Monday’s coalition meeting was rather short, as most of the time between our decision to have a coalition meeting and actually having it was spent preparing for the potential Keepstar battle.  Now that our staging is established and the front lines drawn, it’s time for a military update so that you can be fully prepared to fight this war.  This update will also include some structural changes to our military doctrine that have been a long time coming and are finally ready to be implemented.  There’s a lot here, so please take some time, read each part, and start making changes to your ship hangers as soon as possible.  The biggest theme of this update is to be prepared for battle before the actual fleet starts forming up, so it would be rather unfortunate if you skimmed and fucked up having the right ships ready.

Is this a deployment, how is our usual dual staging policy effected?

Something we failed to appropriately stress in Monday’s meeting is our decision to move the U-Q staging.  Let me be very clear here so that there is no confusion: This is not a deployment like Providence, we are back to our normal dual staging stance, and the DY-P Keepstar is the new U-Q until further notice; nothing has changed other than we stage out of DY-P instead of U-Q now.  This the reason we put a Keepstar down rather than staging in the Fortizar we already had in system.  We plan on being in this for the long haul, and we are not shutting down Rorqual mining or any other normal activities.  That being said, as was mentioned Monday in the run up to the Keepstar op, we are at war, so all capitals that are supposed to be in DY-P (everyone’s first combat capital, all shield supers and titans except spares ... ALL SHIELD SUPERS AND TITANS EXCEPT SPARES) need to be in the DY-P Keepstar.  This war will likely feature the major super battle that we’ve been preparing for ever since we made the decision to leave Vale of the Silent, and you will likely not get a ton of advance notice when it happens.  In fact, it’s likely to happen spontaneously, so it’s imperative that you have your capitals in the right place before the fight starts.

Being properly prepared for fleets

Speaking of being prepared before the fleet forms, we need to remind you of a few standards that have been slipping the past few months.  This should be obvious, but unfortunately we need to reiterate basic stuff like “buy your ship before the fleet starts”.

So, buy your ship before the fucking fleet starts.  Buy your ships before the day of the fleet even.  In fact, buy the ships you need now, and have a full hanger of our required doctrine ships (the ones you can fly).  This is part of being properly prepared to participate in alliance fleets, and one of the main things we ask of you as a member of TEST alliance, going all the way back to the Virtues of TESTinattus alliance update earlier this year. There are two major problems that we keep experiencing that can be considerably reduced or even eliminated if everyone would just sort out their ship hangers like they’re supposed to be doing before an actual fleet forms.

Fleet form ups are taking way too long.  This is an issue that has been getting progressively worse over the last three months, and it’s time we finally put a stop to it.  This is quite simple, the goal is to spend more time playing the game rather than waiting to play the game.  The longer our form ups take, the earlier we have to schedule ops, and the more time you have to take out of your own schedule to enjoy the same EVE content you would be enjoying if we just had shorter form ups.  Not to mention that long form up times eliminate our ability to respond quickly to enemy mistakes and flash forms like we need to, reducing the number of dunks we get and fun you have.
Supply of ships in our staging systems.  This is a major problem that we are partly solving from the logistics side, but one of the biggest reasons it continues to be a problem is that people wait until the fleet forms before buying the ships they need.  This really fucks with our suppliers, and it is hard for us to maintain a large enough supply of ships for both a fleet and replacements during a fight if people do not replace their ships until the next fleet forms.  This is why you always need some amount of liquid isk, so that you can buy a replacement ship after a fight before the SRP comes in.  Our SRP turn around times are always pretty solid, so this is not too much to ask.
In the next few sections I'm going to go over some changes we are making to how we organize our doctrines, what ships we use in them, a few changes to fits, and everything else you need to know about what ships you need.  After reading this post, there should be no excuse for not knowing what ships should be in your hanger.

Understanding our military doctrine and how it determines the composition of our fleets

In order to help you guys be more prepared for our fleets before they form, and to have a better understanding of what you should do when we send a fleet ping out, I'm going to go over some basic foundations of TEST’s military doctrine that we have been finalizing for the past 4-6 months.  As of today, our military doctrine is finally complete; we have every fleet concept that we want and are introducing the last few ships that we feel are necessary, and we are now ready to start running our fleets entirely as they were intended to be run.  This will take some  trial and error to learn the tactics, but developing and practicing the tactics our doctrine call for is the goal for the next few months.

Before I get into the details, a reminder:

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We have many different types of content and ways to enjoy the game in TEST alliance, and we encourage you guys to roam and do whatever you feel to enjoy EVE Online.  The implied social contract in this arrangement is that the strength of TEST alliance's military is what allows us to hold this space and provide all these different opportunities to you, so every member of TEST is expected to be properly prepared for TEST military pings and properly trained to understand and execute our tactics.  Once again, this was detailed in the TESTinattus alliance update (you really should read it if you haven't):


In short, when a ping goes to Op Military, that fleet is playing to win, and everyone responding to it becomes soldiers who need to execute our military doctrine effectively.  The good thing is that winning is usually a lot of fun too, especially when you’re outplaying your opponents, so putting in a little work to be prepared for fleets and following what we’re trying to get you to do ends up being quite rewarding.



The core principle of our military doctrine is that we force our enemies to drop capitals on us first by winning the subcap battle.  Escalating second is a massive advantage, and it's why we put such an emphasis on all facets of subcap fleets and tactics.

The diagram below shows you how we think about our fleet concepts, including some of our new changes, and how we are starting to organize our mumble subchannels (and sub FCs) within fleet as well.  The only major change to our fleet concepts you'll notice is that jackdaws are out, and harpies are now their own doctrine (both MWD and AB version) and more than just a ship we use in Goku fleets.

rACw9To.png

This is very straightforward and should give you an idea of how to prepare your ships in each staging.  Every subcap fleet has four core parts.  In each staging, you should have every main DPS ship that you can fly for the required doctrines in that staging.  If you can fly a dictor and stiletto, you should have one of both.  If you're a logistics pilot you should have a basilisk and a Kirin.  These three cores make up 70-90% of the pilots in our fleet, and other than command links, give us just about everything necessary to undock and fight.

The rest of our fleet is support.  Support is still very important, in fact it's the support elements of a subcap fleet that contain all of your force multipliers that can really win you a fight.  Up until this point, we have put very little emphasis on the support elements of our fleet.  The majority of the final upgrades to our military doctrine is focused on changing that, with the goal being to have every pilot, even a 14 day old alpha pilot, able to make significant contributions that win us fights (hint: having 15 vigils is bad).

We are going to work towards giving our FCs options so that they can tailor the support wing of their fleet to the demands of that particular battle.  That is why I would like all pilots to strive to have as many of the support ships as they can fly, including the EWAR frigates.  Each fleet concept will have a default composition for it's support wing, but the FC can change these and ask for any combination of support ships that the situation may require. Most of them are t1 and t2 frigates, and owning one hull will give you an easy refit to be either MWD or AB, depending on which fleet concept we're using.

There are a lot of changes, so I'm just going to show you another diagram that should give you the big picture, and then I’ll go into detail about every single change.

pUaNNDO.png



Crucifiers instead of Vigils: The biggest change by far is that the vigil will no longer be the “newbro ship for every fleet”, in fact it’s going to be phased out entirely over the next two weeks.  This is being replaced by the crucifier.  The Crucifier will be the first ship that every day 1 pilot in TEST should train into, and it will be accepted on every fleet.  For now, you can keep bringing Vigils for two more weeks, but by the time America’s birthday rolls around there will be no more Vigils in fleet.

Harpys instead of Raptors/Maledictions:  If you were paying attention above, you noticed that the tackle section in the first diagram only listed the stiletto and interdictors, and the raptor and malediction are missing from the list of support ships.  We have decided that it’s better to have 10 harpys and 5 stilettos rather than 10 Raptors/maledictions and 5 Stilettos.  The heavy tackle harpy is going to become our main tackle frigate, while the stilettos are there for their instalock tackle capabilities and their ability to enter grids nullified getting us warp ins and ping spots.  The Harpy is much more tanky and can actually dive onto enemy fleets and hold tackle more effectively than our heavy tackle Raptor fit.  Plus, the Harpy can hit out to 90km for decent damage, so all Harpy pilots can actually anchor with the fleet and participate in the fight rather than just waiting for their moment to tackle.  The Harpy will now become the second ship that every day 1 member in TEST should train for after the Crucifier.

Hyenas and Web Lokis instead of Huginns:  The problem with the Huginn is that it can’t sig tank and it doesn’t have enough EHP to buffer tank, making it an incredibly squishy ship, too squishy for it’s important role.  From now on, with Vigils being phased out, target painting for all heavy fleets will come from Hyenas, which will usually be fit for paints only unless requested to have webs.  Obviously the Hyenas in our Mobile fleets will still have webs.  But the webs in Heavy fleets will now exclusively come from the Web Loki fits that are already listed on our wiki.  We’ve had these for a while, but with the Huginn as an option we were rarely getting Lokis and usually getting Huginns.  The Huginn is no longer an option, so get web Lokis.

Svipuls instead of Jackdaws:  With Jackdaw fleet officially put out of it’s misery, we no longer are forced to use the jackdaws for their defender launchers when we need more anti-bomber protection in a fleet.  Jackdaws suck at this role too, just like they suck at most other things, so they will be replaced by Svipuls, which feature instant damage and an afterburner fit that isn’t terrible, allowing them to actually flirt with sig tanking.  Having more Svipuls in people’s hangers also gives us the option to refit them with sebos and setup instalock arty camps if need be, which is a nice option from time to time.  In general having Svipuls instead of Jackdaws is just all around better.
The Sabre fit has changed, now has a defender launcher:  We have experimented with this in the past and generally liked it, so we’re making it official.  Our Flycatchers already have defender launchers, so adding defenders to the Sabre means that every FC always knows exactly how many defenders they have just by looking at their dictor count.  They can then choose to add in some more Svipuls if needed.  Even if we don’t run with any Svipuls, having 10-15 defenders in every fleet without having to change the fleet composition is a nice additional tool.  While that won’t completely stop a large bomber fleet, it might save a fleet wipe, and it means we only need to add 10-15 Svipuls instead of 30 to get full protection.

Kitsunes instead of Griffins, Keres instead of Maulus, EWAR ships in general:  First the Kitsune;  the Kitsune is a great ship, and considerably better than the Griffin.  We are now making the Harpy the second training goal after the crucifier, it’s only natural that Harpy pilots quickly spend the few days it takes to get into a Kitsune.  They already have the EWAR skills from being in a Crucifier (or they should), and training for the Harpy means you already have Cal Frigate V.  A single Kitsune can tank quite well for an EWAR frigate while disabling an entire carrier’s worth of fighters by itself.  As for the Keres, we don’t actually have very many uses for the Maulus, and sensor damps are actually in a pretty bad spot since CCP keeps buffing the targeting range of literally everything.  There are occasions when we might want to bring damps, and for those occasions we’ll use the Keres instead of the Maulus.  The Keres is much better, and we already use them for long range tackle so it’s an easy refit.  In general, we are going to start trying to push EWAR frigates.  It’ll be slow at first, but we have started to integrate crucifiers into a few of our fleets even before this update, and the goal is to get EWAR to be a common part of our fleets.  The truth is, the EVE meta is moving towards large battles that are almost exclusively for capitals, and traditional subcaps tactics don’t have very many places on a capital battlefield.  Our subcap doctrine designed to be used in a capital fight, but even with our unique focus on fighting capitals, there could be times when a Kitsune might be more effective than a Nightmare, as sad as that is to say.  For this reason, it’s important that everyone has the ability to fly EWAR when requested, not just our newbros.
Adding Neut Sentinels:  Only Goku fleet uses these in it’s default doctrine, but we have already mixed them into a lot of other fleets for fights against HACs with great success, so expect to see these situational ships called on from time to time.

Broadswords and Onyxes:  We’re going to attempt to get better at using Hictors and use them more often.
Goku Hound is getting it’s bomb launcher back: As fun as it was to have 650 DPS bombers for a little while, we’re starting to use Goku for more than just hunting rorquals, and it’s much easier to form the fleet if every bomber has a bomber launcher.  All bombers will still require T2 Torpedo launchers.

Any fits that changed or were added are listed below and will be added into the wikis for their respective fleet concepts if they are part of the default composition.  A lot of the default compositions will change, and we’ll make a quick announcement when those changes are updated on the Wiki.  Some fits will not be listed in any fleet concept, like the kitsune, but will still be a support ship on the wiki that we use often.  We are going to add those in to a support section and likely redo how the wiki looks a little bit to facilitate this, but that won’t happen right away.

Also, by July 4th, Crucifiers will replace Vigils entirely, and we will start cracking down incredibly hard on people not in the proper ships for our fleets.  This includes shitty interceptors that are not doctrine interceptors and other useless ships.

Nightmares, they’re awesome, and we need them

So it seems that everyone else in the game has finally figured out what Snuff and ourselves have known for over a year now: Nightmares are the best subcap fleet concept in the game.  Most of our enemies are now adopting a Nightmare doctrine, which is fine, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.  This has had a major effect on the Nightmare market though, which has left us in a unique situation.  We control a large portion of the supply of Nightmares to this game, not all of the supply, but quite a bit of it.  It is absolutely critical that we do everything we can to control the supply by keeping the Nightmare BPCs that we generate in Esoteria, and that we do everything we can to discourage people from selling them in Jita at all, or at the very least make the prices ridiculously high.

For this reason, we are going to increase the price of the Nightmare Buyback Program to 360 million isk, and we encourage you all to read the post linked below and learn how you can help generate Nightmare BPCs for the alliance.  We are calling on your patriotism here, not only is the Nightmare buyback program an extremely convenient way to make money off the BPCs you pick up (you don’t have to export them, usually paid in less than 24 hours), every Nightmare BPC you sell to us is one less that goes directly to our enemies, and NCdot and Skill U have already adopted Nightmare doctrines with others following soon.


Brief notes on capitals

Keep getting them.  But specifically, we are going to start fielding long range T2 sniper dreads more (turrets only, remember we are phasing out the phoenix).  These fits are in the capital forums, there’s very little change over other than you need to start purchasing the T2 long range weapons to use them, if you have t2 capital guns.  We need more T2 sniper dreads.

Also, with us moving all of our shield supers out of Esoteria and using our armor supers there for home defence, we need to start getting some Apostles there.  If you have the money and can find an open capital build slot, go for it.

Final thoughts

Personally, I’m pretty excited about the situation we’re currently in.  You can ask any of our other Strat FCs, I’ve been kicking around a lot of these subcap doctrine changes since January, and we’re now finally putting them in and we have a perfect opportunity to learn to use them.  The next few months are going to feature a lot of serious fights for serious objectives, there is no better time for us to improve as an alliance.  War time in EVE is always the best chance to grow and improve, but also the only time you can truly regress.  If you guys put in the effort to get your ships ready, get your capitals moved, take a little time to ask some questions about what you need to do in our various fleet doctrines before you join a fleet, I have no doubt we’ll take the final steps towards being a complete military force in EVE capable of defending our space against anyone.

All of the new and updates fits can be found here, if it isn't found here then it didn't change: