TEST Oct 22, 2020 Wall of Text

Last month Vily and I called a coalition meeting and promised you that the invasion of Delve would be the crescendo of this war, and among the most intense fighting in EVE history. Clearly that promise has been fulfilled, as the scale of every battle has been massive. What we didn’t expect is that Goons would decide to put everything on the line before we even got to Delve. Over the last three weeks Goons attempted what can only be favorably described as a massive bluff in an attempt to break our will. Though the more likely explanation for Goon’s suicidal tactics was that it was one of the more impressive displays of incompetence and hubris in major war history. During this time all of you have been true warriors, rising to the challenge and giving us every ounce of effort when we needed it most, and as such you’re well aware of everything that’s transpired. So let's put it in perspective, and then talk about what comes next as we finally start the destruction of Goon’s now breached fortress Delve.

A month ago we had our coalition meeting and finally crossed over the border between us and Goons. At that point Goons were riding pretty high on hubris. They had just switched their timers to US TZ, and were taking advantage of all the PAPI forces being mid-move and spread out between three stagings to score a few small subcap wins in Querious. This both amused and excited us as we knew they'd now be willing to throw down in Querious for some stupid reason. That week saw the NDII fight and then the 49-U fortizar fight where goons lost 15 supers expecting a PDS to work in heavy TiDi, and ever since then we've been crushing them.

After we finally unified PAPI forces into one staging, we won every major battle, and most minor battles too (minor being in the 50-100 bil range) outside of a few hiccups. We had this success because we've been able to leverage our advantages in numbers and strategic experience while Goons have mostly squandered their own strengths. I have always found it amusing when Goons complain about the numbers we've brought to invade them, as they always end up frothing at the mouth and stop just short of taking it as a compliment. Putting the strength of defensive sov and structure mechanics aside for a moment (and their strength clearly requires the numbers we brought), our numbers are really only an advantage because Goons allow them to be. They stupidly switched their timers to US tz, despite having at one point fielded nearly 4,000 pilots for a D4KU ihub timer early in the war. The Initiative fielded an amazing 1400 pilots for that timer, now they get barely over 100 for key defensive timers in US tz. Point this out to any goon and suggest that maybe their leadership don’t know what they’re doing, and you’ll mostly receive tired insults and regurgitated spin. Goon leadership also spent months promising to only fight us seriously on their own keepstars or under cyno jammers (a wise move), then immediately pivoted to wasting trillions of isk fighting on our keepstars instead, while staking everything else on a half baked plan to win the war with twenty bosons (about 10-20 too few for that tactic by the way, more on that later).

After all of that Goons narrative has finally, in the most spectacular fashion possible, completely collapsed. They staked almost everything on convincing their members they could leverage their infinite wealth to make sure we never even arrived in Delve to actually invade it, that this whole war for the last five months had been minor skirmishes in the floodplains and now that we were at the fortress gates we would be broken upon them (jesus even I’m cringing having to write that). Instead it was all a façade. No, there was never infinite wealth. Yes, wasting trillions of isk of ore during CCP’s resource depletion push just to kill anchoring keepstars is a terrible idea. And of course, pretending everything’s going exactly as planned while announcing SRP reductions is generally an indicator that things aren’t going even remotely as planned (fun fact, goons are reducing SRP too, not just Initiative). All of this seemed obvious to even the casual observer, but Goons did do an impressive job of trying to sell that lie for a few weeks.

Their efforts to appear as strategic geniuses were given a brief boost in credibility, at least in their own member’s eyes (and unfortunately some of yours too I imagine), by the boson trap they attempted during the YZ9 Fortizar timer. Throughout this war the only thing Goons have had working for them is Elo Knight’s coaching making them more capable than they would be otherwise. For a moment Elo’s boson plan looked as if it had rolled snake eyes and pulled off the ultimate reversal, but this too turned out to be a façade. There is a difference between gambling and risk taking, and while most of the other major FCs in this game had looked at the same idea of a massive boson trap on supercaps and decided the odds of it working as intended were slim to none, Elo had been pushing it for a while and Goon’s were obviously willing to ignore these concerns.

The reason that most FCs decide that the boson trap is a bad idea is because it requires perfect TiDi conditions, but not the ones you would expect. The boson trap requires way more than the twenty titans they used, and can only be used on supercarriers, already making it a slim trade assuming it actually works. In a perfect world without TiDi, the boson trap never works. You either materialize too late, or too early and the enemy easily holds invul, jumps in a phenom Erebus, then refits and fire links while quickly spreading as fast as possible. In this scenario those twenty titans Goons used probably get most supers down to half armor, then promptly eat shit. What you need to make the boson trap work is enough TiDi where the enemy can’t reasonably react due to lag (and with luck dogma is not functioning, which happens in some laggy fights), but not so much TiDi that the bosons will fail to fire or function. This razor’s edge of unpredictable conditions that must be present for the trap to work is why most FCs decide that it is a bad idea, and it’s worth briefly mentioning that all of the EVE’s major block FCs are forced to scrap a ton of cool ideas due to feasibility concerns, as that is just part of being a block FC in EVE online.

During the YZ9 battle the lag was incredibly bad, and the node was obviously not functioning as well as in previous large fights. Our FC team recognized this early and started to adjust our tactics mid fight to compensate. We had set up a bookmark wall in order to spread our eventual supercap jumps between the four super capital fleets, but in an incredible twist of irony we decided to abandon it due to the lag. As our dreads entered the field on top of their super carriers, many of them reported staying on black screen and never loading the system, and Vily’s dread was dead before he even loaded. Many of the top PAPI FCs have been in almost every large battle for over a decade, and we all recognized this kind of lag from previous battles and knew that the node was at it’s limit. The consensus was that the next group of capitals to jump in might be the last group of capitals to be able to load the system at all, so we needed to get all of our supers and titans in immediately before goons could jump in any titans. Furthermore, because Goons had jumped in their supers on the opposite side of where our Rokhs and Carriers were had set up in the middle of our bookmark wall, they would be out of range of our titans if we used our original bookmarks. Because of this, we decided we would jump everything in within Titan range of the Goon supercarriers, so that Goons had no choice but to either end the fight or risk their supers getting massacred. As such we abandoned the bookmark wall and moved all our cynos to a few warp ins on the other side, and in the confusion three of our super carrier fleet cynos landed at the same bookmark. According to Asher’s battle report those cynos being at the same spot were exactly what Goons were hoping to see, and they sprung their trap. In the end the laggy conditions that forced our plan to change and gave Goon’s the only opportunity with any chance for success, would also be what caused Goon’s boson trap to fail.

The supercarrier fleets were all ordered to jump, and as they finally loaded system the goon titans started to appear. To Goon’s credit, while the boson trap is a bad idea, they set it up well, and we did not know in advance that it was coming. As the titans exited warp and we saw what was happening, we quickly gave the supers the simple orders needed for them to tank as much damage as possible, and then waited. The debate on command comms was still ongoing as to how much damage the bosons would actually do, as with no phenom Erebus able to load in time it was unclear how well the supers would tank, but no time was wasted immediately jumping in all of our titan fleets. We were cautiously optimistic as Horde supers were able to successfully refit to full tank before the bosons fired, and all links were up. As the supercarrier FCs reported little damage coming in, we wondered whether the server would eventually catch up or if lag had just eaten the damage as it did with bomb damage in one of the previous keepstar battles the week before (by all rights we should have lost an entire nightmare fleet to bombs during one of those fights). As time went on and we realized it was just the server eating the damage, we all chuckled on command comms and committed to wiping out everything that remained.

The unfortunate reality of this war is that there are a lot of people in it, and the server can only handle so many. From the beginning of this war, PAPI leadership has spent most of our planning meetings talking about the server. Every one of our advances must account for the server conditions, and we must always put ourselves in an advantageous position for lag, as ships that have loaded first do seem to have an advantage during the fight, and of course there’s always the risk of node crash to consider. For these reasons, the idea of attacking Goon keepstars in a titan vs. titan battle was seen as too risky for the early stages of the war, not because we might lose but quite simply we had no clue how the server would behave under those conditions. In a way Goons did us a huge favor with the second FWST keepstar fight, as we got to preview how 6,300 in local would function without having to take a major risk to do so, and the results were quite good. That being said, we are still mostly concerned with putting ourselves in good positions when it comes to server lag, and will continue to make decisions around what the server can handle rather than just gamble and hope for the best.

Goons on the other hand, have never taken the server lag seriously, and have instead mocked other groups whenever they complain about lag or take server conditions into consideration. Goons are notorious for not sending in fleet fight notifications to reinforce nodes when they think lag will benefit their strategic objective (we always reinforce nodes when we can by the way), they mocked us a month ago when we chose to stand down rather than have a 4,000 person fight on an unreinforced node, and they laughed when the KVN node crashed. After the 49-U fortizar fight, in which Goons master plan to use the PDS to free their supers from bubbles hilariously backfired because the module stuck due to heavy lag, Asher wrote a battle report blaming their failure on “bad server weather” (his words not mine), as if the risks were unknown to him before he made the call to jump his supers. In this way he resembles a general who seems oblivious that t it’s raining despite all of his clothes being wet and his shoes muddy. For this negligence Goon’s paid dearly, their one master plan to win this war backfired horrifically, and now all they are left with is a giant SRP bill and a bunch of reassurances that they almost had us.

So here we are, over five months later, finally in Delve. We are still finishing up the move, but already we are blowing up Goon rorquals and reinforcing their structures with impunity. Elo Knight continues to be the only good thing Goons have going for them, as he’s the only FC consistently forming to contest us in US tz. Thursday is the first chunk of I-hub timers in Delve, and from there the destruction of Goon’s home for the past five years will begin. By suiciding so much of their remaining wealth into us before we even got to Delve, Goons have mistakenly presented us the opportunity to truly deplete them of everything they own by the time we are done destroying all their structures. All that’s left to do is burn it all down.