“The Atlas Alliance empire seemed an unfathomable fortress, spanning several regions of the EVE map, with vast territories and […] stations, supported with the equally extensive Render Base. The Atlas empire was one of the pillars of NullSec life in the south of New Eden. Like every great empire of man, the Atlas was destined to fall.”
–Riverini, EVENews24.com
IN EVE ONLINE, EVERY action has a reaction, and every vacuum has to be filled. When Goonswarm abandoned the South with its all-out attack on Band of Brothers in 2009, that action had a number of important effects. As we’ve explored over the last few chapters, the most important was obviously the Great War itself, and the eventual destruction of Band of Brothers. The second most important, however, was the creation of a power vacuum in the deep southern territories the Goons abandoned.
Nullsec territory is too valuable to stay vacant for very long. Even the most derelict nullsec star region is still more profitable than what can be earned in any other part of EVE. So when this space became available in the middle of the Great War, with all other major alliances distracted, the Southern Coalition’s junior member—Atlas Alliance—saw this as the opportunity it had been waiting for.
The young alliance had spent the past half-year as tag-along allies of larger nullsec powers as its leaders adapted to live nullsec gameplay. By 2009 it was thriving, thanks largely to its second leader, Bobby Atlas. Bobby was a highly engaged and motivated player who had ambitions to shape Atlas into a power that was capable of leading its own coalition rather than merely being a subordinate in one—as it currently was under its more famous allies, Band of Brothers and Against ALL Authorities.
Bobby was a tireless leader who had been through half a dozen smaller scale wars, including as part of the coalition that aided SirMolle in the disastrous MAX Damage campaign from Volume I. That campaign in particular had given Bobby both a taste of what it was like to be part of the most powerful coalition in nullsec, and also a stern belief that he could do the job better.
Atlas was on the rise, but its leader’s ambitions required the alliance to claim nullsec territory of its own. Bobby was looking for opportunities to expand so he could one day build himself a power that could go toe-to-toe with the legends of nullsec. Goonswarm’s abandonment of the south was just such an opportunity. When the Goons moved out, Atlas got ready to move in. The territory it initially claimed—a region called Omist—wasn’t particularly wealthy, but it was more than enough to provide a starter home for the rapidly expanding alliance.
The history of Atlas Alliance is not well-known in the EVE community. Its story is treated more as an esoteric subject that only ancient veterans and students of the game’s history are even aware of. That’s because it’s tale is frustratingly anti-climactic, and illustrates perhaps better than any other episode the precarious position EVE alliances occupy at all times; how fragile even a mighty civilization is when held atop a single pair of shoulders.
RED SOLAR LEGION
Another opportunity would soon shape Atlas’s destiny. As with much of the geopolitical situation in EVE at the time, it had to do with the burgeoning Russian community.
Towards the end of the Great War, the Russian community of EVE began to grow quickly. CCP Games had released a full Russian localization of the game in 2009, and EVE became far more accessible to a much wider swath of Russian gamers. When those new recruits made it into the game, fresh with enthusiasm, they found an established, Russian-speaking community in nullsec complete with Russian services, Russian fleet commanders, and Russian historical heroes like Death and Mactep.
But while the Goons and the Northern Coalition were each bonded internally by their approach to gameplay (for the Goons: spreading terror, for the NC: gaining wealth) the Russians had only one bonding factor: being Russian. It was not a terribly specific bond, and it made no allowances for individuals’ morals or personality. There is no Russia in EVE—no national boundaries to force players from a given country or culture to play together (with the notable exception of the Chinese community which was on its own server—Serenity—running parallel to the global Tranquility server.) What held the Russian players together was not so much their desire to play together, as the way in which players of other nationalities excluded and looked down on them. A lot of the players in the Russian alliances were actually Ukrainians who were simply lumped into the same group by other players who didn’t care to learn the difference.
After the Great War, however, there was no longer an entity that they perceived threatened them specifically for being Russian (or just speaking it,) and so their bond became less existentially critical. Their unity was threatened not by external forces, but, paradoxically, by their unexpected triumph over those forces.
BEST FRIENDS FOREVER
Mactep and Death had been fighting together in EVE for more than four years, and both of them had earned their stripes at the Siege of C-J6MT, a bonafide which established them as unimpeachable veterans who were effectively enthroned as the fathers of the Russian nullsec community. The experience had also made them into best friends. Much of nullsec lived in fear of their storied friendship.
Because of Red Alliance’s deep roots in early-2000s Russia and Eastern Europe, it also came with a certain fondness for aspects of communist governance. Red Alliance’s version of communism differed significantly from the real world, however, as one would expect given the uniqueness of EVE. The people I’ve spoken to describe it more like a mafioso honor system, in which each person is expected to pursue strength and wealth, but for the ultimate purpose of kicking back a significant portion of the profits to strengthen the larger whole.
As Red Alliance grew large and stable during and after the Great War, Death and Mactep’s fame was seen by many within the alliance to be at-odds with a more egalitarian Russian ideal. Death and Mactep embodied a different Russian ideal, however: the political strongman.
The high council of Red Alliance wasn’t pleased that cults of personality within their alliance were beginning to outshine the average members and threatening the influence of the council itself. To hear Death tell the tale, they became envious of his and Mactep’s power and popularity. Third parties say that Death and Mactep were likewise growing arrogant and increasingly untethered to the mother alliance of all Russians in EVE.
Mactep and Death both left Red Alliance around the same time, and departed to make their own way. And so, towards the end of the Great War, they each formed their own alliances: “Solar Fleet” and “Legion of xXDEATHXx” respectively.
Mactep, the famous fleet commander. Death, the politician and industrialist renowned for operating as many as 89 EVE Online accounts. Each helped the other carve out a space for their alliances in the Drone Regions, which were famously populated with dozens of small, new alliances naive to the nature of nullsec politics.
According to Death, the way the two of them carved out their first home was by using diplomacy as a subtle knife. He told me numerous stories of how they weakened their enemies by exacerbating existing border conflicts, fanning the flames until war was unavoidable, and then standing out of the way while the less experienced Drone Region alliances fought each other. When the fighting had left them weakened and exhausted, Death and Mactep would move in to conquer huge portions of territory.
This didn’t sit well with the leader of the vast and powerful Northern Coalition, Vuk Lau. The small alliances in the Drone Regions were generally allowed to exist with Vuk Lau’s permission. They weren’t exactly allies, but they were people who had stayed on the right side of the North, and that was supposed to come with certain privileges.
“We were a bit pissed because [they] were meant to be part of the old anti-Band of Brothers allies,” said Vuk Lau. “They should have been helping us, not backstabbing us. I think some of the Northern Coalition allies still had them blue [marked as allies] even as they were invading.”
Members of the EVE community have created timelapses of the EVE Online sovereignty map which shows which alliances officially owned which territories over time. You can watch the whole history of nullsec play out in this timelapse if you know what to look for. During this period in the Drone Regions it tells an unmistakable story as one-by-one, Legion of xXDEATHXx and Solar Fleet surrounded, divided, and conquered each resident alliance. This continued, unhindered, until it came time for the final assault.
ETHEREAL CROSSING
The final battle to conquer the Drone Regions pitted a pair of inseparable allies called Ethereal Dawn [ED] and Intrepid Crossing [IRC] against a Russian coalition in February of 2009, the same time that Band of Brothers was being disbanded and invaded by RedSwarm on the other side of the star cluster.
With the Russians occupied by the invasion of Delve, ED/IRC were able to hold their ground. However, hubris got the better of them and they launched a campaign of revenge against Red Alliance in its home in Insmother. Attacking the spiritual home of the Russians is rarely a good idea.
When Red Alliance leader Silent Dodger asked Goonswarm for help in the matter, Goonswarm’s intelligence director The Mittani burned a long-dormant spy and stole ED/IRC’s entire capital ship fleet. With all the dominance of a playground bully, he held it over their head and promised to give it back if they abandoned their campaign against Red Alliance. The Mittani later revealed that the thief wasn’t actually one of his agents, but a Something Awful Goon who was willing to pretend he was one in order to scare ED/IRC into thinking it was a reprisal for their attack on Red Alliance. The real heist, he said, was an unrelated theft of opportunity that he’d managed to twist to tell a more advantageous story.
With no other choice, ED/IRC acquiesced, abandoned the campaign, and agreed to a ceasefire.
This did not put an end to the conflict, however. There was now a faction growing within Red Alliance that viewed ED/IRC’s attack on Insmother as a grievous offense, and wanted to wipe the two alliances out of existence.
I’ve never been able to get a good story for what happened at this point, but some sources say there was an attempted coup within Red Alliance as that aggressive faction tried to seize control.
In the ensuing drama, a number of corporations left Red Alliance for either Solar Fleet or Legion of xXDEATHXx, and just two days later, Red Alliance broke the ceasefire and attempted a “headshot” attack on Ethereal Dawn’s headquarters at ZZ5X-M.
A “headshot” attack means invading your opponent’s capital system with overwhelming force, ideally to cut off its center of commerce and organization before it has a chance to wake up to the threat. Properly executed, it can end an entire war in one demoralizing engagement.
In this case, however, the attack failed. At ZZ5X-M, the ED/IRC defense miraculously held strong against the Red Alliance counterattack. There are no hard facts about what transpired in this battle, but to me, it’s easy to imagine what happened by considering how each side viewed the battle.
Red Alliance was riven by distrust and confusion in the wake of the—apparently successful—coup. For Red Alliance, this was an operation that only half of the alliance cared about, amid a time of drama and division, after it’d already lost its two legendary founders and half its alliance membership to Legion of xXDEATHXx and Solar Fleet.
For ED/IRC, by contrast, this was the grandest, most dramatic moment of their EVE Online lives. To them, this was a deliberately broken ceasefire. This was the same Red Alliance who in years past had obliterated Veritas Immortalis, Chimaera Pact, and Lotka Volterra. Now that fabled juggernaut, the bear of C-J6MT, had descended upon ZZ5X-M, ED/IRC’s home of more than two years.
Stories are powerful weapons in EVE, and in this case ED/IRC was telling an inspiring story of defiance and survival. Inside Red Alliance, however, the story was much different, and it was beginning to suggest that the once famous Red Alliance was now in serious decline. The myth of Red Alliance is one of the strongest in the colloquial mythos of EVE, and it is arguably more important than the actual state of the alliance at any given time. In this case, ED/IRC fought harder than they may normally have because they believed they were fighting a nullsec legend. In reality, Red Alliance at the time was in shambling organizational shape. But that same mythos has ensured that throughout EVE history, Red Alliance is seldom down for very long.
The surge of enthusiasm and spirit propelled ED/IRC to a defense of their home that lasted three long months. It was a time commemorated by ED/IRC with one of the more famous propaganda videos made by the EVE community. The story they tell of their defense against a brutish Red Alliance is soaringly triumphant. It’s got choirs and grand battle sequences filmed during the actual battles of the campaign, and it tells the story as its pilots experienced it: as a story truly worth remembering, even if you weren’t there. The events that transpired in the story of ED/IRC vs Red Alliance were so intense and consuming from the individual perspective that for the average pilot there was no distinguishing between this and a war twice the size. To them, this was the Great War.
Empires of EVE tends to zoom out to understand the large-scale conflicts between tens of thousands of people, but at every stage of this story it’s important to remember that it is being experienced by real individuals from a first-person perspective.
The ED/IRC defense held for three months. Three months of late night defenses, and five hour meetings seeking to spread the Reds ever thinner until, finally, on Red Alliance’s southern border, far away from the war with ED/IRC, disaster struck the exhausted alliance.
A new voice in the south of EVE—Bobby Atlas—had declared that the Red menace was to be exterminated. He had seen Red Alliance struggling to evict the smaller ED/IRC and determined that the time for an offensive against the thinly stretched Russians had come. Others in nullsec warned Bobby that attacking Insmother was an overly greedy move that risked reuniting the fractured Russians, but Bobby would have none of it.
“Atlas Alliance has launched a surprise attack on [Detorid,]” wrote a reporter on EVEOnline.com in an article dated May 30, 2009. “At the time of writing, clashes are concentrated around DG-8VJ, 77S8-E and HZFG-M solar systems. Given the size of the alliances occupying Detorid, it is still unclear whether this conflict will remain a regional skirmish or rather develop into a global war.”
THE RISE OF ATLAS
In the middle of 2009, Atlas was growing stronger, and Bobby Atlas believed his chance for a meteoric rise was finally here. Atlas had its foothold in Omist, and now fate had gifted Bobby with an unusual opportunity: The Russians on his border had splintered into five factions (Red Alliance, White Noise, Red.Overlord, Solar Fleet, and Legion of xXDEATHXx) and were distracted by wars on two different fronts. What’s more, as mentioned in the last chapter, his allies in IT Alliance and Against ALL Authorities were planning a coordinated offensive that would soon bog down the Russians’ Goon allies. For the youngest leader in the southern regions, the opportunity was obvious.
“They want space really bad and they think it’s so easy to take,” said a director in Legion of xXDEATHXx who went by the name ‘Saint xXDEATHXx.’ “We knew that they would come.”
Though the Russians put forth a typical front of confidence and bravado, behind the scenes the situation was worse than they were willing to let on. Red Alliance was a shell of its former self. Its name was synonymous with grit, determination, and greatness, but at this time it couldn’t muster the strength to embody those qualities. When the Atlas Alliance fleets arrived in Red Alliance-controlled Detorid, the Reds began to fall apart.
“We went into 5 of the 6 station systems and quickly ripped down the jammer in each, one by one,” Atlas Alliance Fleet Commander Banlish—who is now a Twitch streamer—told EVEOnline.com. “Capitals have been deployed almost non stop… support was buzzing around doing whatever required.”
There was no magic wand The Mittani could wave to save Red Alliance this time, nor turn back the mass of players pushing forward into Red Alliance territory with all the vigor that only a young and excited alliance can gather. Detorid was crushed within a week, and Red Alliance now found itself caught between Atlas in the South and ED/IRC to the North.
The fleets of Bobby Atlas took control of the famous Cloning Facility that served as the main hub station in C-J6MT. It doesn’t actually clone anything, but that’s what its text description called it. The value it carried was mostly emotional. After the successful defense that had cemented their alliance three years ago, the Russians had named it “RA Prime.” When Bobby Atlas arrived, it was swiftly renamed “RA DONE AND GONE.”
GUN MINING
Though Red Alliance was in decline, its successors were building a kingdom in the famously poor Drone Regions. With that vast space, Death and Mactep were creating rental fiefdoms called “Shadow of xXDEATHXx,” and “Solar Wing.” The vast regions were no longer a frantic pool of small alliances, but were partitioned and sold by the week to renters. The territory was claimed and defended by the mother alliances, but the star systems themselves were rarely inhabited by them unless an enemy contested its control.
Throughout 2009, the Drone Regions were agriculturalized, turned into a vast field for the harvesting of digital minerals.
The system was largely adopted because the Drone Regions were a different place than the other regions of EVE. You couldn’t make nearly as much ISK running missions in this territory as you could elsewhere. Instead, the titular drones which populated the area would drop minerals when killed. Playing in drone space resulted in so many minerals and raw materials that players began referring to it as “gun mining,” a subtle jab at CCP for failing to provide gameplay variety.
Nobody cared about the Drone Regions because nobody knew what to do with all the cheap minerals. Shipping them all the way from the Drone Regions to the marketplaces of empire space was borderline impossible without being caught and shot down or establishing unrealistically vast convoys.
However, the Russians had a plan. They allowed their renters to pay for their space with a portion of the minerals they collected. While there wasn’t much an alliance could do with a small amount of cheap minerals, the Russians had figured out that an astronomical amount of minerals added up to more than anybody else had imagined. In the secrecy of the most unpopular and difficult-to-reach regions of New Eden they began to pour these minerals into a secret project to reconquer their homeland, and redefine the balance of power in nullsec for years to come.
With the arrival of a serious threat in the southeast, the Russians retreated into the safety of the Drone Regions and united the old community of alliances (Red Alliance, Solar Fleet, Legion of xXDEATHXx, White Noise and Red.Overlord) to focus on wiping out ED/IRC with their combined force to clear a new home for Red Alliance. Once it was over, they would split up again, but Red Alliance is the mother of all Russian alliances, which meant that the Russian entities of EVE would usually seek to maintain a place for it in the game by whatever means necessary. The Russian community of this era fought like cousins who would instantly put aside their differences and become a family again if an outsider threatened their mutual matriarch.
But Bobby Atlas would not be denied. Atlas was a growing power, and to him this was the moment that the Russian myth was exposed. No longer would he bow to the spectre of the Russian legends. Everyone had heard of how the Russians refused to ever be defeated, and would grind out victories from months of grueling guerilla warfare rather than face defeat. Bobby would put the lie to these stories, and show EVE that the Russians were no different than any other group.
After securing Detorid, Bobby Atlas began an assault into the historically Russian region of Insmother. The Russians fought back throughout the Summer of 2009, but it wasn’t enough. After conquering Omist, Tenerifis, Detorid, and Wicked Creek, now Insmother too was placed atop the shoulders of Atlas.
In October 2009, the conquest of Insmother was complete, and Bobby Atlas looked ahead into a blindingly bright future. He now held more territory than any other single alliance in EVE, including the crown jewel: C-J6MT. Bobby saw in Atlas an alliance of destiny—his destiny—and he began making plans to break away from IT Alliance and Against ALL Authorities, and to begin charting a new course for himself.
But no matter the opponent, and no matter the odds, the Russians of EVE can never forget: C-J6MT, Insmother is home.
