Large regions of the map have seen changes in ownership in June as entities continue to grab space that’s become available after the collapse of TRI, MC, Insurgency and other factions. Still, the only area that’s seen major fights are the drone regions and Geminate, where GS moved in to support IRC and friends, pushing back Smashkill, FIX, -V- and allies, attacking systems like M-MD31 (Roadkill, Sov3), IOO (Geminate, Roadkill) and R-6 early on.

Attacks on BWF and BQ0 were coordinated with Solar Dragons and IRC, supported by Kia Tolon in a new Erebus (mandatory tinfoil: it’s deadtear’s reimbursement). The attacks succeeded in gradually taking back the region from FIX:

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BQ0 is one of three station systems in what used to be the DMC super-cap construction constellation. After DMC had a falling out with RA over a pricing dispute, the space was owned by Ka-tet, and for a brief time, Carpe Universitas. Smashkill removed the latter, and turned the space over to FIX and -V-. Not long after, Solar Wing, etc., made an attempt to force the new tenants out before they could muster Sov 3. They were unsuccessful, and withdrew for a time. A week or three has passed, and now they are back.

Solar Dragons eventually regained control of BQ0 and IRC took GK3, quickly followed by the loss of the third FIX-controlled station. With the drone regions more or less secured attention shifted to Geminate and massive fights over BWF in particular. GS gained POS superiority and took over the station, declaring it an open space for everyone. Attempts by Roadkill and friends to regain the system resulted in some GS losses, but the attack came pretty much to a halt after another mothership loss for Roadkill.

From there the whole affair turned into a bit of a rout. 8MG, next to BWF, was next, and despite a Smashkill hotdrop that cost the by-now somewhat careless GS fleet a number of capitals, all POS in system as well as those in X-9 were eventually removed, resulting in the loss of RK’s Sov4 P-E / BND home system. With Smashkill support gone ATLAS starts to pack up and leave the drone regions for Empire:

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SF, x.i.x, IRC and ED are taking FIX space and harassing ATLAS in Oasa/Perrigen falls. No Smashkill fleets sighted, which means they are all in geminate.

Not surprisingly, the last few stations changed hands quickly (WW-, B-7) as defence ops cease to take place both in the drone regions and Geminate, leaving Solar Fleet and xDx with enough breathing space to remove Ka-Tet from the R-3 area en-passant. Goonswarm continues to clean up the Smashkill systems, but the process seems to be struggling with participation issues due to the lack of any serious defense.

As Mostly Harmless ponder whether they are next, KIA — who helped on the GS side after wrapping up their campaign vs Hydra — move into the area (another good report), FIX reset standings and move to roam in the Querious region, Smash sheds about half of their members and I’m not quite sure where Roadkill might end up.

In the North, major POS ops slowed down as the inevitable happens — Darth stepping down and Insurgency disbanding shortly afterwards, but not without the usual drama over corp assets being stolen. In another power move RA seems to have decided that they want Cloud Ring and Fade for themselves, taking over 6NJ, the C4C Malice station as well as P-2 from ATF who cannot hold the system even with help from Un-Nat and eVoke (kb link). I’ve yet to see an official response to this from the Northeners, but it seems safe to assume that they’ve come to some kind of arrangement. Looking forward to see what kind of impact this will have (mid- to long-term) on the Northern coalition’s politics, and how RA’s control over a large amount of valuable moons will continue to influence the game. They are certainly not shy about defending assets once they’ve acquired them, this time resulting in the loss of 2 Styx moms and several capitals during an unsupervised op in Arida.

As RA take over Fade, other smaller entities such as Project Alice and Daisho scramble to leave the region in time, the former playing nice with GS, the latter deciding to try try their luck in Fountain and arriving in the middle of an Axe/Goodfellas vs CI/SoT/PL POS op, joining on the AXE side. After receiving a warm welcome, PL-style, (minus one Aeon, a couple of capitals and a POS) Daisho decided to move elsewhere — the drone region for now, assisting KIA, GS and Co with the Roadkill cleanup. Completing the game of musical chairs BRUCE stop playing with Cruel Intentions in Fountain, yield PNQ to PL and Y-2 to BOB before moving to Syndicate on accounts of being too heavily infiltrated. Might have been worthwhile to consider an arrangement with PL instead, but it seems leadership has been in disarray for a while now.

Whether Syndicate is the best area for BRUCE to move to remains to be seen; local residents Huzzah and others have gone back to shooting each other after the departure of Un-Nat as well as killing motherships; Cry Havoc fight with Cosmic Anamalies over one of their many POS (either alone or with Star Fraction and Pandemic Legion involvement), and while NOTR disbands there’s enough folks left to provide BRUCE with a warm welcome by dismantling their POS and fleets.

POS and moons continue to drive other conflicts, such as Cosmic Anomalies’ attempt to defend their Outer Ring towers from Razor (not quite successful); likewise, Stain sees continued fights between MASS/RA and SE/Coven/etc over mineral resources. And for once I can simply point at an excellent summary of the history of the conflict, courtesy of C0ven’s Voulture.

In Catch the fight between IAC and AAA continues to be somewhat low key, although -A- took over another IAC station system (V2) despite CVA assistance to IAC. With TCF stopping by in Providence now and then (apparently still one of the prime recreational PvP areas) as well as Tercios Alliance taking FAT with BOB support the region has the potential to see some bigger fights soon.

BOB in the meantime seem to be on vacation and gearing up for MAX, their cap-ship heavy plan to pillage areas as they move across the Eve map in an attempt to once again irritate enough people to kick off another great war. Bonus points for the announcement with style, and a standing ovation for this thread on something awful which I’ve discovered way too late. Sometimes you find the best discussions in the most unlikely places. In-game, GBC/BOB are all over the place with roaming gangs, fighting Hydra, IAC/-A-, visit the North (Finfleet) and Venal (Dice) or cleaning up parts of Fountain.

And if you still haven’t had enough BOB-related links, there’s the drama about Hegemon Rast indeed not having any lunch money after Shrike’s Avatar loss. The topic is discussed in depth over at SHC with feedback from Blacklight, and there’s another summary at the Tribune. Oh. And just in case you _really_ are no longer playing Eve, Faction Warfare has finally hit the server. Summary here, videos there, preliminary map around the corner. Give it a try!

Late April to Mid-May 2008, part 2

The second large change during the April to May timeframe involved, of course, the rather rapid fall of Tortuga which began with a BOB-led attack on H74 in Southern Querious. The Waagaa-version of Molle’s original announcement has some more information on the initial attack, and the first POSs went down rather quickly. Given the numbers involved ownership of H74 changed quickly, with BOB launching another titan (Dianabolic) for good measure.

The GBC used their forward momentum and moved straight towards 1-N and EIMJ-, two sovereignity systems in Period Basis, to disable the cyno jammers; capitals quickly followed into the systems and reinforced all towers.

As so frequently the events surrounding the attack turned out to be more interesting than the (lack of) actual fights. Krall Amarr, an ETNY pilot with a titan under construction, tried to save his ship by not only negotiating with BOB — which was sanctioned –, but by also handing over billions in ISK and POS passwords, allowing a Tortuga fleet to be DD’d within their own POS.

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During some rather hilarious chatlogs, during which a friend of mine (who isn’t even in BoB) posed as Galavet to convince him to contract some stuff to my alt, Krall Amarr went from “I’ll never betray MC” to “I’ll do whatever you want to save my Titan under construction”. In less than a week.

Got to love this game. The build of the titan was aborted rather swiftly and Krall kicked, getting rid of any further incentives for negotiation (image link); Krall himself is under new ownership these days. Given that one of ODD’s motherships in built was also removed — in this case rather accidently — I can see KiaEddz having a bit of an heart attack regarding his shiny new toy, but at the end of the day they KIA managed to deploy their new Leviathan. Didn’t help with their stations…

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I see KIA lost 2 key station systems in HIX and E2-

.. but that was to be expected. Given the scope of the event there’s been plenty of debriefs. Just to highlight a few, the posts around this one on SHC are actually readable, as are the first two pages on CAOD. KIA’s viewpoint is, of course, worth spending some time with, as is this reply. Sel’s official announcement to fold the MC flag is one long thread but includes lots of good reading material and we got the mandatory discussion of Mercs in Eve, just to get you started.

The end of Tortuga and MC, along with the fall of TRI, left a bit of a vaccuum. BOB, among other entities, will have to start looking for new targets — if someone’s figured out already who Max is.. let me know. And no, I doubt it’s linked to Goonswarm’s new organization (img link).

One of the likely target areas for GBC forces is of course Fountain and Bruce.. who actually seem to be busy enough handling Pandemic Legions and Sons of Tangra. Rumours of BRUCE siding with BOB got squished rather quickly as another BRUCE mothership dies and Y-2 changes hands (the station was actually in possession of BLAST who bought it from Pure), causing — among other turmoil — BRUCE’s executor corp to leave.

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Also without really trying, it appears BoB will have captured Y-2 soon.

BRUCE towers have been running out of fuel all over Fountain, and this has extended to Y-2 (not a surprise, they never really made a real effort to do anything about Y-2). Even PNQY staging POS BRUCE used once ran out of fuel — so I think BoB figured if they put one bait POS into y-2 they might actually capture the system with it one day.

To make matters worse, some of the Ex-TRI corporations (namely SPA, Cora and Illuminati) reform Cruel Intentions together with AWAR and move to Fountain, too; while Illuminati might have moved on to PL by now this is probably not much of a consolation for BRUCE pilots. A return of BRUCE to Cloud Ring seems also unlikely as the area has come under combined attack from eVOKE and Unnatural Selection who went for 9-4, deployed POS and evicted 10th Legion from the area before moving on to G8AD and XZH:

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With BRUCE busy dealing with ‘internal issues’, they became useless in Cloud Ring, leaving CR held by only overly small alliances with no supercaps.

Ev0ke dropped 4 POS in 9-4, riding their fairly burly supercap fleet for security and waited a week for sovereignty to drop. This occurred, and they shot and took the 9-4RP station without significant incident.

Following this, they made a Euro TZ assault on the cynojammer in XZH. As near as I can tell, Tenth did not have POS gunners and tacklers in place, and less than an hour later the jammer was down and a large number of supercaps were in the field. Tenth was told by BRUCE that no help would be forthcoming, and agreed to terms for withdrawal of their assets.

Residents of Syndicate seem to be breathing a sigh of relief after the departure of UNNAT, although everyone did seem to enjoy the regular fights (kb link) in the area. There’s been plenty of skirmishes, even POS fights (joint ops with Outbreak/evoke, img link) and pretty fluid battle lines. The Un-Nat summary:

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1) We moved into 35- and have not been pushed out yet, despite being heavily outnumbered.
2) none of our large pos’s have been destroyed
3) We have started to move into the s-u cluster area its self now that we have the large pos in ZV-
4) we get big fights daily and whatever people say on here, were all having a good time, isk efficiency or not
5) We have actually grown larger as this conflict has gone on, and have grown more centralized/organized

Bad Things:

1) we havent stolen any high end moons yet
2) none of the enemy alliances have given up yet
3) sacul is still a noob :D

Which of the bad things made them actually leave the area I wouldn’t dare to guess. Also not quite sure who is now in possession of the valuable moons in the Syndicate area:

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Un-Nat owns several of the northern Syndicate high end moons, RA own a few more with Crescent and Hammer (RA vassal I believe) owning several more on top of that. Cosmic Anamolies still have one, and the southern collection is split between NOTR/Huzzah/OSS.

Speaking of RA and valuable moons, the fight in Stain is still going on; in this particular case RA traded 16 of their capitals for 27 SE dreads and carriers via another hotdrop; round two saw MASS and Coven struggling with each other. After a brief NAP between BOB and Stain Forces it’s seems to have calmed down a bit, though.

Which also is ‘mostly’ true for Catch, another GBC target area. Fights seem be rather muted; while -A- did cause trouble to IAC’s jumpbridges in B-3 (kb link) they seem to be holding back somewhat. Probably just as well as it allows IAC to recover for a bit; only a question of time before FAT comes under attack again from the next residents of Querious.

In the North the departure of TRI has triggered a gold rush for the vacant areas, and I’m still confused about who is moving where. In Deklein, Project Alice (driven by cormer MC corps ETNY and Vidar) pushed in and were met by IRON and RA (!) halfway along the way, the latter wasting no time in taking the EC- station system.

Other Ex-Tortuga members Daisho (augmented by some Odyssey corps) announce their first joint op with KIA on a contract vs Hydra. Somewhat bad timing as any threat to sovereignty is likely to be countered by the Northeners who no longer have to worry about TRI/CELES. At least that new titan is being used actively. There’s likely another titan active in the area as Daisho are rumoured having bought the CONIN titan which was apparently for sale. And yes, that’s quite likely tinfoil.

Just hope they are careful with it; just as a reminder how fragile supercaps are Cosmic Anomalies, former SMASH allies, lost two of their motherships to an ad-hoc coalition of CI, Conin and others in Placid:

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Two Chaos Incarnate mother ships were spotted sieging a Cosmic Anomalies POS in Alperena (Placid lowsec).

No, we’re not blue to Cosmic, but mother ships are good eating. We hooked up with Star Fraction, Contraband Inc, and some folks from Prophets of a Damned Universe to try to get numbers up for breaking a dual MS tank. We figured there was a pretty solid chance that CI had the rest of their gang just waiting for the MS to clear POS mods and would escalate once tackled.

Killboard link one, two and a third one (Aeon) down just a day later when logging back in. Hope that Cosmic Anomalies-owned moon in Syndicate generates plenty of ISK.

For a while I’ve been writing more or less regular summaries of current events in Eve, something that’s been popular as the ‘Daily Show’ within FIX, got some popularity within the MC as ‘Tinfoil Hattery’ and eventually was moved to the general Tortugan area.

The archives are in the process of finding a new home, and the thread itself did not get updated with current events for a while, to no small extent since I wasn’t quite sure where to keep posting any updates. Thanks to Winterblink for providing a venue — as always, all mistakes are mine. Please keep in mind that the original disclaimer regarding any truth or even objective summaries in this thread still holds true:

They are updates on major events, gossip and a lot of tinfoil hats gathered from the various forums. I’m spending entirely too much time browsing through all the smack and madness that is CAOD, SHC, VN Boards, Eve Tribune and various corp boards, and keeping track of the interesting quotes and creating a short writeup is usually just an additional hour a week or so.

…

Keep in mind that I make no claims of having inside information or anything that’s even remotely close to the truth. In most cases you’ll be better informed by talking to the actual people involved, by checking other sources or due to having access to internal information. If you spot something that’s wrong please do not hesitate to follow-up; the only purpose of this thread is to allow inactive players to get a bit of an idea of what’s currently going on in New Eden. As such I’ll often skip over details in an attempt to keep this moderately brief. If anyone feels that this is too close to CAOD or rather not suitable to this forum please let me know and I’ll either change the concept or stop altogether.

To get you started, this request on CAOD regarding current conflicts as of early May isn’t half as bad as it sounds. Couple of decent summaries within the thread. I’ll stick to my own ‘areas’, although these overlap of course — this time more so than usual. I’ll also be catching up with current events in the next few days; this post has been split in half to make it at least somewhat readable.

Late April to Mid-May 2008, part 1

Executive summary: Massive cap fights in the drone regions, TRI disbands

The drone regions saw a brief quiet phase before IRC/XiX/SD gave FIX towers in the area another try, using a rather impressive cap fleet. FIX seemed to enjoy the prospect, probably to some extent because it drew SACK (Smash/Roadkill/Atlas) back into the conflict. Fights intensified with one titan in trouble and Mactep’s mothership going down (kb link). Solar Dragons retaliate by killing a cap yard that apparently still had components for a new titan stashed away.

Capital and supercapital losses only increased over time. A second Solar fleet mom soon followed (kb link, report link) only to be outdone by one of the largest cap ship fights that Eve has seen so far with close to 70 capitals lost between all parties (image). Borders itself remained fairly stable, maybe because of a) a lack of capitals and b) everyone waiting for Goons to move in, but the initial push to keep FIX out of BQ0 and GK3 failed. Didn’t stop XiX from losing another Nyx, quickly followed by the 4th dead mom of the week (another report) as fights moved to R-6 — for more cap ship battles, this time with about 15 caps (img) IRC/ED capitals destroyed at one of their own POS.

Goonswarm did arrive in R-6 just in time and decided to catch up with regards to the capital losses, leaving deadtear’s Erebus behind (kb link). Despite a triple doomsday some tacklers survived long enough to take advantage of a de-synched titan pilot, the result being inevitable (mandatory wreck image, full report over here). GS and friends managed to take down 9 SACK caps at least.

With the recent launch of the first DS1 titan (in true GS comedy style, no less) the bees are back to two (known) titans for now. Let’s see whether their combined numbers are sufficient to push back FIX/SACK.

In the second big combat area TRI/Insurgency did their best to stand up to a rather impressive combined fleet of ‘old’ Northerners ranging from Mostly Harmess over Morsus Mihi to Razor, Pure and half a dozen of smaller entities. For quite a while things were looking bright for TRI and CELES, particularly after an excellent start by killing Intensity Green, Razor’s Erebus-class titan (kb link, wreck image, another one) during a POS defense op in D4R. Note the Rorqual on the killmail. But then, battle rorquals are all the rage these days.

If rumours are to be believed, an DAB alt in PURE took revenge on Razor and gave away the titan’s location. Bit of a shame given that it was there on a rescue mission (lovely propaganda material indeed!). Titan loss notwithstanding, fights continued on a massive scale over 4DT (typical kb link), to the point that fleets had to be split up to fight in multiple systems around the general BKG area.

Both sides continued to actively use their titans despite RZR’s loss, some with better results (img link) than others:

(TRI titan pilot)

I get told to loggin get in gang, JUMP JUMP DD ASAP 60 man gang jumped in and bubbled your 120km off. I jump and dd while grid loading. Grid loads all blue pods.

WTF?!?!?

Oh wrong cyno pilot dropped the cyno.

Might want to open a self-help group with Goonswarm who stopped by in Pure Blind to run some interference — only to get DD’d _again_. Phalanx in the meantime did their best to disturb NC supply lines by war-deccing most northern alliances, and former TRI member corps CORA, Sparta and Illuminati kept IRON busy, killing yet another mothership.

All events most likely provided only some help, but in the end — despite other minor capital losses — Insurgency temporarily regained control over 4DT/D4R, and fights shifted into a bit of a cat and mouse game — made more difficult by ‘Trisurge’ disabling various jump bridges.

That is not to say any and all fighting stopped. The involved parties continued to trade dreads over Z-K (kb link of a General Dynasty scorpion with fittings worthy of any capital), quickly followed by another mom kill (Darkness Nyx, RZR propaganda version) in the same system. The Northern Coalition did gradually take control of Z-K by a combination of POS counterspam and continued presence in the system:

NC holds LXWN and BKG station systems.

Trisurgency currently hold 4DT and EQI station systems.

NC is currently removing and incapping Cyno Jammer and Jump bridges in Z-K (first system after BKG). NC POS’s in EQI that were re-inforced have come out and been repped i believe. Insurgency POS’s to come out of reinforced in Z-K over the next few hours.

Currently NC holds the pipe up to and through the two hostile station systems. Only very small engagements at the moment, with small gangs ganking loners and stragglers on gates. No serious hostile force has been seen in Z-K after the cap loss battle this afternoon.

At that time the fight did seem a bit like a standoff, despite an impressive churn of capital ships (at least from my perspective):

Both sides are achieving their short-term objectives tbh. TRISurge seems to be largely content with retaking & refortifying lost systems (4dt, d4r, and eqi). The Northern Coalition have seemed to accept the fact that they will not be able to retake them now that they have been lost.

Maybe that’s why I felt completely surprised when TRI decided to open another front by hitting PURE POS in Vale. While it certainly prevented PURE from defending their valuable moons in Fountain from PL (if they had any intention of doing so in the first place) the move was unlikely to help CELES:

Can we win this war alone against RZR, PURE, MM, mostly harmless, stella, majestic, CO2 and the others? of course we cant…

Quite predictably, CELES got pushed back, followed by an announcement from Darknesss that TRI would be folding down. For a while it seemed they might be able to survive the drama of previous weeks, but the joint work with Insurgency didn’t seem to be enough to hold the alliance together. Oree’s reply is worth reading, as is the TRI history post from touchvill.