Vernichtungskrieg

Once every year, on average, someone tries to destroy Goonswarm.  In 2006 it was Lotka Volterra and in 2007 it was Band of Brothers.  In 2008 and 2009 it was BoB in various guises, Against All Authorities, Atlas and Red Overlord.  In 2010 it was, well, Goonswarm.  In 2011 it was basically everyone in the Assault on Precinct VFK.  Now, this year’s attack has come a little early.

For the last week, Raidendot have been amassing, in Venal, every goonhating relic of 2007 who ever loudly proclaimed that they detested all blues or that ganking a raven on a gate with 12 cynabals was the epitome of small-gang warfare.  They have been hitting our moons and those of our allies and, in the face of some complacency from a bloc gorged on tech and conquest in the aftermath of branch, they have already made some gains.

Next, they intend to assault our sovereignty and our CSAAs.  To defeat this plan we will need two things.  One is an Xttz, and we fortunately picked up one of these quite cheaply, ages ago.  The other is you, with your maelstrom or scimitar or huginn.

Changing the direction of a big alliance to attack Goonswarm is a bit like altering course on an ocean liner: you’re probably drunk when you decide to do it; the person who made the call will be the first one in a liferaft paddling for safety; and there’s every likelihood you’re going to end up wrapped around a small but highly figurative Italian island.  But this won’t happen unless we are rolling with several full fleets of battleships each night.  The fact remains that we are facing four large alliances, the largest force of supercapitals assembled since the DRF’s attack on Tribute and a trashmob of “sorry, who?” types like Biblical enthusiasts Giantsbane, ticker “David”, who have been dragged from Vale to PF-.  Not to mention the five hundred Greeks of Hell4s (I’m not making these names up) who, driven into a plate-smashing frenzy by the thumping sound of bazouki music, with no prospect of jobs any time soon and reduced to living off tzatziki and pine resin, will doubtless be able to squeeze in plenty of POS-bashing between riots.

All in all, I admit, they look an unimpressive crew, most of whose leadership I wouldn’t trust to paint my shed.  But they have a lot of titans, and that does make up for a lot of failings in Eve Online.

Having gradually lost fully ten percent of their membership in the last 6 weeks, Raidendot badly need a good war.  Unfortunately for them, this shall not be that good war.  It will be an ugly, grinding war of kiting and timers; a war of Vee’s bombers; of five full fleets of Maelstroms; of suicide dreads and of Dominion sovereignty.  And most of all it is a war that will eventually end with the shattered dreams, once more, of the hapless residue of Finfleet and x13 who we have beaten so often before.

Background

Starting in the late autumn (or “Fall” if your national pastime is complaining about Mexicans taking your jobs) of last year, Raidendot began attempting to assemble a slightly-shuffled arrangement of the usual suspects in order to attack us.  Deklein has been offered to various more-or-less sceptical recipients, Pure Blind and its technetium to others.  For a while, their putative allies – especially Tri Mk Ncdot – were nervous about the effect of the winter patch on supercapitals, and shuffled anxiously while trying to remove imaginary lint from their left sleeve.

Now, they are all worked up and ready to invade, full of outraged assertions that their 90bn ISK wanking chariots should be invincible to repay the risk they took in botting for them for four months.

There is some good news.  I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a fight with a bunch of people at once, but my Dad always told me to pick a big cunt and hit him fucking hard.  Since he was the headmaster of the secondary school I attended you can imagine that this was not a purely theoretical discussion.  So while the Axis of Faggotry were humming and hawwing and waiting for it all to kick off we punched White Noise, and we did it fucking hard.   Minus one enemy, according to this announcement:

Update from 25th January
From: Cyberserker
To: White Noise. [WN]
ALLIANCE
Recently, you could see multiple mails about meetings of directors and CEOs of alliance corporations in the TS. It’s time to update on the situation in the alliance and that you can expect in the future since your head is already exploding head of contradictory rumors and all that was done for the last few days had come to a logical end.

About a week ago, BOPE corporation left alliance. At the meeting all corporations got invitation to join new forming alliance and go to the south, to work mainly with Red_legion and so on. The new alliance would get claim, war, and a new meaning to playing with the prospect of growth.

There was a meeting of directorate immediatle after that where all possibilities of alliance saving were discussed. We talked a lot before where should we go but little about how should we work together to save ticker, which was part of our life for 3.5 years. If you skip a bunch of small organizational issues, we had to resolve two major problems to remain on the “party” course:
1) Creation of new FC team, cooperation with allies and start of active participation in the war against goons as soon as possible.
2) The financial problems in three stages: creation of a fund to start the campaign, midterm and longterm funding.

We were able to find money and FCs that can lead fleets.

Raidens refused to work with us. They are not interested in our fleets. It does not make sense to describe everything that we were told but logs were sent to CEOs.
The general idea is simple: The war against the Goonswarm is over for WN within nothern block. Raiden. set us to +5 but their allies (Ev0ke and Init) refused to set us blue. So there will be following consequences for us: Major operations and war in the north is finished for us, and we will have space in Vale as long as Raiden. will “protect” us from Ev0kes and Init. If needed we can defend it and maybe for a long time but the result will be predictable – Venal.

This information was announced to the CEOs at the last meeting yesterday, after that we began to plan our next steps. Most of the corporations wants to “continue playing” in claimable 0.0. Despite the fact that during the existence of WN. we pissed off 3/4 of Eve – various options were considered various options (maybe except the goons) – from west to east.

Karma thing is simple – to change the side or to seek friendly place is not good and so CEOs made logical decision – to join the fight in the drone regions, together with old friends, Red Alliance and Legion of Death, we will start negotiations with them in the near future.[/b]

Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations, you need to know to do this know:
If you have not done it yet – store most of corporation assets in 6NJ- (Venal), but leave a couple of PVP ships in TVN.

With White Noise out of the way, we still face Raidendot, Ncdot, Evzeroke, Initiativedot and some pets whose names are very nearly as punctuation- or number-strewn.  Lacking a credible American timezone, they are attempting to scrabble around for more and more reinforcements.  Maybe IRC need a new home now that they’ve betrayed Mactep!

They also tried to plead with Test to abandon us, and promised them a variety of rewards on the never-never.  Picture Test, here, as a kind of tubby, cross-dressing but nonetheless comely Eve in the Garden of Eden while Raiden are like that snake from The Jungle Books but with a worth lithp.  Nevertheless, despite the attempts of Nugz and a few, retarded others to alienate Test, they remain our friends, whether or not we actually deserve them.

All of this would be distinctly unworrying: we have hammered pretty much every corporation in Raiden and NCDot into the ground, some of them on three or four occasions.  But they have titans and they have supercarriers and we’re going to need every single clusterfuck member to be Xing up if we are to keep our moons and our space.  If Goons sit back and hope someone else turns up then we lose our untouchable US timezone, and then we lose.

What To Expect

For the last week or so, Raidendot and their rapidly growing blob of allies have been hitting tech moons.  Thus far, they have only taken a handful, and those have almost all been badly timed ally moons.  But take tech they have, and in our space.  You should expect them to keep doing this: kiting towers into Ev0ke’s timezone whenever they can and gradually trying to crumble our holdings down.

We are dealing with people trained at the feet of the Great Swede, however.  So you should expect a very high chance that they repeat the same routine.  At some point in the next few weeks they will, mid-week, red pen every titan, every supercarrier, and every subcapital that they can (well, every one which hasn’t been sold to raise a deposit for a new flat) and corral them into a symbolic target for a headshot.  They will post screenshots of huge screenfuls of erebuses and avatars, and at the sight of these they will gloat and preen and surreptitiously rub themselves under their workdesks at the sight.  They may try a headshot or they may try to achieve this in several systems at once, doubtless following the advice of some badly-remembered quote from Sun Tzu.  When that comes, we will need to do what we did in VFK, and in PNQY and elsewhere: X up, keep Xing up, and then reap the rewards.

Those who forget the lessons of the past are condemned to come back in the summer for study camp.  And in this case Camp Deklein might well end up with hostile ragnaroks desperately evacuating at downtime, stabbing at the ctrl-Q buttons and cursing CCP for getting rid of that exploit.  But in order to achieve this traditional end-of-campaign celebration we will need every one of you, and every one of our allies, to join fleets.

CCP’s physics model sucks.  Whenever you put a large group of supercapitals in one place the likelihood is that one of them will, a few minutes later, hurtle off into the distance at thousands of metres per second.  This will happen and we will kill them.

The sad fact is that we are looking at several weeks of intensive fleet warfare, and that is going to seriously impact the amount of time left over for masturbation and… well, whatever else it is people try to squeeze in between bouts of Onanism.

What To Do

Get alphafleet ships in place.  Watch the op threads to see where to have them.  If you can fly a capswarm dread then please get one fitted and follow the instructions in capswarm.  It is ridiculous that Eve has been reduced to the need for a 200-man suicide dreadswarms in order to counter otherwise-invincible titan blobs but we can only piss with the cocks God gave us so until CCP gets their act together it’s time to insure your Revelation and x up for titan destruction.

Have spare ships fitted.  Even if you cannot afford multiple first line ships, have some spare drakes or digicanes or the like ready to go.  In the era of Time Dilation it will come down to which side keeps coming back.

Genuinely good at Eve?  Hate fleet fights?  Love having your killboard seeming scroll in real-time before your eyes with the massed wrecks of travelling hostiles?  Then join Black Ops and help theAdj make reinforcements and latecomers walk a trail of tears.

If you can get into a supercap, do so.  Check out this thread [link removed sorry pubbies!] from S-Mart for how to get in on these low, low prices and vast subsidies (save up to 45 billion over open market costs, overall):

Leviathan Blueprint, ME 2, free rental, shorter queues

Approx 45bn mineral cost at ME 2

Erebus Blueprint: ME 0, Rental fee 5bn

Approx 50bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 48bn mineral cost at ME 1
Approx 47bn mineral cost at ME 2

Avatar Blueprint: ME 0, Rental fee 5bn

Approx 49bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 47bn mineral cost at ME 1
Approx 46bn mineral cost at ME 2

Ragnaroks: Bring your own BPC (typical cost 7-9bn)

Approx 47bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 45bn mineral cost at ME 1
Approx 44bn mineral cost at ME 2

Aeon (Free BPC)
Approx 13bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 12bn mineral cost at ME 2

Nyx (Free BPC)
Approx 14bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 13bn mineral cost at ME 2

Hel
Approx 12.5bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 11.8bn mineral cost at ME 2

Wyvern
Approx 12.3bn mineral cost at ME 0
Approx 11.6bn mineral cost at ME 2

Titan Subsidy:
All tank and rig modules; doomsday and jump portal modules; all  weapons (turrets or launchers); discounted BPO/BPC use (see above)
Supercarrier Subsidy:
ECM burst module and 20 Fighter-Bombers; Free Aeon / Nyx BPC for use with alliance-approved producers (limited supply)

You  will still need to provide any implants or skillbooks yourself, so  remember to take that into account. pirate sets and hardwirings can cost 2-4bn, while the  titan skillbooks are around 6bn.

Don’t travel solo and unscouted in your alphafleet ships.  Occupational Hazzard are having so much fun popping hapless soloists in VFK itself that even I have wistfully eyed their “Apply” button.  For big fights our Skirmish Commanders will be running reinforcement convoys.