Map of military development indices in Tribute.

I mentioned in passing in the last article about ratting that some systems are better for it than others. All 0.0 systems in EVE are characterized by “development indices” on three axes: military, industrial, and strategic. The first two indices directly effect how well you can farm in the system. The higher the military index, the more cosmic anomalies will spawn in the system. The higher the industrial index, the more high value mining sites will spawn.

You can’t just pay to upgrade the development indices in your systems, though. You have to actively raise the development level in the system by farming. Each NPC pirate you kill in a system raises its military development level slightly. If you have enough people killing enough pirates, you can level up the quality of that system for that kind of farming. You have to work to keep it up, though — over time, the development level will fade.

There are two big implications of this system. The first is that a 0.0 system can now support many more simultaneous farmers than it used to. If you only have an average of 2-3 people online over the course of the day, they won’t be able to maintain a well developed military system. The development level will decay faster than they can kill rats to increase it. This encourages people to clump up. Better to max out the development level in one system than spread out across a bunch of systems with poor development levels.

There’s a subtle tradeoff here, though. Every system your alliance owns costs quite a bit of ISK: 180M ISK/month just to own it, plus a bunch of other costs to upgrade it. So you don’t want to have a bunch of systems you’re not actively making money from. And since everyone is clumping up in fewer systems now, all those extra systems you own are burning a big hole in your wallet.

The solution? The farming metaphor shows up again: serfdom! With all these expensive (and fertile) fields, it makes a lot of sense for the owners of the space to install serfs. Serfs pay a monthly fee back to the alliance that owns the territory (a fee substantially higher than the upkeep costs for that system) and moves in its own farmers. This makes sense for the serfs because they get a system that they can efficiently farm. It makes sense for the alliance because they don’t have enough pilots of their own to farm the systems effectively. As with feudal serfs, these space-serfs tend to have some similar obligations to their lord. If the area comes under attack, they’re generally expected to take up arms and help with the defense. They tend not to be as large or well organized as the major alliances that own space, but every ship counts. These serf-corporations are usually referred to as “renters” or “pets” (although pets often has a slightly different connotation).

The other big implication is for long-term warfare. Because un-farmed systems lose their development levels, a concerted campaign of disruption and harassment can scare away all the farmers. If this is sustained, the development level of the effected systems will fall, harming the incomes of all the pilots based there. This can be a super effective tactic for smaller groups trying to weaken larger groups without resorting to all-out combat. Star Fraction, a long-lived major alliance announced just such an operation:

Therefore, Operation Black Lustrum, in which the Star Fraction will wage war against the economic and industrial base of our targets. … In particular, the development indices pertaining to military and industrial activity serve as keen and acute indicators of the economic health of a territory and the alliance that administers it.

There’s a longer overview article about how this campaign is progressing that describes a bit more about how this works. So far, it looks like this kind of guerilla warfare is pretty damn effective at decreasing development levels and choking off income streams. The North is thankfully clear of these kinds of tactics so far, but it may just be a matter of time before our farming gets shut down in favor of serious combat.

That’s exactly right private, wars over, we won, turns out you’re the big hero. They’re going to hold a parade in your honor. (Red versus Blue)

It’s probably an open secret now that the Northern Coalition has pulled back from its base in ROIR. Pure Blind has quieted down pretty significantly, and I just finished moving all my stuff back home to Tribute, the reverse of my trip a few weeks ago. I never really got settled there before the hostilities started, so it’s going to be a bit of a change of pace in my EVE-life to learn about how to make ISK in 0.0.

This was my first campaign, so it’s hard to really know if we won. I’m not even sure I know what winning would look or feel like. But at least internally, people are pretty happy with how the campaign went. There’s a lot to learn and practice for our next big fight, but there’s definitely some celebration and relief that we can get back to being the professional carebears everyone thinks we are.

For your amusement, I’ve embedded a bit of NC propaganda footage below. I think the message is pretty clear – don’t screw with people who have 40 titans at their disposal. I’m sure the NC haters (and they are legion) have plenty to say about how this is wishful thinking, but it’s still a pretty mighty thing to behold.

I put together a quick video from what little footage I had of my first big battle. It shows what fleets look like, a little of how they’re organized, and you can hear the fleet commander giving orders.

Been learning to fly Stealth Bombers this weekend. Hoping to get my first real combat kills of this war the sneaky way.

I dawdled for a while, not really realizing that I could just fly to P2-TTL on my own. I was in an interceptor, after all — the one thing my ship was exceptionally good at is getting places quickly.

When I arrived on-grid in P2, the battle was well underway. I had literally never seen this many ships before in my life. I hadn’t really been shot at, outside of a few controlled circumstances. I half expected to die as soon as I arrived. Surely someone’s job in this 300 person enemy fleet was to shoot at me, right? I fired up my microwarp drive and ran very high speed circles around the enemy fleet, relieved to discover that, in fact, no one really cared about me at all.

Getting noticed is actually kind of tricky. With this many people, you don’t actually click on your targets in the world. You spend most of your time staring not at the world itself, but at something called the overview. The overview is just a sortable table. Each row tells you how far away the ship is, what kind of ship it is, who’s flying it, and potentially a bunch of other optional information like velocity, alliance, and corporation.

On top of the overview are filters for different combat situations. For battleships — the fleet ships of the line in situations like this — all you need is a Hostile Battleships view. This scopes your world down to just a list of your counterparts in the enemy fleet. The picture on the left is a support-only view of the battle. Unlike the battleship-only view above, this view is much more sparse. Battleships are clearly eh backbone of any fleet. Battles are won or lost by taking out enemy battleships. The rest of the fleet exists to keep friendly battleships alive, make it hard for the other fleet to target our battleships, and keep wounded enemy battleships from retreating to safety.

That last bit was my job. I was was flying an Interceptor. Faster than any other ship on the field, I watched for retreating enemy ships and jumped on them with a warp disrupter. That way when their armor started to wear down, they couldn’t start their warp drives. When our battleship fleet wore them all the way down, I would bounce to the next target. If I attracted enemy attention, I would burn hard away from the enemy fleet until their target locks broke and they shifted their attention elsewhere. When I’m actively tackling someone, it looks like this – my “locked” target is in the upper top part of my screen, with two icons just to the right of it showing that I’m using my missile launchers and warp disrupter on the target. On the bottom, you can also see my micro-warp-drive is on, and my current speed is nearly 5k/s.

The most striking thing about this kind of combat is how abstract and slow it is. There are no formations, just amorphous blobs of purple (my fleet), blue (friendly fleet), and red (enemy). These blobs drift slowly through space, with dots occasionally warping off and warping back, trying to avoid death by breaking enemy target locks on them. There are no football-style plays; no delicate formations, daring gambits, or flanking maneuvers here.

Instead of calling plays, all we get are names of enemy targets. The Fleet Commander calls out the name and ship type of our target, focusing all our battleships’ fire on one enemy ship until it buckles under our attention. The support ships flit around the edges, doing our jobs independently, hoping not to attract any attention while we carry out specific side missions.

It’s all quite lonely. I swap between a list of enemy battleships and enemy support ships fading away all the friendly ships until my screen is just angry red. I haven’t the faintest idea if we’re winning or losing, all I know is that there’s a lot of red and no one’s shooting at me.

Until, all of a sudden, I die. It happened fast and out of nowhere, and I was knocked out of the fight. If I was really dedicated, I would have slow-boated back to Tribute in my pod and jumped in another ship and made my way back to the fight. But it was late, and I’d spent 3 hours in fleet already. This, in the end, is probably what decides fights more than how fancy your ships are: who has work in the morning and needs to get to bed.

Last night, death was a shrapnel bomb.

I wasn’t even worried when it hit. We had just warped out to regroup before going back in, and a stealth bomber that I didn’t even see dropped a bomb on us. That kind of thing isn’t a big problem for larger ships, but I was flying an Interceptor. The bomb one-shotted me, and that was the end of my night. I was able to help tackle a couple battleships and a heavy interdictor, though. I’d had some scarier moments earlier, but escaped mostly unscathed until the bomb hit.

These kill-board read-outs are kind of confusing, but I’ll dissect them in the near future. When you kill someone, you basically get an email with details of the ship you killed, and a list of everyone who dealt damage to the target. There’s a lot to learn from these, but it’s a longer story than I can tell here.

The Alliance forums are already buzzing about this. There were some tricky details about how this fight was organized (this is the 1000AU / safe spot stuff people are talking about) that in reading the post-battle analysis I’m starting to understand. It looks like in the end our side lost and the tower we were defending went down. From the perspective of the poster, I’m part of the Northern Coalition (NC), the nominal bad guys. It’s all relative, though. Since TRI held the field, they went to the forums to gloat and claim good-guy status. There might be a reprise of the fight tonight, though, as the station in the system comes out of reinforced. Not even sure what that means yet, just hearing some chatter about how it’s not over yet and we might be going back in.

Much more to say about this epic engagement in the days to come. I’ve got lots of screenshots and some footage that I can hopefully get processed and posted this weekend.