After a long break from playing war reporter, Human_Being is back with an overview of the action since his last post:
War Profits
There are some mis-conceptions earlier in the thread about how much material damage Haargoth Agamar actually did to then-BoB's Black Nova Corporation. While what he took hurt, it was not in-itself crippling to KenZoku. He took all fifteen Corporate Capital Ships BNC had, but the KenZoku 'Dread fleet still numbers some 230 ships (all still in PR-8CA). Agamar also took the "corporate store" of BNC consisting of hundreds of sub-Capital ships and stocks of Tower/Jump Drive fuel. These ships represent a pool that would have been used to fill in utility gaps in a given fleet or replace individuals' ship losses after a major battle. All corporation members still possessed their own ships though, stored in their own hangars. Finally, Agamar took eight billion in currency from the BNC corporate account. This is a significant sum of cash, but represents a fraction of BNC's available resources. Most corporations have a practice of keeping most of their money divided in Directors' personal accounts. Storing cash in individual accounts allows Directors to pocket and mis-use funds, but also prevents the corporation from being rendered completely insolvent by exactly this kind of attack. As a measure of scale, a Dreadnought hull without any fittings will start at around 1.6 billion and a Titan will begin at 40 billion. So while it was damaging, it didn't determine the war's course on its own.
The economic portion of the war began with about the same standings as the military one: KenZoku holding an apparently stronger hand and GoonSwarm facing an uphill battle. And like the military struggle, the economic confrontation has played out almost in the reverse of expectations.
Goon-anomics
One might criticize their antics, their chosen equipment, or individual pilots' performance, but one thing that has impressed all the Goons' allies and surprised their enemies is the astonishing logistical feat that they have, and are, pulling off. Firstly they managed an orderly and near-complete evacuation of several thousand players' assets from their old space. Outposts were cleared, Towers were taken down, and ships were convoyed out. Any ships that could not be moved were "insured" and then fed to NPCs for recovery of partial value (yes, that's fraud). Everything was transferred safely to 319-3D in NPC Delve; a central location within jump-range of most points in the Delve/Querious region. Materiale was moved swiftly enough that the Coalition Dreadnought fleets were able to operate with full support within two days of the evacuation order.
Once moved, support personel set up stores and have maintained a continuous flow of supplies from Empire-space. GoonSwarm has a reimbursment program for anyone who loses a ship in a fleet action and new hulls need to be available. All of those ships launching sorties 23 hours a day (minus one for server maintenance) require ammunition of some sort, with many specialized types and expensive varieties. Besides ammunition, fitting a ship for different tasks requires specific ship-modules. Dreadnought, Titan, and Cyno-field capable ships need "fuel" for each Cyno-Jump they make from system to system. All Towers need fuel and equipment as well. They need not just Strontium Clathrates to guard them against attack, but regular fuel consumed hourly to make them function at all. Of course, each NPC-faction's variety of Tower also requires a different type of fuel . All of these things have been procured and provided so as to allow uninterrupted operations for weeks on end.
Also impressive is how efficiently supply is being maintained. The busiest player trade-hub in Empire-space is "Jita". Players in outer regions refer to the costs of their equipment as "Jita +X%". GoonSwarm is moving items efficiently enough (or bringing in raw materials and manufacturing them on the spot) that their pilots are paying "at or slightly below Jita prices". One Goon pilot has reported that with prices as they are from the logistics teams, he was buying and fitting a new hull for 10-20 million less than the ship-reimbursement value received from his corporation.
While all of this is going on, the logistics team is moving new Towers into place, anchoring them, keeping track of which faction-type is where, and keeping them all fueled. There are some 300+ Coalition Towers in the region now, with more going up, and all of them must be manually maintained by someone.
There are Real World militaries that can't do this and the Goons have kept it up for over a month. Slacker-retards indeed.
The situation gets more astonishing if you take into account that everything was from a standing start. The time from realization that they could destroy BoB's Sovereignty to execution of the plan was literally hours. No one outside the GIA (Goon Intelligence Agency) and GoonSwarm CEO knew that anything was going to happen. The Mittani actually explained what had been done to the rest of the GoonSwarm Directorship after the fact (warning: some language).
The Coalition had only one advantage in preparation. Before the de-Sov-ing operation, GoonSwarm had been under attack by AAA and BoB/GBC. The Goons were holding their territory (even in the face of a de-Sov-ing spy used by BoB themselves at DG-8VJ), but the war had largely turned into a Tower-trading stalemate. Not satisfied with this state of affairs, the Coalition leadership had planned a new offensive against AAA with new tactics to take their territory. In preparation for their plan, the Coalition members had quietly purchased and stockpiled....300 Towers.
Landed Nobility
In contrast, KenZoku started the war with all of their equipment already in place. They had 400+ towers in Delve alone. They had years of stockpiled ships in their hangars. They had regular supply routines. Yet they have been pushed into NPC space.
KenZoku and the Pets still operate daily fleets of cruisers and frigates, but they are mostly basing out of NPC Aridia to the North of Delve. This puts them even closer to the trade hubs of Empire-space, but a KenZoku pilot has reported he is paying "Jita +15%" for equipment. KenZoku ships are also showing up in Coalition killboards with some surprisingly sub-standard fittings. BoB always insisted on the very best equipment (and demanded the same of the Pets) for their fleets. Always having better equipment than their opponent was a matter of pride for BoB. It's unknown if the "fail-fitted" ships represent replacement ship-modules in short supply or unwillingness to risk their best assets in what amount to harrying attacks.
Questions are being raised about BoB's past finances. They controlled the richest area of the game for years. They had much of their territory occupied by Pet Alliances who paid "rent" for their space and cost BoB no overhead for that income. The Pet Alliances also took their place in BoB battle lines, but were responsible for their own ship-reimbursments and (BoB-dictated) Capital Ship building programs. BoB built literally dozens of Titans, some of which were sold to friednly powers and others it now appears were sold under the table.
"Where are the Titans??" has been replaced with "Where is the Money??"
AAA and Red.Overlords are derided as "ebayers" and "Farmer alliances" with accusations that they forcefully occupy high-quality mining areas so their leaders can sell game-currency for RMT as a profession. A single Titan is valued at several thousand real-world dollars by the known RMT rates. BoB as a whole had income in the hundreds of billions per month. If they had wished to, the BoB Directors could have skimmed car-payment worthy amounts of cash from their sprawling empire. With their vaunted Titan fleet failing to appear and their years of occupation in Delve, some are wondering with bewilderment if the leaders of the Elite PVP Alliance of EVE...were in fact the worst group of Gold Farmers the game has ever seen....
Bust and *BOOM*
Regardless of any RMT suspicions, KenZoku is now an Alliance looking for a working strategy to attack the Coalition. For most of the previous weeks the majority of their activity has been to form a sizable fleet of support ships during their prime-time and dash for PR-8CA. In the few minutes before they arrive, word gets sent out out over out-of-game communications and enough Coalition members log in to the System-Camp to double their numbers or more. After seeing that they once again were not fast/numerous enough, KenZoku would turn and head for Querious to find some mischief. The Coalition would subsequently pursue them until the KFC ships logged off or were destroyed.
This is most of the action the Coalition PR-8CA campers see. They maintain that they are not becoming bored however. The guards have said that they get rotated on a good schedule, can do other things on their computers while waiting for an alert, and as an NPC system it is easy to find "rats" if they want to hunt a little. Since the earlier slash fan-fiction was somewhat poorly received, the Goons are now trying to be more literate with stories read over the Coalition Teamspeak. The current reading selection is The Count of Monte Cristo. While not what one might associate with Goons on first blush, the irony in being read the ultimate story of utter financial, social, and personal destruction in pursuit of vengeance appeals to the Campers. They insist they can keep this up forever (or at least longer than it takes KenZoku to give up).
There is some minor friction developing amongst Coalition members regarding the chases of KenZoku/KFC "breakout attempts". Most of this annoyance relates to the Pandemic Legion fleet commander "Shadoo" and his willingness to launch Doomsday attacks on even small fleets....and regardless of how many friendlies might be mixed in with them. The complaint is less that pilots' ships have been destroyed than that Shadoo is "hogging all the action". There is now a running joke with the formula "Shadoo DDed a Scout Frigate on the 319 gate. Update: 10 Goon Cruisers destroyed in the blast". Before the conflict even started, Pandemic Legion apparently secured a diplomatic "pass" for any such incidents and they are making full use of it. Never the less, Shadoo has begun to pilot Interdictors, trap enemy ships himself, and then order a Doomsday on his own ship in joking penance.
However, despite his "guns blazing" combat style, Shadoo has been very capable as a Fleet Commander during the campaign. For example, one day last week he noticed that KenZoku's ships appeared to be following a route to Querious they had used twice before. He Cyno-Jumped his Interdictor to a system ahead of the enemy fleet along that predicted path. Inside the system, Shadoo plotted an exact line between the entry gate and the one several Astronomical Units away that KenZoku would take when exiting the system. He then activated his Warp Interdiction bubble in the middle of that line just before the fleet entered.
As the KFC ships warped across the system they were stopped and dropped out of warp inside Shadoo's bubble. The set up worked perfectly with the entire fleet caught in his trap. Shadoo instantly had a waiting Titan Jump in via Cyno-Field and fire its PBAoE Doomsday Device as soon as it was through. In order to escape the blast, the clumsy cruisers and battleships would have needed to have a tactical speed-boosting module equipped, activate that module, power themselves to the edge of the kilometers-wide warp disruption field, and reactivate their warp drive all in a few seconds.
There was a teensy flaw with the plan though. An uninformed Tau Ceti Federation task force had also set up a gate-camp in the same system. They intercepted the KenZoku fleet when they came through the gate...and naturally tried to immediately pursue them when their prey warped away...
Of course, after having fought beside Shadoo for over a month, some TCF pilots have become remarkably quick on the uptake.
