Tag Archives: Imperium

Notes from the War in the Geminate Flood Plain

In addition I’ve been seeing more and more people talk about winter co as though we’ve been abandoned by winter co. We haven’t been abandoned at all by our allies.

Sapporo Jones, Leader of TEST, March 5, 2026

This past weekend saw multiple armor timers for TEST structures in Geminate. It was a big red crayon strat op for us in Chinese time zone. These were very early on Saturday morning for me and, after a week of work, I wasn’t quite up to a 3am alarm clock op.

And, as it turned out, staying in bed was a good choice on my part as WinterCo declined to show up to defend those timers. I’ve shot enough structures to not feel I missed out.

This is where we get to the flood plain discussion, which comes up in every war, where an alliance or coalition under attack has to make hard choices as what to defend and what to fight for. Flood plains are the term, in vogue since the PAPI attack on the Imperium in World War Bee, for those parts of space that a group is willing to lose in order to be better able to defend more important systems.

So it is not completely out of the ordinary for a group to decline to doggedly defend everything in what they consider a flood plain… and anything can be a flood plain at need.

That said, it was something of a slap in the face for TEST when, while WinterCo declined to show up for the armor timer for three Keepstars and a Sotiyo on Saturday, the found time to form up to defend Northern Coalition Skyhooks in Pure Blind. This cranked up more than a few memes on Reddit. (My fav)

Pure Blind is in play because WinterCo still has that war, which they started, festering on their northwestern frontier because The Initiative wouldn’t come back later simply because WinterCo was busy elsewhere.

Norus sent out a broadcast drawing the line at the 4-HWWF Keepstar in Vale of the Silent.

norausdot 🔴 NØRT 🐊 [redacted]@everyone it's all TEST part of geminate getting burnt, without a fight. WC formed 1k4 to defend FRT's gemi. it's cuz we tried in M-MD at our best case scenario and tried in atioth also. neither worked out well for us while we lost grounds elsewhere, grounds where we could used to spare at critical moments. the writing on the wall is on the day 0, we have said this loud and clear to coalition. All space except for 4HW keepstar will be choose to lose at a time. I should not need to ping this daily, except i agree I probably should have said this in ping more often that TEST space is in the worst part of this invasion, defending them would have been possible but when INIT decided to join it's lost already we choose to weight more defense on PB cuz it would net us results, breathing room (space systems) to spare. Should Goons stall for another month we will still be fighting over around vale border except init isn't in Cloud ring, they could be in X47. Can I plainly communicate all above except for repeating We only defend at our choices strategically? probably not before they are at the keepstar armor like now. It doesn't take any genius to figure out our priorities and exploit it. But it's all good now that we have repelled all serious attempts from INIT. I could cede pure blind tomorrow and it wouldn't affect if goons and we stuck in a titan brawl. Now friends, there will be a few more days you can't shake off that noraus abandoned you. You will hint that if not saying so to my face. There was at least one imp high level spy trying to do that on the exec level before they even put down the atioth keep. When you chose to live in geminate I've warned people this could happen. I said we couldn't defend those space but we would house the members, eat the damage together then revenge those who's responsible.

Noraus Statement to WinterCo

The above image transcribed:

**norausdot** 🔴 NØRT 🐊 [redacted]

@everyone it’s all TEST part of geminate getting burnt, without a fight. WC formed 1k4 to defend FRT’s gemi.

it’s cuz we tried in M-MD at our best case scenario and tried in atioth also. neither worked out well for us while we lost grounds elsewhere, grounds where we could used to spare at critical moments.

the writing on the wall is on the day 0, we have said this loud and clear to coalition. All space except for 4HW keepstar will be choose to lose at a time. I should not need to ping this daily, except i agree I probably should have said this in ping more often that `TEST space is in the worst part of this invasion, defending them would have been possible but when INIT decided to join it’s lost already`

we choose to weight more defense on PB cuz it would net us results, breathing room (space systems) to spare. Should Goons stall for another month we will still be fighting over around vale border except init isn’t in Cloud ring, they could be in X47.

Can I plainly communicate all above except for repeating `We only defend at our choices strategically?` probably not before they are at the keepstar armor like now. It doesn’t take any genius to figure out our priorities and exploit it. But it’s all good now that we have repelled all serious attempts from INIT. I could cede pure blind tomorrow and it wouldn’t affect if goons and we stuck in a titan brawl.

Now friends, there will be a few more days you can’t shake off that noraus abandoned you. You will hint that if not saying so to my face. There was at least one imp high level spy trying to do that on the exec level before they even put down the atioth keep. When you chose to live in geminate I’ve warned people this could happen. I said we couldn’t defend those space but we would house the members, eat the damage together then revenge those who’s responsible.

This would be pretty normal for a coalition under siege that is losing fights and wants to husband its forces for use in a more defensible environment. Is Vale of the Silent more defensible? I do not know, but it does stretch our logistical tail a bit more, and I’ve been through campaigns where we have reached a point that being able to resupply the front line has become an issue because the war has simply moved too far from our home.

But WinterCo isn’t losing fights. If we just use the ISK outcome they are often breaking even or winning pretty decisively. There have been a number of brawls over the last week… usually just escalations over minor objectives, that have turned into bloody slug-fests between battleship fleets.

The fight that went down on Saturday night in H-5GUI in Vale of the Silent, sparked by The Llama feeding a CFI fleet then coming back for more, was probably the closest brawl of the bunch, swung our way because WinterCo dropped some dreads and we went after them like somebody said, “Treat!” in the other room.

A WinterCo Phoenix gets our attention

From the new killmail.app battle tool report, this header resulted.

H-5GUI Battle Report Header

Going off topic for a moment, I do like the visualization that tool provides, but I feel the need to crop it down to something more useful for a blog post. You can click on the link to see the original.

Another problem with that tool is it only tracks one system at a time, and in null sec Aegis Sov means that we will have constellation spanning fights at times, and fights do often spill over from one system to the next. I was in a fight over the course of the week where half of it took place on one side of a gate, then WinterCo pulled back through the gate, we followed, and the fight continued on the other side. No battle report for me on killmail.app.

Also, it doesn’t show the major participants on the main page and names the sides after the largest alliance present. That should say WinterCo and The Imperium. And also INIT, because they showed up, but you can only have two sides in a battle as well.

My usual fallback is the Battle Report Tool site, though that seems to be having some issues currently. I could not get it to generate anything like a reasonable battle report for the fight at H-5GUI

Ideally, I want a tool that has a nice, not too cluttered summary that doesn’t require me to crop and rework too much to get something readable to include here. (More than a decade ago Asher asked me to include a visual of the report headers with my posts, as the sites that generate them come and go. This was wisdom and I have not regretted following that advice.)

There is another new player on the block, EVE War Beacon, which does generate some nice battle reports and has most of what I want. Here is the same fight as a battle report from there.

EVE War Beacon BR Header for H-5GUI

That gets me about everything I want, just in tiny eye-strain-o-vision size type. You may need to click on that image to see it in full size for it to be legible.

I personally contributed two Raven Navy Issue (RNI) battleships to that report, which run 650 million ISK on contract. I have already been paid out via the ship replacement program (SRP) for strategic operations, but losing those two has boosted my SRP total past 2.3 billion ISK.

My losses in our new SRP tool

But it was a glorious and satisfying fight, even if I lost two ships. But at least I remembered to put a frigate in the escape bay in the second RNI. You cannot transport a battleship in a capital ship with a frigate in the escape bay… no ships in ships in ships I guess… so I had to take them all out to haul them, and then I keep forgetting to put them back in.

Also, I once again forgot that the escape bay frigate was even a thing when my second RNI blew up and got up to go to the bathroom, only to come back and find I was in a ship, albeit a much smaller one, and somebody was shooting at me. I barely got away.

Still a few points of armor left, no sweat!

Having loaded up a combat drone in my Scalpel, I was able to send it out on a couple of the targets we went after, including a Phoenix Navy Issue, where I did my part applying a while 134 points of damage.

My Scalpel over the battle

I lost that drone on a sudden cold warp across the battlefield, but was able to reconnect with one of the drones I had deployed from my RNI when we landed, so carried on doing that and repping the occasional target in our fleet. I was mostly left alone and made it out when we rushed the gate through the bubbles and a pile of hostile Maelstroms.

It was an opportune time to overhead your prop mod

Anyway, that was all a semi-relevant digression as part of the point that WinterCo has been holding its own when it comes out to play, and should be able to dominate when it comes to structure timers set to their time zone preference.

Oh, and I keep forgetting, WinterCo won a major victory over the Imperium at the Atioth Keepstar timer, winning both the objective and slaughtering us in the ISK war, blowing up 33 titans, just two weeks ago. While not an M2-XFE round 2 level of win, it is the sort of loss that had caused some coalitions to pause. But we just plowed forward, lying about how many Keepstars we were dropping and deploying forward all the same.

So it doesn’t feel like WinterCo should be falling back, but I am not privy to what Noraus knows about his own coalition.

So WinterCo has decided to let go of Geminate, which included all of TEST’s holdings. That, and then the decision to put in the effort to defend Skyhooks in Pure Blind has reportedly made TEST a bit salty in coalition coms.

[TEST LEYIF] Tyler Rina 🔴 TESTHow are skyhooks several regions away from vale more important than a keepstar one region away [TEST UKOC] Everlasting Hurrican 🌐 UKOC I wish we had this much love for skyhooks when the ones in Geminate were being hit

A sample from a menu shared out on Saturday

TEST members wondering how Skyhooks are more important than their Keepstar and where was the Skyhook love when theirs were being attacked in Geminate.

It would be enough to make you feel for TEST… but then I have to remind myself that they chose to put themselves in the middle of the road we would have to take for any attack on WinterCo… and also, we have long memories and hold grudges.

TEST locations, November to January

[Thought experiment: If TEST had stayed in Pure Blind, would WinterCo be defending their Skyhooks as aggressively?]

Noraus eventually had to put out an quick update to put the heat on himself for this decision.

norausdot 💎 NØRT 🐊 [redacted]@everyone also it's not possible to feel ok. I don't mean to force people especially TEST members to PRETEND we are ok and dont worry about us. You can fire up all the complaints but please do NOT point them at FCs. Why would you be mad at the people who can not decide grand plans yet try to net the best results for you. Going to personal is the only thing should not happen here. rather you should be mad at me, which is quite OK. I still offer all of you to tend your wounds here then revenge at a time we can. I made the decision and you are the most impacted. You've lost the most. you have the right.

Noraus takes the hit

The above image transcribed:

**norausdot** 💎 NØRT 🐊 [redacted]

@everyone also it’s not possible to feel ok. I don’t mean to force people especially TEST members to PRETEND we are ok and dont worry about us.

You can fire up all the complaints but please do NOT point them at FCs. Why would you be mad at the people who can not decide grand plans yet try to net the best results for you.

Going to personal is the only thing should not happen here.

rather you should be mad at me, which is quite OK. I still offer all of you to tend your wounds here then revenge at a time we can. I made the decision and you are the most impacted. You’ve lost the most. you have the right.

This is what leadership has to look like when things are not going your way. You don’t get to blame others when you’re in charge… not if you want to keep your organization from fracturing.

Will this quell the discontent? I do not know. But there are a number of structure timers coming out in the next 24 hours, the structures I referenced at the top of the post that WinterCo declined to defend at the armor timers.

It is generally assumed that the big fight happens at the armor timer and that you evacuate the structure and abandon it to your foe at the structure timer. But Noraus may feel the need to put in some effort now to defend at least one of those structures for TEST, if only to prove that Skyhooks are not more important than Keepstars. Also, again, these fights will happen in their core time zone, so they should be able to contest the field against EU and US pilots who will be at work or asleep on Tuesday when they hit.

We shall see this week.

Addendum:

Then, after I wrote this yesterday morning rumors started to run about moves to low sec and other items. Not sure of the veracity of any of it, but Asher did post that TEST would be allowed to setup shop in the Drone regions if they follow the rules. Could be trolling. Could be the future.

Notes from the War in Geminate

The (Not) Two Keepstars

The second Keepstar… is in my heart. That is where it always was.

-Asher Elias, April 11 Imperium Fireside

As I wrote in a previous post, the Imperium’s response to the loss at Atioth was to loudly announce that we were doubling down and had dropped two more Keepstars in the KR-XF4 constellation in Geminate, which is where Atioth is as well.

This lit Reddit up with memes.

This also may have caused WinterCo to pull its staging back. Unlike the first Keepstar, they declined to contest the two additional. The theory is that this was because they couldn’t find the second one. So we were able to move capitals and supers forward into a new staging Keepstar.

As it turns out, there was no second Keepstar. We only dropped the one, but kept on acting like there were two, to the point of Applepear, an Imperium FC and director, calling updates on coms about the status around anchoring and deploying the second Keepstar.

I appended this to my post about the Keepstar deployment and move op after the fact, but I figured it deserved a mention of it own.

The Fortunes of TEST

The hardest hit by the decision by WinterCo to pull back was TEST.

DOTLAN numbers from earlier in the week

TEST alliance has been removed from the sovereignty map once again. This has happened… three, maybe four times since I have been in null sec; after the Fountain war for sure, and after the Casino War when PanFam turned on them and CO2 and kicked them out of Tribute and Vale. Then there was the loss of all their space after World War Bee (or WWB2 or Beeitnam, there are multiple names for it, but I stick with what I called it at the time) when they fled to as far away from us in New Eden as they could.

Anyway, if you look at that zippy new sov visualization site you will see TEST is missing.

Frat, GSF, and some randos now

I would have used DOTLAN for the map, but it seems to be having some issues in its map rendering. It still shows TEST in a few systems even though when you look at the details it makes it clear that they are no longer there. I hope that site isn’t falling apart.

As a reminder, TEST decided to put themselves there as Pandemic Horde was falling apart.

TEST locations, November to January

So anybody feeling they got the short end… well, we didn’t design their cap badges or whatever. They chose that bit of space, next to us, the people with a simmering grudge against them from the last big war, which was why they had stayed far away from us for the last few years.

That said, when it came out that one of their members was hacking our authentication site… probably looking for information about that second Keepstar… they kicked him right away. So full points for that. Maybe they don’t have to be “next” anymore after all of this.

Ongoing Battles

There have been a lot of fights going on. WinterCo, despite pulling back, seems keen for some action. A lot of them have been in early EU / late Chinese time, which doesn’t do me a lot of good here in California. But I did manage to get into one good brawl.

Typhoons in a bright orange explosion

I mean, we did get our asses handed to us, but engaging in a battleship brawl in Frat’s peak weekend play window and then bringing some faxes was us shouting “treat!” just a little too loud I suppose. From the battle report.

SR-KBB Battle Report Header

Also, some dreads showed up and got zapped.

Still, it was fun. I lost a Typhoon, but actually remembered to fit my rigs and insure when I undocked, so I was made whole on the loss by the next day. I had hauled out another Typhoon in any case, so I was able to rejoin the battle, get in a few more shots, then run away with the rest of the fleet when the odds got too bad.

We do seem to do better when I am not around. Also, if that linked fight were in low sec there would be an all caps headline topping a post on Reddit about a trillion ISK fight. In null sec that we’ve been to the trillion ISK party too many times to get too excited about it.

The Keepstar Count

Meanwhile, there is our war objective, which I quoted back when the campaign was announced:

Our objective is straightforward: we will attempt to destroy their staging Keepstar in Geminate.

We’re not their to take space and keep it… though we installed ratting upgrades for anybody who misses the old days of Guristas ratting back in Deklein… we’re here to kill structures. Specifically, Keepstars in Geminate. We’ve killed two so far with one loss.

The Keepstar Score So Far

There are at least two more out there to blow up, including the one in BWF-ZZ.

The coming weekend promises to have a few fights and maybe another Keepstar timer to fight over. The struggle continues.

The Imperium Loses 33 Titans Battling WinterCo and the Server in Atioth

15 Replies

TL;DR – 10K capsuleers in local turn Asher’s cunning plan into a disaster.

Edit: Title changed to 33 titans to reflect addition kill reports showing up.

The Imperium’s attempt to deploy a Keepstar in Atioth was set to be the first real struggle in the conflict between them an WinterCo. The gauntlet had been thrown down. Asher asked if WinterCo was a sleeping dragon or a paper tiger and so it was on yesterday morning.

We did move ops on Friday and through the weekend into Monday morning to get people lined up for this fight and the coming campaign.

Docking up in Atioth on Friday

We had Fortizars in system already, but a Keepstar was necessary to keep the supers and titans safe, giving them a place to dock up and resupply from. The Keepstar had been deployed and was going to come out and start anchoring at just shy of 19:00 UTC.

Three days to come online… from when I arrived on Friday

On our end pings went out over the weekend saying that we would be forming up at 16:00, well in advance of the timer and that WinterCo was also planning to line up in a big way for this.

There were a last few move ops, but come 15:45 UTC the pings went out for fleets, two for our carrier doctrine, and two for smaller support doctrines. Then on capital coms, more pings went out for all the remaining capital ships.

I had already been logged in for an hour at that point. I got up, logged in my client, then got ready for the day. There were 3,350 people in local at 14:10.

That had jumped past 4,000 by 14:49.

At 15:36 I saw the numbers in system pass 5,000, and slowly rose to close to 5,500 as people got in fleets and undocked to get into position. A host of bookmarks had been laid out on the Keepstar grid and we warped off to our assigned positions.

Or fleet bookmark array

By 16:15, when the supers and titans started gating in the number rose to 6,000, which rose to 7,000 by 16:30 as we got ourselves arrayed around the Keepstar.

The might of the Imperium arrayed about the Keepstar

And that was before WinterCo had started to show up. At that point I was wondering if they would bother to show up, remembering the second battle at M2-XFE where PAPI made the mistake of jumping titans into us for the Keepstar timer when we were already there in huge force.

But I was wrong, WinterCo did begin to show up. By 17:20 they were coming in and local was up to 8,500, and another ten minutes got us past the 9,000 mark.

At 18:25, less than ten minutes before the timer was set to finish, I saw local move over the 10K mark.

10K spotted at 18:25

That said, local counts get notoriously unreliable in these situations where the server is straining and people are getting disconnected. People were reporting local counts of nearly +/- 500 users when I saw that. Still though, a lot of capsuleers in system.

As time counted down WinterCo began landing on grid, ready to start the battle.

Fleets landing with three minutes to go

There was an enormous amount of rubber banding, with fleets landing, then suddenly back and landing again. Also, people began to disconnect, with my local count dropping by almost 500 as WinterCo landed on grid. But even ~9,600 people in system and tidi firmly at 10%, it was still pretty amazing that the game was playable at all.

And then the timer hit zero and we started to try and shoot at each other and the whole server took a dump, kicking everybody out.

The dreaded message

There were 38,605 accounts logged into the game… pretty big for a weekday, with about 25% of the game in and around Atioth… and then, splat, suddenly there were only 27,414 according to EVE Offline.

The evening dip visible

The server that Atioth had been hosted on for this battle was down, and remained so for about an hour, giving people trying to get back in a very specific message.

Yeah, you’re in Atioth, you’re screwed

This would have been very much to our advantage had we been able to put the core in the Keepstar to start the final timer. However, we had not gotten the core installed.

After about an hour people were able to log back in. I got in and found that I had lost my fighters, which had been launched and ready for a fight, so I spent 45 minutes getting another set of fighters loaded in the launch tubes and out into space again. Then my client lost connection again and I seemed to be done for the day.

As the post crash fight wore on, we found ourselves in a difficult situation.

Usually in these fights, being there first with the most is the key to success. However, we were now in a situation where people getting disconnected in Atioth could not log back in, but reinforcements that could log in elsewhere in the game were seemingly able to jump into Atioth and join the fight. This started to very much favor WinterCo as they had not initially committed so heavily, while we had put everything on grid right away and now people were reporting sitting at a black screen waiting to get logged in for hours.

We had something of an M2-XFE in reverse… including a dead, unfit ghost titan… with those trying to log back in ending up stuck while those jumping in were getting the kills.

Asher started calling for any alts or anybody not currently committed in Atioth to log in and jump into the fight because that seemed to be the only path to get into the system. Those stuck in the system were hosed.

The Keepstar went down. We were never able to get a core in it. With that done WinterCo saw an opportunity to get some titan kills. Past 01:00 there were still between 6-7K people in system.

Overall, a bad day for the Imperium. Even my meager goal… to actually use my 13 year old carrier in combat and get on a kill mail… fell short. I mean, technically there were kill mails. The first batch of fighters I launched were killed.

My fighter losses

And even those were blown up by our side, with smart bombing capitals and supers doing them in.

Of course, all of this is nothing new. I was writing about this sort of thing back in 2014 when the battle of HED-GP was another server straining exercise. That post links out to a bunch more that would mostly apply to what happened yesterday. And the whole issue wasn’t new back in 2014.

And the responses to the battle over on Reddit are nothing new as well. There is the usual blame cast at players, calls for CCP to break up large player blocs, calls for CCP to make the servers run better, and the rest of the usual suspects that always show up when server problems turn a battle into a fiasco. Oh, and TEST trying to make it all about them.

This has all happened before. It will all happen again. CCP isn’t going to break up blocs or re-introduce scarcity or upgrade their servers. We’re just going to have to be aware of the technical limitations and deal with them… and maybe not pile 10K people into a single system.

But the headline is that the Imperium lost and WinterCo won.

However, the Imperium generally doesn’t get going until they’ve screwed something up. On the move ops there were questions as to who would end up sacrificing a titan to the blood god. Well, we gave up two.

Wait… I am being handed a new report… make that 31 33 titans as early battle reports this morning begin to reveal the magnitude of the setback. [Edit: Alternate graphical report here]

Atioth Battle Report Header

It was two titans down when I went to bed at 4:00 UTC, but the battle carried on to downtime at 11:00 UTC. And the killboard still hasn’t finished resolving. I was in the system again with an alt from 2:30 to 3:45 UTC that got on a half dozen kills, only one of which has registered so far.

Just pulling capital ships and the Keepstar off of the report, here is the tally of losses so far:

Hull	Lost	Cost
Keepstar	1	172.5b
Azariel	2	1.6t
Erebus	8	1.3t
Leviathan	8	1.4t
Avatar	8	1.3t
Ragnarok	7	1.1t
Vendetta	1	132.2b
Hel	3	180.2b
Zirnitra	17	114.3b
Naglfar Fleet	2	8.32b
Revelation Navy	6	31.6b
Moros Navy	4	19.5b
Naglfar	2	9.63b
Archon	5	26.3b
Thanatos	13	64.9b
Nidhoggur	10	46.4b
Apostle	5	32.8b
Minokawa	3	18.4b
Ninazu	1	4.14b

EDIT: Table updated to reflect further kills showing up. Now 33 titans destroyed.

That isn’t all that much when you consider what we had on grid, but we lost it in exchange for a lot of very cheap ships. WinterCo won the objective and had a landslide in the ISK war.

Again, early results. More may show up later.

I do wonder if we’re in Guinness Book World Records territory. Back in October of 2020 at the second battle of FWST-8 a record was set for “8,825 players taking part overall and 6,557 playing concurrently.” We seem to have surpassed that. We shall see.

Now we’ll being doing rescue and extraction operations, probably into the weekend, so the war will slow down for a bit. 31 titans may have died, but there were a lot more on grid that were logged out at downtime or that could never get back in after the first crash.

As usual, the losses were not the frustrating part. You don’t risk assets without the expectation of loss, and losses in a standup fight, or even a trap, you get used to and learn from. It was the fighting the servers for half a day that made people angry. And what did we learn from that?

Well, maybe don’t park all our expensive toys on grid when there are already 5K people in system? That might be a starting point. Expect to see different tactics going forward.

Asher posted a statement after downtime hit and logged everybody off. It was posted to Reddit so I feel okay repeating it here:

Post DT report: We held the line against an incredibly stacked situation. We brought our super and titan fleet in to defend the keep. We had a strong feeling that WC would try to cheese the objective and not look for a fight so we prepared to be there early with more ships to defend against the cheese. We got in with an amazing form and spent 2 hours carefully launching our fighters in waves per fleet, per birth month. WC formed a few HAC fleets and a huge amount of vexors. The system was actually pretty snappy, then WC warped in all their vexor fleets and dropped drones simultaneously and the server crashed.

We relogged but the server was deeply broken on the grid we were in which contained the anchoring keepstar, our staging fort, and the K-I gate. Many ships were black screened with aggro that never dropped and could not be fixed. Personally my carrier got blackscreened and I spent the next 13 hours trying to log back in but was never able to. Many of us had the exact same story. Basically what happened was if you were on that grid and you got DC’d you could never log back in successfully until your ship died. Unfortunately for us many of us were in titans, supers, and caps and many of the other side were in vexors.

We lost half the titan and super fleet to black screens immediately after the system crash never to return. I want to be clear that no amount of relogging, killing the client, warping them, visiting the NES, adding and dropping fleets, or any of the other tricks would bring them under control. During the keep fight we were unable to ever core the keep, but we knew at this point we were in far deeper trouble.

Because the grid was deeply broken if you were able to cyno in or enter the system off the grid you could load fairly normally. However if you came in through the K-I gate which was on the grid you would load the grid just like a disconnected ship with no overview ( https://i.imgur.com/d2oknD5.png ) although others could see you on grid you could not see anything or target any ships or initiate warp.

Because of this the only reinforcements we could bring in had to go through lowsec, around into Geminate, and enter through the D-I gate from WC space. This meant that anything we logged into the system was already on the grid either in space or in the fort and we had no way to log in any reinforcements. At this point we made the call that if we warped off the working half of our titan/super fleet the entire other half would die so we decided to stay in system as a deterrent.

What WC didn’t know was that as you had the normal kind of deep tidi disconnects or server hiccups we kept losing titans who could log back in but could never control their ship again. By the time the enemy attacked us we only had 15 pilots in control of their titans and able to fire guns. Thankfully by bluffing them we delayed them coming in and turkey shooting half the fleet, but if they had come we had essentially no defense. The “faithful fifteen” stayed and shot till the end, helping lower DPS on our unpiloted titans.

Also, Goon hero FC Sir Yohnny took a flycatcher fleet around and through the backdoor of Geminate to be able to actually load in system and his fleet landed the moment Casadorr’s hictor died on top of the WC titan fleet. Yohnny’s fleet was able to hold the enemy titans for another 45 minutes of real time, delaying more DPS from hitting our fleet. Another commendation to Dragonfleet for staying here practically DT to DT and forming huge numbers.

Because of the clever thinking of our leadership team we were able to delay the enemy enough that our losses, while frustrating, are not in any way debilitating and it won’t stop us from pushing forward. I also want to point out that I don’t in any way believe that WC attempted to knock the server offline, I think they had a strategy and they pursued it without malfeasance. Please do not go out publicly and complain about the server weather, you wouldn’t complain to God that he rained on your parade, you would just throw another parade. We got quite unlucky here but that is Eve. Sometimes you get unlucky and you adapt the best that you can, so we praise our enemy for fighting us, this is what we always wanted. We praise our leadership team for making the very best of a bad situation, and we move forward to the next fight. I’ll see you all extremely soon!

So it goes. We’ll be back. [Prediction Rated: Correct]

Massively OP – Thousands of players gathered in EVE Online last night for a keepstar fight
Massively OP – EVE Online’s latest massive corporation war continues to rage
MMORPG.com – Over 10K Players Are Battling Over A Keepstar In EVE Online
Reddit – The Battle of Atioth in Pictures
Reddit – The Battle of Atioth Summary (Panda version)
CCP Forums – Tranquility server node death (Atioth)

The Imperium Marches on Geminate

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For years, the people of EVE have said that your only true advantage was your time zone. They said you could top the MER, but not win a real war. Now we are giving you your chance. We are coming into your space, on your terms, in your strongest hours. Are you a sleeping dragon, or a paper tiger? Show us what you are made of.

-Asher Elias, to the pilots of WinterCo in the SOTG

Imperium leadership had been pinging for most of the week to be ready for a State of the Goonion (SOTG) update on Friday at 20:00 UTC. Everybody was there, straining mumble or watching on Asher’s Twitch channel. People were logged into the game as well.

At the C-J6MT Keepstar During the SOTG

The intent was clear; SOTG events usually mean we’re going to war.

Given our disposition staged in Insmother, our proximity to Geminate and WinterCo space, and the fact that we had been happily sparring with them until they decided to escalate to capitals for every fight, the direction we were going to head was not in doubt.

The question was how far would we be going.

My personal bet was that we would be there to push TEST out of their position next to us, a position they chose to occupy knowing full well we were only a few gates away and that we still hold a grudge.

TEST locations, November to January

However, the target given us was more specific than that:

Our objective is straightforward: we will attempt to destroy their staging Keepstar in Geminate.

One structure. Not too far from home. But the locals know we’re coming and we were told during World War Bee that defense is overpowered. Or that was PAPI’s excuse for not taking 1DQ. And, as will no doubt be repeated over and over, WinterCo times their structures in the Chinese time zone, which means being up awkwardly late or extremely early for most of the Imperium.

Still, nice to have a specific goal.

As happens with SOTGs, move ops commenced once the announcements were over. In anticipation of this I had my carrier and a fax fueled up with some obvious doctrine ships loaded. The forum post indicated a couple of additional ships I should pack, but the upgrade to the carrier and its ability to haul subcaps meant I had room.

My main combat alt, in an Apostle, carried a couple more ships, leaving space for the inevitable ship purchases that will happen at the staging system.

Fleets went up about 30 minutes after the SOTG and we were under way about 30 minutes after that, with Asher’s fleet of capitals undocking first. We were sent to the Ansiblex to jump through, but it took a bit. There were nearly 3,000 characters in local and a move op undock brings tidi with it.

The first capital blob to the Ansiblex

I was a little worried. While I had clicked the jump button en route, my alt caught a bad bounce that sent his Apostle tumbling end over end.

Not the usual Apostle orientation

But the jump had already been logged I guess, because he was yanked through and into the next system despite having gotten pretty far off of the gate.

On the other side of the Ansiblex it was through another gate, then to a Keepstar to wait for the following fleets to catch up.

Aligning to the Keepstar waypoint

There we hung out as other fleets, including supers and titans, made their way to the Keepstar. Then, once everybody was settled and docked up, it was time to start undocking by fleets again to jump to the next point on our trip. That was another Keepstar, where the titans and supers docked up and were done.

The rest of us went on into Geminate, into Atioth, where we have previously destroyed the TEST Keepstar and, more recently, dropped one of our own. Once that comes online the supers and titans will catch up and that will be our staging point.

Three days to come online… closed to two when this post goes live

Until then the capitals and subcaps have a Fortizar to work out of and to cover the Keepstar as it comes online.

Doscking up in Atioth

So that is what is coming up in our corner of null sec. We’re not invading all of WinterCo’s space or trying to evict them. But they wanted to escalated to capitals, so we called their bet by bringing our own out to play.

I am deployed, but there are more move ops to come. Meanwhile, it looks like the first challenge is to make sure that Keepstar comes online.