test_war_update_3

First off, if any of you missed that great fight we had on Monday, we’ve got a replay of the fight here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByxPRdGlFRvnUE5pbC1kTnVqelk/view

As you can see, another fight where GOTG were getting trashed despite having larger fleet until the supercaps came in.  We did well, but I’m still not happy with the fight. We make a lot of mistakes, both on the FC team and as individual pilots, and there is still plenty that can be improved upon.  It is possible to fight cap fleets with subcaps, and we’ll get there soon enough (we’re pretty close as is), just takes some more training and improving on our part.

Anyway, let’s get down to business

Everyone else in EVE follows our example and finds their balls

So if you are in TIA you know this already (and if you’re not you should considering joining, in fact there was just an alliance news post about joining you should check out), but almost as soon as we deployed, everyone else in EVE decided to suddenly remember that for the most part they are paying fifteen dollars a month to outsmart the simplest AI scripts in the industry for hours a day (or in the case of asteroids, entirely inanimate objects).  The universe has lit up with activity and almost every entity in the game seems to be headed towards war at the moment when not even two weeks ago this was not the case for just about everyone except Triumvirate and us.

The biggest news which I’m sure most of you have heard about by now is that Goonswarm has called a state of the goonion for today at 1900 eve time, at the conclusion of which they are deploying with regular capitals and one subcap doctrine while stuffing the rest of what they need in their capital ship hangars and cargo holds (hmm, that sounds familiar).  Naturally, this is a big deal, Goonswarm and co. are still one of the largest coalitions in the game, and their deployment is a much larger event than ours, as we are just one alliance.  At the moment, no one appears to know where they are going, or at least no one is stating it publicly (gee, that also sounds familiar).  I don’t think they’ll be hitting Esoteria or Catch, as they can much more easily do that without deploying, but I wouldn’t rule out anything to be honest.  For the moment we are just in wait and see mode like everyone else.

In the south, our allies CO2 and Solar Fleet have gotten into border skirmishes in Feythabolis over their split of the rental space there.  This obviously comes at the worst possible time for us, as we are currently blue with not only Solar fleet, but the entire coalition that backs them and are staging out of that coalition’s space.  There has been some miscommunication here unfortunately, and CO2 has done this on their own.  We are currently hoping that the situation in Feythabolis deflates and can be resolved without a full scale war between them and Gemco, but there is definitely the possibility that could occur.  As of now our position is that we would like to mediate this as best we can, but we do not know how this will work out, and we will not break an agreement that we signed with Xdeath and Gemco in good faith.  They have been excellent hosts to us on our deployment so far, and we have no intention of breaking the agreement we have or ending the deployment early because of the CO2 conflict in Feythabolis.

So, take the two big announcements above, combine that with the cold war between Tri. and Gemco, and the conflict with Init and MC in Syndicate, and it seems that the entire universe could be in a war by the end of the week (except The Culture, get your shit together Raknor and join the fray).  Having said all that, TEST Alliance’s current stance in MTO will not change.  We are still on deployment, and unless Goons take their move fleet and land in Stain, that is not likely to change.  However, it is important that y’all know the political situation and how rapidly it is changing.  It is possible that we could end up restaging somewhere nearby, or recalling entirely at some point in the near future.  With so much going on I don’t want to make any definitive promises.

One thing that won’t end our deployment though is a possible headshot attempt on one of our fortizars in MTO.  Speaking of which…

GOTG convinces PL and Horde to attempt a headshot on one of our MTO Fortizars this Thursday

I only have two theories on this.  Either A) PL knows something we don’t about Goons deployment (quite possible), and they want to try and end our deployment early for strategic reasons, or B) Sort paid off PL again.  I’m leaning towards B, as one of the first moves Guardians of the Galaxy made as a brand new coalition formed in Querious was to pay PL 100 billion isk just so they could move their supers from Querious to their new space in Teneferis without having to put in any effort to prevent them from getting ganked (It’s true look it up).

Anyway, let's get the details out of the way first.  GOTG, PL, and Horde all have major CTAs called for 23:00 on Thursday (Aug. 3rd).  PL is promising to bring supers and titans, and this will likely resemble the show of force they had on our anchoring fortizar last week.

We always knew this could happen, even planned for it, but we never figured Sort and his crew would give up trying to fight us by themselves so quickly.  In the event that we lose, which is entirely possible, It honestly won’t make much of a difference.  Not only do we have a second fortizar in system already in which we can stage from, but we could even use the station if we felt like it (we’ll use the second fort though, forts are better).  If this were a true war of invasion, one that really mattered (like the Catch war when we needed a new home), we would probably blueball and cede the fight in order to use up another one of our enemies stupid hype formups for a meaningless objective.

But I don’t want to blueball, I want to fucking fight.  Among the FC team we’ve been contemplating for an entire week just exactly how we would get a cap fight on favorable terms to us, and then our enemies go ahead and decide to give us a cap fight on the most favorable terms possible.  It would be rude for us to ignore this gift.  We are going to take this fight and we are going to give it everything we got.  After I post this alliance update I’ll be posting the CTA on the ops calendar, and then there will not be any other major ops between now and then.  We are going to spend the next 40 hours preparing to defend the MTO fortizar.  We plan on using every single capital that we brought up here with us, plus all of the capitals that are all conveniently coming out of build before Thursday, plus every single ship that we happen to have up on alliance contracts, plus anything else we can think of.  We are going to give this our best shot, it won’t be easy, but we could not ask for a better field to fight on than our own fortizar sitting 1,600km off of a fucking regional gate.  We’ve already sent in the fleet notification forms, and I’ll double check with a few CCP devs to make sure MTO is on the super node so that we can have as little lag as possible.  I doubt this fight will get over 2,000 people so lag will be very minimal on the super node, and this fight should be quite enjoyable as far as big fights go.

If there was ever a time to make a fleet, it would be this one.  I know US tz is late for a lot of you, and this op is not likely to be over quickly, but this is going to be one of the bigger engagements of the year.  We need to see TEST move op numbers for this one, and I know we are capable of getting them.  The alliance is going to spend a decent amount of money on making this one interesting, and we’re likely going to invite a few of our allies to even the odds at least a little bit.

Let’s show everyone what we’re capable of.  We are going to form up everything we have in MTO at 23:00 eve time on Thursday.  See you all there.