the doomsdaying titans do their work for them.

The result was foreseeable: Bob got murdered. They attacked us in three main waves as we held a system gate. Each time they had less battleships, and each time more of their pilots would jump in using interceptors: selfishly trying to keep alive while removing their chances of swining the fight their way in the face of our bigger damage output. The third time, they stupidly gambled by sending their sniper ships in at close range, and suffered accordingly. That was the end of their attempts at a fleet fight, and we got to scoop a fortune in loot. The last ten ships from their main attacks looked like this, compared to ours:

Bob losses: claymore, tempest, megathron, arazu, malediction, claw, armageddon, crow, megathron, taranis

Our losses: rifter, rifter, rifter, merlin, incursus, heretic, scorpion, rifter, rifter, rifter

That claymore alone, with a wealth of T2 fittings, costs more to replace than all of ours in that list put together.

To round things off, we shot the station to take it and break their sovereignty while they desperately warped in and out, losing ships each time. When I last checked, they and Finfleet had lost 15 ships in a row doing this without a single goon loss. Their fleet commanders should be kicked out of their corps. Well, except that we want them to stay...

The big thing is that this is the third alarm-clock operation in a row that has failed for BoB. The 9-9 pair could have been coincidence, or special circumstances or the like, but the same thing has happened again. Even more worrying for BoB's leaders must be the massively reduced turnout: this time, the killboard is full of Bob victims, since only Finfleet seem to have turned out in any force to help them.

So, where are Goonfleet now?




Oh yeah... there we are.

40 Jumps and a Bang

Fuelled by our successes in the Tenerifis region, Goonfleet and our allies have been pushing into Omist, to our south. Unfortunately, the route from our strategic base in the 77s system to our target system in D2-EZ is a long one, of about 15 jumps. To make matters worse, BoB has their allies sit astride this route: last night there was a fleet of around 115 ships at a bottleneck system, the destruction of whom would have diverted us from the task at hand.

The task in question was the destruction of some BoB POSes that were coming out of reinforced (ie becoming vulnerable to being finished off after we seiged them successfully a couple of days ago). This needed numbers to do, so I joined a convoy from 77s to D2, going the long way round: a distance of almost 40-odd jumps.

The journey itself was pretty safe: we stumbled across a member of our enemies RISE in a vagabond sitting on a gate a few jumps from the end of our journey, but he saw local spike as 20 or so Goons jumped in in battleships, battlecruisers, frigates and a couple of covert-ops ships, and decided to scarper. A shame for him as RoyOfCA, our man in Iraq, was stumbling along five jumps behind and vulnerable over his laggy, satellite connection. Having him in teamspeak is always strange: "F**kin' mortars... If I get disconnected I'll be back in a while, unless they take out the dish."

One glorious moment, as our 2-man reinforcement gang reached the gate into D2, was that a huge French battleship fleet warped up. TCF are our allies, and they do like their Gallente battleships, so there was a wonderfully homogenous feel to their squadrons as they loomed all around us before jumping through. Then, as we gave them time to clear the gate, our Russian allies of Red Alliance jumped in as well: it was like heading off into a battle, knowing you were outnumbered two-to-one and then having massed ranks of solid-looking infantry and dashing cavalry ride past you. Our allies are awesome.

Anyway, we reached the target system, and warped to the first target POS just in time for some of us to see it blow up. Mission accomplished! Unfortunately, the rest of us saw nothing: Eve Online can't really deal with battles of 200vs250 at the moment, especially when BoB uses jumpbridges to bring ships into a system. Most of us desynched or lagged out, and we took a pounding at the hands of the bigger BoB fleet. The repeated lagwarps kept me alive until the end of the battle, ironically enough, but prevented my escape. In the end, I was primaried by the whole fleet. The result was tremendous sense of anticlimax in the non-existent battle, but we were there to do a job, and that job was the strategic one of killing POSes.

I find it odd that BoB, who have played this game longer than anyone, don't properly defend their POSes: they fight us at them as or after we destroy them, sure, and inflict substantial losses. But those are tactical successes. Like the Germans on the eastern front, they inflict disproportionate losses upon us, but lose ground as they do so.

They must know that against LV and against V, two dead alliances who fought us, we lost huge numbers of ships, but won. That is how we work: we swarm, and we keep coming back relentlessly.

Also, they are training us: we and our fleet commanders alike make mistakes. But we learn from them - sometimes immediately, sometimes after a few examples - and we get better each time. Both in terms of skill-points and of personal learning, we improve far faster than them, since we start from such a low base.

Anyway: we lost a skirmish and won the day's battle: we destroyed the target POSes and cotinue to edge towards sovereignty in the station system, just as we did with 9-9. Our losses were mitigated by a large number of ship reimbursements, due to the effects of lag. Roll on tonight.

Some War Background

The corp theft I spoke about in my previous post is bad timing for BoB, for a variety of reasons. They have been driven back from key systems in the south, strategic-level attacks by BoB themselves (as opposed to their pets) failing for the first time in their history at JV-1V. Then, they found themselves under counter-attack in the nearby system of 9-9, which they had recently taken from Goonfleet in the midst of our political confusion following two leaders resigning in short order. They were forced to call off their attack and shift their defence west to 9-9.

Worse was to follow for them: their leader, SirMolle, contrived to lose his titan, Darwin's Contraption: the first time that a piloted Titan had ever been destroyed (you can read about it and hear teamspeak recordings on this site). Videos poured out onto the net. Goonfleet had rallied with such a massive morale boost, and we went on to launch a sustained siege of 9-9: we lived in the system, and I personally launched thousands of munitions into one BoB player-owned structure after another.

Bob had spammed towers to take the system, and now they spammed towers to keep it. Over twenty towers had to be destroyed, and we did it, night after night. First we would reinforce them by taking their shields down to 50%, and then we would come back when their emergency fuel ran out, to finish the job.

Logistically, Bob were clearly over-stretched. They had to cannibalise towers from other fronts to put them up in 9-9. Their stront (emergency fuel) timings were bad, and almost all towers came out in the primetime of Goonfleet or our glorious Red Alliance allies (The Russians). Passwords were often not set. Defence guns were not in place or went unrepaired. We destroyed tower after tower, erecting our own in their places.

At first, BoB sent large fleets to defend their positions. BoB contains many older players who have subscribed to Eve since the earliest days of the game. they fly the best ships the game has to offer, and fit them out with the very best equipment, helping them to maintain the high kill ratios that they value. This means that they invariably win fleet fights.

But they didn't. They started to be engaged by unusually well-drilled Goonfleet squadrons, usually under Tolon's command, who were more often than not inflicting unsustainable losses on them in their own primetime. Often, we were even holding the field and forcing them to retreat, leaving behind wrecks crammed with expensive fittings. I fought in one battle in 9-9 where we destroyed a carrier: BoB jumped in six times to save it, and were driven off each time with more and more losses. The last time, they went heads-down and stuck it out, and died en masse.

We took 9-9. There was a postscript: ten days ago they brought a huge fleet over and put all of our towers into reinforced on a Sunday night. This meant that on the Monday and Tuesday they had the opportunity to force us to fight on their terms. Sure enough, they pulled alarm-clock operations both days, demanding that their pilots turned up despite work or university commitments, on pain of being ejected from the corp. This was, as their figurehead DB Preacher (the worst poster on Eve-Online in a competitive field that includes Butter Dog) said, do or die time: they had chosen the battlefield and the time, and called out their entire capital and support fleets. The goons had destroyed around twenty of their towers in the previous fortnight. Now they had 24 vulnerable towers to attack.

They failed. Despite a mass-desynch from the servers that led to the destruction of an entire Goonswarm fleet at the very beginning of the two-day battle (itself due to a very foolish piece of aggression from Goon commander Sesfan that he held his hands up to at once), BoB managed to destroy a total of no Goon towers. Not one. They attacked a few times, mostly at the end of each day when only one or two towers remained vulnerable. But each attempt smacked of desparation and saw large numbers of BoB ships destroyed. Bob members posting on Eve-Online claimed that they had changed their goals to a simple fight, and that they didn't intend to retake 9-9, but it suonded hollow even to their biggest cheerleaders. BoB had been beaten back over three weeks, had lost when on the defensive and on the attack. The sense of humiliation eaked out in leaked IRC logs.

Goonswarm, on the other hand, had tasted success after success for the first time since Titans had been launched. A period of months when Bob needed to press only one button had made them soft, accustomed to effortless wins. Those of us who remained in Goonfleet, however, were the ones who didn't care about losses, whose morale had been tested for months and was almost unbreakable, but who knew that we would, eventually, win. Now, we would attack.

And attacking we are. Omist in the south is under seige: we live in system D2-EZ, 23/7. AAA and IAC are attacking BoB pets FIX, pushing them to breaking point. TCF and Red Alliance join us in attacking Rise and Finfleet in the south. The North is rejuvenated, and have recovered from the collapse of D2, some of whose best members are now fighting alongside IAC, whose destruction was supposedly certain only ten days or so ago.

There are huge dangers, of course. BoB will recover to some extent. Mercenary Coalition's intentions are unclear, and unlike BoB they deserve their reputation. But morale is high, momentum is with us for the moment, and BoB is away on their annual Barbeque. I wish I could have found the time to attend that on Friday...

Evol Devolves

A couple of weeks ago, we in Goon were rocked - rocked, I tell you - by the loss of about 25 billion ISK from our titan fund, when Goonfleet leader, founder and notorious fatbody Remedial stole it to fund his ham addiction. There was much glee from members of enemy alliance Band of Brothers, who saw this as hilarious. They were a little disconcerted when we, also, saw it as hilarious, but that didn't really dampen their spirits.

Roll forward a few weeks, and it was revealed yesterday that a member of key BoB corporation Evolution, home to alliance head SirMolle, had absconded with somewhere between 100 and 300 billion ISK of Evol possessions: an order of magnitude bigger than the Remedial theft.

In real-world terms, that would translate to over twenty thousand dollars in real-world currency. BoB seem to see this as a lot less funny than the titan fund theft, for some reason. We, just as predictably, see it as even funnier.

A lot is still uncertain about the theft. The amount involved is clearly huge, but until we see screenshots it will remain uncertain. The thief will probably sell most of it back to Evol at a discount, but that will still involve an utterly enormous loss for a corporation already hit by other, recent major losses.

No real explanation for his actions has been given so far, but perhaps he just fancied being rich?

Are you sitting comfortably?

I play Eve. Not excessively: I could, um, give it up any time I like, dude. But I play it a bit.


I have many blogs. One gets a lot of hits, but I find that blogging about Eve tends to drive away my existing readers. So I needed a place to write about all the stuff in Eve that I get geekily excited about.


I also have many alts. One is a budding industrialist who also runs missions: carebear-tastic. Several are trading alts that make me quite a bit of money throughout Empire without doing very much at all. One - and this is probably the one that you are most interested in if you follow Eve politics - is a Goon.

I know what you're saying: "there are no Goons". Well, that's true. Last year, SirMolle (the leader of Band of Brothers) announced that there are no goons. Call it hallucinations on my part, or fan fiction, but I'll write about what that character might do if he, and Goonfleet, did exist. Which he doesn't. And they don't. Obviously.