“The RUS/CFC fleets either forgot the lessons of old or were simply overcome by greed. On the brink of Supercapital Armageddon, all hell broke loose.”
–Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion
THE CLUSTERFUCK EMPIRE NOW mirrored eerily the dominion of the former Band of Brothers at its peak save for the fact it was a bit larger and more stable. From the far north in the Tenal region to the newly conquered deep south of Period Basis, the territories controlled by the ClusterFuck in 2013 were almost exactly those owned by Band of Brothers at its brief apex in 2008.
For only the third time in New Eden’s history, half the nullsec territories were controlled by a single organization of players united under a single ruler. Many of the denizens of EVE jeered that the leaders of the ClusterFuck—Goonswarm Federation—had completed a sort of despotic life cycle, beginning as a rebellious force fighting the entrenched powers, only to become a mirror of those very entrenched powers once that same power was in their hands.
“One cannot help but feel that the [Goonswarm Federation] has evolved from its roots by quite a bit,” wrote Seraph IX Basarab, who often wrote from a virulently anti-CFC perspective. “From their days of throwing swarms of Rifters at the “evil” BoB Empire, hanging out with Red Alliance and being a goofy every-man’s alliance, they have become quite arguably, THE most powerful entity within EVE. […] Where once they swarmed around the tall walls that BoB had put up, mocking them for their decadence of rental programs and elitism, the GSF now find themselves within their own walls, with their own decadent rental program and it seems also engaging in their own level of elitism within the CFC. Those, it seems, that aspire to have an identity outside of the specific GSF mindset are deemed ‘heretics, mutants, and unclean.’”
One TEST Alliance pilot sneered on the forums, “The Mittani had completed his transformation into SirMolle, a Jabba the Hut of idiotic proportions.”
THE COUNT OF MITTANI CRISTO
As the fires of the Fountain War were being stamped out, the stage was already being set for the next set of engagements which would consume nullsec. The rapidity was no coincidence. Many had seen the Fountain War as a sort of proxy war against the loosely aligned force of NCdot, Nulli Secunda (the core of N3,) and Pandemic Legion.
Even now the next stage of that war had begun through a sequence of events that started small and escalated. The mercenary group Black Legion’s sister organization—Confederation of xXPIZZAXx—was employed by the CFC to hit some shipyards in the southeast that it had learned were building NCdot’s future supercapitals. When NCdot fought off the attack, xXPIZZAXx called up Black Legion to add its formidable capital fleet to the assault. Things soon spiralled even further, as N3/PL arrived to aid the defense and Black Legion had to call in the CFC supercapital fleet to critical engagements.
One night, Pandemic Legion fleet commander Makalu Zarya left a Titan out of position as bait. When Black Legion attempted to destroy it, the trap was triggered and escalated wildly leading to a brawl between thousands. As October 2013 came to a close, it was already becoming clear that a new bloc-level war would soon begin. By now few were even surprised, as it was clear that in some respects EVE was in the midst of a forever war. The individuals that made up these alliances could not be destroyed, and neither could their very real animosity for one another which was compounding through the years.
What few knew at the time was that the ClusterFuck Coalition was beginning to fray. What’s more, the CFC’s Stainwagon allies in the south were embroiled in near constant in-fighting and on the brink of collapse. Meanwhile, the coalition’s relationship with its Black Legion mercenaries was fraught with distrust; Lucia Denniard of Confederation of xXPIZZAXx said The Mittani and Sion Kumitomo repeatedly made accusations that Lucia and frequent collaborator Elo Knight of Black Legion were secretly plotting against the CFC, even as they worked with them. It was an accusation Lucia Denniard acknowledged and denied in the same breath.
“People knew I had a large spy network which made them distrust me and see ghosts everywhere especially when I was teamed up with Elo [Knight] who occasionally backstabs allies openly because it’s more fun,” Lucia Denniard told me.
The CFC gathered its shaky allies for a follow-up invasion to capitalize on its success in the Fountain War. It was anyone’s guess whose rickety coalition would survive the coming contest. With TEST out of the picture for now, the CFC’s geopolitical adversaries were now outgunned and outnumbered, and yet they had faith in what they believed was a superior understanding of the game and superior amount of skillpoints (since their pilots had generally been subscribed to the game longer. Those two factors combined allowed them to field entire fleets of Slowcat carriers, which nearly drove the CFC to madness.
The CFC had one clear advantage, however. The alliances of the ClusterFuck Coalition owned a majority of all the Titans in New Eden. While CCP Games had originally envisioned only a few dozen ever being constructed over EVE’s entire lifespan, there now existed a stockpile of approximately 1500 across all of EVE’s alliances. New Eden’s engineers were pumping out new Titans at a rate of 60-80 new ships every quarter; ten times faster than they were being destroyed. If an all-out battle was to break out, the N3/PL forces would have to destroy three CFC Titans for every two they lost—a tricky proposition when you’re outnumbered and overpowered from the outset. And to make matters worse, the odds were getting more severe all the time, because the CFC owned more profitable territory. The only way to survive was for N3/PL fleet commanders to develop new strategies that allowed them to fight outnumbered.
Nearing the conclusion of 2013, the question that hung over nullsec was whether the CFC would eventually fall apart, or would The Mittani be able to find a way to strike a killing blow against his only serious coalition-level opposition bloc. Would he become the emperor of EVE? Or would he be beheaded by the very same Sword of Damocles he had warned SirMolle about six years before?
ALL HALLOWS’ EVE
“In the first week of the war, [the CFC] attacked our home constellation,” said Nulli Secunda’s ProGodLegend. “They tried the headshot. They got really close once, and we stopped them. They got really close a second time, and we stopped them again. At that point they said ‘OK this isn’t going to work, and they went for a longer war of attrition. So after that first week they stopped assaulting Nulli’s home constellation. And Goons started bringing more and more ships down, and telling their members to take the war in the south more seriously.”
With the two predominant coalitions in a state of war, the other alliances of the star cluster were forced to pick sides. The arrangements were complicated: Solar Fleet and RUS sided with the ClusterFuck Coalition, while what was left of Legion of xXDEATHXx sided with N3/PL out of hatred for Solar Fleet. However, the ClusterFuck Coalition and Legion of xXDEATHXx had managed to stay on relatively friendly terms, and they agreed to a non-aggression pact privately between themselves, with xXDEATHXx reserving its fire for Solar and RUS.
While the alliances of the star cluster picked sides, the ClusterFuck Coalition launched a campaign that it called the Halloween War—so named simply because it was close to Oct 31—which was framed as a punitive campaign against N3 for its role in the Fountain War.
In a CEO update, The Mittani fanned the flames of animosity, writing about N3’s use of “laughable mechanics” and announcing the beginning of hostilities on what he sometimes called “the Ostfront,” which means “Eastern Front” in German and was the name Nazi Germany used to describe the war with the USSR during World War II. It was not the Goons first overt reference to Nazism. The very name of the corporation he was CEO of was “GoonWaffe,” a reference to the Nazi air force. In the following quote, The Mittani will also evoke the imagery of “putting our jackboots to their throats.” In 2013 these references often flew under the radar, discarded as shock humor. In more modern times, they require closer examination. A sociological study of Goonswarm’s posting history is beyond the scope of this book, but a few details help provide some context.
Goon leaders and others throughout EVE’s history have often invoked macabre historical imagery to paint their in-game proclamations in the aesthetic of totalitarianism. Because they are rulers of a cold, dark, and harsh universe they make callbacks to the darkness in our own shared history. At the height of the Great War, Darius JOHNSON referenced the conquistador Hernan Cortez who committed genocide against the Aztec people. The capital station of Goonswarm was named “Mittanigrad,” casting his name in parallel with Stalin’s. Many alliances repurposed Nazi and Soviet propaganda, and some of the darker memes even referenced modern terrorism. But to many Goons this is all just a silly game, a “sci-fi themed masquerade ball” as The Mittani would later describe it. The Mittani himself, for instance, has expressed progressive personal political views in my interviews with him and on social media. He occasionally even mocks real world dictators who are doing an amateur job at despotism and points out when they are abusing his favorite tactics.
I can say that the references make me personally uncomfortable, but I think the Goons would probably think that was pretty great. Mission accomplished, they would likely say. That is what drew them together in the first place: a belief that their tolerance of risqué and lurid content made them an ideological tribe. That said, it’s easy to see how risqué Nazi references can attract and give cover to actual Nazis. Which is a very real problem in EVE Online.
While it may not necessarily indicate a fondness for fascism in the real world it most certainly reflects a fondness for authoritarianism in the digital world. In the following speech The Mittani utilized one of the dictator’s sharpest tools: victimization.
“They come for us in Syndicate, they come for us in the Great War, they come for us in VFK, they come for us in Fountain, and now they act horrified and surprised when we show up in the East and start putting our jackboots to their throats. They actually have the audacity to be surprised that we would come for them, hungering to inflict the vengeance they so dearly deserve.
Northern Coalitiondot is literally a mishmash of Band of Brothers and Raiden, minus Reikoku—which is sharing fleets with them regularly. Nulli Secunda is no BoB, but they made their bed when they loudly declared in the Fountain War that their entire N3 coalition exists to try to destroy the CFC—our destruction is their raison d’etre. Never forget this. [Editor: This is largely true. He seems to be referring to an alliance update written by ProGodLegend of Nulli Secunda during the Fountain War in which he used the phrase “raison d’etre” and said that the current war is the coalition’s reason for being. However since it was a defensive war it’s not clear from context whether he meant the CFC’s ‘destruction’ as The Mittani alleges.]
[…] They yet again have another pathetic, indefensible and shameful gameplay mechanic in their hands which they will use to try to destroy our people, just as they always have [editor: he’s referring to the Slowcat carrier.] That is what they do: find some bullshit mechanic, abuse the hell out of it, all the while defending it vehemently and simultaneously trying to annihilate us.
[…] Our ancient enemies have found themselves another superweapon [editor: we’ll talk about this soon] and so we’re going to overreact on an absolutely colossal scale and smash them—and all their friends—into dust and tears. We will smash them in Immensea, and put a stop to their dreams of our ruin before they get out of hand. Once we have the largest fleet of Dreadnoughts the game has ever seen, we can give the entitled shitlord demographic the finger and have a round of carefree hijinks elsewhere.
Until then, it’s war.”
–The Mittani, Goonswarm Federation, Clusterfuck Coalition
Dec 15, 2013
The opening month of the war featured frenetic fighting between two blocs that by this point genuinely hated one another. Conflict after conflict over the years had embittered many of their members against each other. The beef was sometimes personal. In particular, one source told me about an escalating series of conflicts between Manfred Sideous and a CFC counter-intelligence agent who gained a reputation for taking things too far.
“Goons found Manny’s Titan spy, and killed the Titan,” that source said. A “Titan spy” would refer to a spy that was so valuable it flew a Titan in the enemy supercapital fleet so it could follow its movements. “They called a Titan operation, and then they said on comms, ‘Manny we know who your spy is,’ and then they killed the Titan.”
The grudge escalated even further, however, and Manfred Sideous was doxxed [publishing of a person’s personal information on the open internet.]
“Manny had a grudge against Goons that Shadoo did not,” the source said. “Shadoo had worked with Goons many times. But Manny did not like Goons, and he still doesn’t like Goons to this day.”
That source also claimed to have been doxxed by the same CFC spy. “He crossed the line quite a few times. And it ended up pissing a lot of people off. He crossed the line with me once when he burned my spy. Just to give you an idea of how this plays out. One time I had a spy in a Goon fleet. [But they] had my IP number and I wasn’t using a VPN. So he found out who my spy was just by comparing the IP numbers. Instead of just kicking my spy—and this was a full Goon fleet, so there’s 250 people on comms, I don’t know any of these people, they’re all internet strangers—instead of kicking my spy and saying gg, he goes on comms and says, ‘[Source’s full name and address] and whose ISP is Cox Communications, we found your spy, bro.’ It happened a lot. He doxxed a lot of people. The worst was Manny. No one got doxxed worse than Manny. Manny held that grudge for a long time.”
The Halloween War would go on for about three months, and while much of it included frenetic fighting between the two blocs, it was only the last three battles of the war that truly mattered. Of those three, two were so climactic that all the maneuvering and positioning and politicking before hardly amounted to much.
The first battle will fizzle out without much incident. The second will herald imminent doom for The Mittani and the ClusterFuck Coalition. The third—which we’ll see in the next chapter—will end this story.
F4R2-Q
Just after the new year, Against ALL Authorities’ home system was attacked in a simple harassment operation that cascaded into a major problem. Morale was in the pits inside the alliance, and its own leader was discovered berating the membership for low activity in a forum leak posted on EVENews24.
“Fleets are called, pings are sent, not one fuck was given,” wrote the leader of Against ALL Authorities. “Alliance has the same trolls talking that never [get into] fleet. And the rest? Silence. Not a peep. Not a word not a fuck given. […] Our participation hasn’t gotten better, it is worse. Excuses seem to be the Fleet Doctrine of today’s [Against ALL Authorities.]”
With membership activity and morale at a new low, Against ALL Authorities accidentally forgot to repair its home starbase and let it fall into its final reinforce cycle. In other words, the home system of the RUS coalition was suddenly vulnerable to conquest. In order to protect their southern RUS ally and keep it from falling apart, the CFC responded with a massive force to safeguard its ally’s capital station until server downtime.
“[Against ALL Authorities‘] bacon was saved by their allies who proceeded to put a combined 2500 man [capital and subcapital] fleet into F4R2-Q to guard the system from downtime—about eight hours. PL/N3 were simply astonished by this showing and couldn’t fight; catastrophe averted for the ever downtrodden [Against ALL Authorities],” wrote Pandemic Legion’s Elise Randolph afterward.
Pandemic Legion Southern Commander and former AAA leader Manfred Sideous was disappointed. This was a golden opportunity to gain back some ground in the war, and it slipped through his fingers only because of an utterly miraculous turnout from the CFC membership. However, Sideous resolved to use this information as best he could. Now he knew it was possible to engineer a situation that forced the ClusterFuck combined fleet to fight. So he set to work trying to recreate the circumstances that led to the CFC Sky Command deploying 2500 pilots to Against ALL Authorities’ capital. Only this time he’d be ready to exact his revenge upon the Goons.
Sideous selected a system called HED-GP in the region of Catch to set a trap. There he planned to force the CFC fleet into the open and unveil his newest fleet strategy, the superweapon The Mittani plainly feared: the Wrecking Ball.
HED-GP
The system HED-GP was chosen because it has an extreme lack of moons. That star system has only six moons where players can anchor starbases. Sidious slowly took over all six of the moons in the system while leaving it nominally controlled by Against ALL Authorities to avoid raising any alarms. Once all six of the moons were under Pandemic Legion control, then Manfred Sidious led a fleet to HED-GP to attack the system’s iHub and bombarded it into its reinforced invulnerable state.
CFC and RUS weren’t too concerned about this yet. After all, they could simply anchor a cynosural field jammer in the system and then N3/PL would be unable to bridge in its capital fleet. Without the capital ships, the N3/PL forces would have to fight using only small subcapital ships, which would give the far more numerous CFC/RUS fleet a massive advantage. But when Against ALL Authorities arrived in HED-GP and tried to anchor the cynosural field jammer, they quickly discovered that there were no starbases around any of the star system’s moons to anchor it on.
It quickly began to dawn on RUS leaders that Manfred Sideous had been planning this for weeks and that HED-GP was going to be the site of a major attack. On the up side, they were abundantly confident coming out of the non-battle at F4R2-Q, and felt this was an opportunity to shut down N3/PL once and for all. CFC/RUS wasn’t planning on just holding the defense this time. They wanted to make Manfred Sideous pay for this. Against ALL Authorities contracted Elo Knight, and Black Legion’s imposing 200-ship Dreadnought fleet—the largest such third party force still operating in nullsec—was put on standby in preparation for a major engagement.
“The gauntlet was thrown; HED-GP could only be saved with a similar capital and supercapital showing from RUS/CFC,” wrote Pandemic Legion’s Elise Randolph. “As happens ever so rarely in EVE Online, the stars aligned and a truly awesome [capital ship fight] was on the horizon.”
Both sides had days to prepare for the battle at HED-GP, and the forces that arrived for the battle were some of the largest that had ever come to a single fight. The CFC arrived with its historic Dreadnought fleet, 700 strong, flanked by fleets of logistics ships and DPS [damage-per-second] battleships.
Manfred Sidious arrived in HED-GP at the head of “500 Archons, 100 Dreads, 170 Supercarriers, and 70 pivotal Titans” which Elise Randolph speculated was likely the most imposing force ever assembled by N3/PL at this point in its history. This was Manfred Sideous’ first opportunity to test the Wrecking Ball strategy, a fleet concept which he hoped would save his whole coalition.
The Wrecking Ball was a complete oddity in EVE Online fleet strategy, and it relied on previously unheard of coordination. Most fleet concepts in this era of EVE revolved around maximizing the amount of damage a fleet could do in sharp bursts to destroy ships in one shot. These fleets were generally giant balls of ships that either fired in unison to destroy enemies in one volley or used drones which essentially did the same thing.
The Wrecking Ball was the opposite. It revolved around making ships invulnerable. Manfred Sidious used a sphere formation of hundreds of carrier ships to essentially create a bubble of friendly ships. Five hundred Archon-class carriers and 170 Supercarriers formed the thin surface of the bubble. Inside this bubble of slowly orbiting carriers is where he would position his Titan and supercapital forces.
The reason for this has to do with a quirk of how ships collide in space in EVE Online. Titans are extremely large ships, and CCP never thought there would be so many of them occupying the same space at the same time. When a group of Titans warps in on a single location all at once, they take up so much space that many times a few Titans will smash into each other and the janky video game collision will cause them to be bumped out of the formation and shot away into space. Slingshotted far away from the rest of the fleet these ships are easy prey. This was one of the primary ways that Titans wound up getting killed in fleet engagements: becoming separated from the healing carriers.
The 670 carriers and supercarriers literally surrounded the Titan fleet with a bubble of friendly ships, so if the Titan bounced out of the center of the fleet, it would collide with a carrier and the carrier would be shot off into space instead—a far less expensive loss.
The N3/PL Titans could fire their Doomsdays from the safety of the center of the Wrecking Ball sphere, secure in the knowledge that if the CFC/RUS fleet focused fire on one of them, the carriers on the perimeter would offer swift repairs. At the head of the force was Sala Cameron’s Ragnarok-class Titan fitted with expensive components to draw the enemy fleet commander’s fire, but also fully decked out with maximum armor and resistances to withstand as many Doomsday blasts as possible. Each of the 70 Wrecking Ball Titans was paired with a partner, and when the battle commenced they would work in teams to one-shot CFC/RUS Dreadnoughts. It was the most expensive race in EVE Online history.
The Wrecking Ball was the most expensive fleet ever built in EVE at the time, and only an ultra-wealthy group of older players like N3/PL could actually afford to field one, let alone pull off the logistics necessary to make it actually work. Anyone who has done a five-person dungeon in World of Warcraft knows how hard it is to get just 5 people to cooperate effectively. The Wrecking Ball fleet was an operation of incredible complexity that relied on the cooperation of literally hundreds of individuals to precisely position their ships and follow orders.
This was the marvel of fleet engineering that CFC/RUS hoped to kill. The CFC hated Slowcat carriers. It grew to loathe the Slowcat during the Fountain War, and so for the Halloween War The Mittani prepared an unstoppable force to break the immovable object that was the Wrecking Ball. In reference to one of the CFC’s first fleet doctrines “Alphafleet,” the new fleet style would be called “Omegafleet.”
“We are going to smash our enemy’s precious golden toys and rub their faces in shit,” The Mittani wrote in an alliance update on December 15, 2013. “Here’s how.”
The CFC’s “Omegafleet” was much simpler than the Wrecking Ball. It was a huge fist of Dreadnoughts, as many as could be found.
The CFC’s Lazarus Telraven rose to meet the Wrecking Ball in HED-GP. He would put it to the test with an unprecedented 700 Naglfar-class dreadnoughts, capable of nearly one-shotting a Titan with their combined power every weapon cycle. Their mission here was to clear the Slowcats off the field, and pop the bubble of carriers that protected the Titans. It took the firepower of about 70 Dreadnoughts to one-shot a Slowcat before repairs kicked in from the other Slowcats. The open question was whether 700 Dreadnoughts could clear 70 Titans supported by 670 carriers, before those Titans cleared a critical mass of the Dreadnoughts.
Three hours prior to the battle, Manfred Sideous ordered his fleet into HED-GP, and the Wrecking Ball began to take shape. A cynosural field was lit, grew into its distinctive ball lightning, and from it emerged the 170 Supercarriers and 500 Slowcat carriers. The carriers began their slow process of moving into orbit around the cynosural field, eventually evening out to form a thin spherical layer a few dozen kilometers in diameter.
In flashes of bright pink light, dozens of Titans emerged through the cynosural field in staggered numbers. In the chaos, a few of the Titans collided with each other and bounced away from the center of the fleet, but collided with the bubble wall of carriers and bounced safely back toward the center of the formation.
The Wrecking Ball was working and the fleet was ready. Now Manfred Sidious would wait for Lazarus Telraven to make his move.
NODE STABLE
“Surprisingly, RUS/CFC were chomping at the bit for this fight,” wrote PL’s Elise Randolph, describing how the enemy fleet was specifically equipped to dismantle a Wrecking Ball. “All 700 Dreads were Doomsday tanked with a close-range fit—the most downright punishing Dread fleet assembled in recent memory. This was augmented further with ~30 Titans and ~150 Supercarriers. Capable, for sure, of putting the PL/N3 Wrecking Ball fleet to the fire.”
“These types of Capital slugfests are the unicorns of EVE PvP combat—a Fleet Commander’s dream. Killing an N3/PL Wrecking Ball fleet would show once and for all that the Kings of Supercapital Combat were in fact mortal. On top of that, a punishing loss would simply cripple N3/PL for a non-insignificant amount of time before the ships could be replaced.”
During previous wars there was rarely a single battle which could drastically hurt the finances of a coalition. Even in the Northern Coalition’s war with the Drone Region Federation, when dozens of Titans were destroyed across several battles, the losses were still usually recouped. But now these coalitions were truly beginning to play with fleet concepts that were so valuable and powerful that they couldn’t just be replaced. A winning strategy in this battle could very well determine the course of the game’s history. Lazarus Telraven had a simple plan for how to defeat the Wrecking Ball. He was going to warp all 700 of his Dreadnoughts directly into it.
“The RUS/CFC fleet had the numbers,” wrote Elise Randolph. “Their plan was simple—come into system with subcaps and cyno their close-range Dreadnoughts into the PL/N3 Wrecking Ball and then unleash havoc in what would be the largest and bloodiest capital ship fight EVE had ever seen. A crude plan, perhaps, but no doubt effective. All that was left to do was execute.”
The only issue was that a big part of the CFC/RUS subcapital fleet was already in the system, and so was the N3/PL Wrecking Ball fleet. CFC/RUS were not ignorant of EVE’s history, and knew that it was a risky game to jump 700 capital ships into a system that already has nearly 3000 people in it.
“The RUS/CFC fleets either forgot the lessons of old or were simply overcome by greed and took the daring approach to cyno all of their Dreads on grid,” wrote Elise Randolph. “Not only on grid, but actually inside the PL/N3 bubbles. Brazen. The call was made, the cynos deployed, and the Dreads began to jump.
“On the brink of Supercapital Armageddon, all hell broke loose.”
WRECKING BALL
At 16:45 GMT on January 18, 2014 Lazarus Telraven emerged from a cynosural field at the head of 700 Dreadnoughts specially tanked to survive Doomsday blasts and equipped with close range guns to take down the Wrecking Ball. On all sides the fleets were surrounded by the familiar blue hue of warp disruption fields, which wobbled like colossal soap bubbles and coursed with thin veins of electricity. Seventy huge Titans—each kilometers long—loomed nearby, while beyond circled the mass of carriers that formed the capital ship shell of the Wrecking Ball. The fleets were committed now, and there was no escape. Pandemic Legion fleet commander and frequent scribe of battles Elise Randolph wrote in the aftermath of the battle:
“PL/N3 command channel lit up; ‘what the fuck did they just do?! They’re cynoing into our bubbles with their subcap fleet on grid?!’ The shock and awe would have to take a backseat, though, and PL/N3 quickly went to work breaking the fleet down into 5 distinct cores each shooting their own target. If they were to win they absolutely had to clear Dreads at a frenetic pace. This would be the only play PL/N3 had: clearing DPS before losing all of their [repairing] power. The PL/N3 pings went wild: ‘Fight is on, when you die [self-destruct your pod to resurrect at the resupply at] Amamake and come back in a new Dread—cyno chains up.’ Fast reshipping was the best hope to clear damage, and the cache of Dreads and carriers was ready to be depleted. Organized chaos from N3/PL saw reports that [we] were cutting through the RUS/CFC Dreads with ease—the [Doomsday] tanks weren’t effective and Titans—which were split into pairs—were able to single-shot Dreads.
Hearkening back to the old days, strange things began to happen. The RUS/CFC Dreads would simply vanish after taking damage. Others would remain invulnerable. The [RUS Dreadnoughts were] visually stuck in a warp-tunnel from [the RUS pilot’s] perspective, and were materializing in HED-GP and then being magically transported back to where they came in F4R2-Q. The node creaked to a halt, 25 minute module lag from the PL/N3 perspective [editor’s note: “module lag” is the amount of time it takes in extreme lag for a player to give their ship a command and for the server to execute that command in the game world.] Drone assign simply broke. Credit to CCP on a day where most will blame them, the node did stay functional in the face of 4000 people on grid. The RUS/CFC Dreads were showing up in clumps of 100, vanishing again before dying. After about an hour of this confusion (six minutes of elapsed [in-game] time), all of the RUS/CFC Dreads began to materialize in earnest. The 25 minute module lag however, meant that the relatively uncoordinated Dread fire was relegated to easily tankable splitfire.
The only thing doing significant damage was the Titan Doomsdays—after all 25 minute module lag is irrelevant with hour-long cooldowns. Jumping onto a grid with 2700 people, of which 1800 are yours, is a rookie move by all accounts. It is what saw Pandemic Legion lose the then-largest capital fight in Y-2ANO some five years ago—a fight that the CFC were involved in. The same type of fight that RUS experienced fighting the Northern Coalition in Uemon and O20-2X some three years ago.
So a completely abysmal execution changed what was a decent chance at killing a Wrecking Ball fleet into an utter turkey shoot. RUS, dejected by this catastrophic failure, completely gave up on calling [targets.] The CFC, equally frustrated at the failed execution, at least tried to make the best of the situation and killed [warp disruption bubbles] allowing them to extract the bulk of their Dreads. Meanwhile the Black Legion component, the ~surprise~ 200 dreads, simply opted to go home instead of showing up to the fight.
Some three-hundred and fifty RUS/CFC dreads died between HED-GP and various other systems they panic-jumped to. In return for this hefty price, a mere ~10 N3/PL [capital ship losses.] […] The old school strategy devised by Manny, Vince [Draken], and the rest of the N3/PL Fleet Commanders paid dividends albeit in a very anti-climatic and drawn-out way. At the end of the day the largest Wrecking Ball fleet ever assembled was able to execute perfectly and completely and utterly devastate the CFC/RUS Dread fleet, proving once again that N3 and PL use capitals better than anyone else.
In the current EVE climate a 350 Dread loss is not coalition-breaking by any means—the fighting will continue and the south will be ablaze with action. […] The fighting is far from over, though it will be months before we see a capital fight of this scale again.
–Elise Randolph, Pandemic Legion
January 18, 2014
The shaky CFC/RUS coalition quaked as the CFC cast blame and vilified Black Legion for staying out of the fight, saying it was more evidence that Elo Knight was a treacherous mercenary.
Meanwhile, confidence swelled among the N3/PL fleet commanders, who saw this as vindication at long last that the ClusterFuck Coalition was EVE’s aging, decrepit empire and they were its true superpower.
However, the reality check would come in just seven days.
B-R5RB
Throughout the Halloween War, N3/PL had been staging out of a station in the star system B-R5RB in the region of Immensea. Nulli Secunda were the owners of this critical offensive base, but the campaign commander of the combined N3/PL forces at the time was Pandemic Legion fleet commander, Manfred Sideous. This meant that Manfred Sideous had to get permission from someone in N3’s Nulli Secunda whenever he needed to use the system’s infrastructure. In particular, there’s a critical piece of infrastructure in nullsec called a “cyno jammer” which makes it impossible to deploy cynosural fields in a system. Since cynosural fields are the only way to get capital ships into a system, this is an essential tool for defending space. The cyno jammer needed to be active during Russian prime time to keep the system safe from an onslaught, but Manfred Sideous also needed to be able to deactivate the jammer so he could warp his own fleets in and through B-R5RB to successfully coordinate the defense. Since the system was owned by Nulli Secunda, Manfred Sideous had to ask a Nulli director (if any were online) to deactivate the cyno jammer and then turn it back on again once he’d left. It was a procedural annoyance, and a common one in logistics-heavy New Eden.
The other issue was that Pandemic Legion didn’t fully trust Nulli Secunda to keep this crucial system secure after the embarrassing disbanding of its rental program during the Fountain War.
The problem was that if Nulli Secunda simply gave control of the star system to Pandemic Legion, all of the defenses would’ve gone offline as soon as Nulli Secunda dropped and transferred their claim. It would then take Pandemic Legion four weeks to get back up to full sovereignty defense bonuses, which would have left them incredibly vulnerable in the meantime.
The solution was for Manfred Sideous to work a little paperwork magic. Like a true nullsec alliance leader he was intimately familiar with the ins-and-outs of the EVE user interface. He knew all the obscure functions, all the trickiest bugs, and, most importantly, he also knew all the administrative ways that shell corporations could solve difficult problems.
The problem was easily solved by Manfred Sideous setting up a dummy corporation called HAVOC with only one member: himself. Then Nulli Secunda invited HAVOC to be a member of its alliance, and assigned it to have control of the structures in B-R5RB. Voilà. Manfred Sideous could now control the cyno jammer with an alternate dummy character without having to transfer the sovereignty claim. A solution as elegant as the problem was boring.
This was a common logistical workaround that every alliance had done a dozen times by this point. It wasn’t really a special or unique arrangement, and yet it is arguably the single critical choice that shaped the game for the next two years.
What happened next is disputed. Manfred Sideous says he packed the HAVOC corporation wallet with enough ISK to cover four months of sovereignty bill payments and clicked autopay so he’d never have to think about it again.
The Tranquility server disagreed. According to the server, Manfred Sideous did not click autopay. On January 27, 2014 the sovereignty bill for control of N3/PL’s forward staging base went past due.
