We covered World War Bee heavily at the time, following its political twists and decisive battles as The Imperium was forcibly evicted from its home regions in the north. The coalition vowed revenge, annexed space in the south of the map, and began farming hard to rebuild its supercapital fleets in preparation for the day when they would take the fight back to the enemy. That day may have finally arrived, but are both sides afraid to commit?
The revenge war that never was
Last August it looked like that revenge was at hand when The Imperium moved 1,000 capital ships across the map to the north of New Eden overnight and teamed up with massive TEST alliance forces. After several unsuccessful attempts to establish a beachhead in enemy space and a lot of ISK in ships destroyed, the war eventually lost a lot of momentum. The Imperium declared its strategic objectives met and went home to the south, where it continued to farm and rebuild its supercapital fleet to massive proportions.
That leads us to today, when a seemingly routine border skirmish has reportedly caused The Imperium and its ancient rivals to lock horns again. Having now rebuilt its supercapital fleet to massive proportions, The Imperium is poised to commit so many resources to this battle that player progodlegend estimates a fully escalated battle could result in over $1,000,000 US equivalent in destruction. There’s a catch, though — For the battle to reach this scale will require that both sides decide to commit their full force to the war effort, and that’s a tall ask.
Escalation point and the reluctance to fight
Territorial battles in EVE normally start out at reasonable scales and escalate as each side commits more expensive capital and supercapital ships to maintain superiority on the field and win whatever objective is being fought over. At the scale of thousands of pilots, the decision to escalate is made by fleet commanders and each battle is as much a game of poker as space-chess. In his reddit thread on the war, progodlegend suggests that leaders on both sides of this conflict are abject cowards, that they will refuse to fight and then blame the game mechanics for making escalation unfavourable.
“They will then each make up a bunch of excuses, declare the other side as ‘cowardly’ for not directly charging into their defensive position, and tell everyone to log off from the game” – progodlegend
EVE historian Andrew Groen agreed that “There’s a lot of worry that the opposing fleet commanders may be too timid to commit, because the risk/cost is so high” but highlighted that “the community is goading them into it.” Keep your eyes peeled because the next big story coming out of EVE Online may very well be about a million dollars’ worth of ships going up in smoke.
Who’s Negan?
Dear Imperium: Your name is boring and you should feel bad.
All this needs is a corp leader fucking off with all his corp’s ISK to be the Most EVE Story Ever.
Eve is a Game of Thrones simulator. It has the long history where players and empires are established. Leaders rise and fall, as do their empires. The appeal of this game is how long it has been around combined with the ever present “meta-game” that surrounds it.
If you’re going to put on your war-reporter’s hat again, Brendan, you might need an appropriate graphic to inspire you. Here’s something vintage from WW2 to inspire your inner Space Edward R. Murrow. Cheers!
Excellent inspiration! Unfortunately I won’t be skulking around nullsec to get a first-hand look at this battle as it unfolds as my father just passed away. I had some downtime today at his wake and wrote this story up from secondary sources, so I couldn’t do much research on the immediate build up to and trigger for this battle and I can’t guarantee I’ll be following it as closely as usual.
Condolences.
My father passed away last year, at this same time of month.
o7
Ouch, sorry to hear that
So sorry to hear this happened, Brendan. My genuine condolences to you.
If only the actual in game gameplay was as interesting as EVE’s overall meta-game situations.
Small-scale fights can be pretty fun, TBH.
But, yeah, the giant headline-grabbing “wars” like this one where a single weapon cycle takes ten minutes of real time? Those do not sound like much fun.
My phone is even now buzzing with Jabber pings about Imperium fleets forming up. They will be jumping in to hit the Keepstar without a doubt. And as we saw on the December Monthly Economic Report, production in Delve is huge, so the Imperium would likely be happy to simply trade titans with the coalition of the north, being better set to replace them.
I give it 50/50 that Pandemic Horde, which is currently pinging “everybody just have fun” morale messages, decides to punt or just put in sub caps looking for opportunistic kills. They will then fall back on the traditional responses of “made you form” and “didn’t want that Keepstar anyway” on Reddit.
If they do punt it does seem likely that the Imperium will then simply push to PH’s Keepstar in Fade to see if they will defend that.
My favorite game to read about.
Completely agree. I didn’t enjoy the game personally but I do enjoy reading about it.