I have recently been seeing a lot of chatter tonight about the new developments concerning the ongoing war within EVE. With the recent announcement of N3 joining with TEST (Reddit) against CFC (Something Awerful Forums) I wanted to know from more veteran players if this is the biggest war EVE has had? Also wanted to know if someone could further explain why CFC need to invade Fountain, is it simply for ISK gain or does it put them in a more powerful position within the overall universe?

Thanks

** Also if anything I said here is inaccurate please correct. While I may play EVE Online it is rather hard to decipher all of the incoming information about the political landscape of the game. **

CFC is invading us (TEST) for isk, as our moons in Fountain and Delve are rich in R64, now the most valuable moons in the game. Taking sov from us does both things you mentioned - gives them money, which comes from being in a resource rich region.

As far as the size of the war.. It's definitely the biggest we've had for a while. I'm not sure if the great Fountain push originally, when we (TEST) gained control in the first place, was bigger or not as I wasn't there.

I don't know shit about EVE, but I find the topic fascinating, so let me ask you a couple of questions:

What does it mean in EVE when two corps (or alliances or whatever) go to war with each other? Does it just mean that when two ships of different factions run into each other, they start shooting, or is there something more to it? Like, are there generals and commanders? Do you plan battles and invasions? Like, does a message go around on some mailing list or forum that says "All right guys, on June 24th at 3 A.M., we're all going to attack Moon X. Don't tell anyone!"

Are there, like, battalions and regiments and that kind of stuff? Like, is some user in charge of commanding a bunch of battle groups, each of which is composed of some number of members? Because that seems like it could be pretty awesome.

Sure, so going to war in the game sense (creating a wardec), only applies to Empire space so Concord doesn't concord you when you shoot at people.

In nullsec, the policy is generally NBSI (not blue, shoot it), so even if we weren't at war with each other, we'd still shoot each other if we saw the other side.

In terms of the Great Fountain War that's ongoing (and, due to real life, am probably going to have to quit EvE and therefore miss the rest).. you typically organize around timers. Timers are when an infrastructure hub (IHUB), territorial control unit (TCU), or station are attacked. What happens is at a certain shield %, they go into "reinforced" mode, which means they're invulnerable until the reinforcement ends. The rough time frame is set by the corp that owns it, and then that number is added to or subtracted to by CCP to determine when it actually exits.

Once it exits reinforcement, the defenders either have to rep the shields (or armor, if it was an armor timer) back above the reinforcement threshold, or the attackers have to keep shooting it to get it into the armor timer, in which case the above happens all over again, but this time for armor. If the defenders fail to defend the station in the armor timer, it can then be destroyed (in the case of TCU or IHUB timers), or station changes ownership (in the case of station timers).

So those are the big fights we rally around. 1-SMEB, which we fought over three times, was all about an IHUB shield timer, and at least 2000+ from both sides (combined) participated in those battles. We do schedule some other ops, but nothing specific since there are spies everywhere. We have some in CFC, they have some in TEST. So nothing super important or opsec gets discussed publicly, and is typically only done by mildir (military directorate) and above.

We also organize via Jabber, and pings go out constantly for fleets that go on roams, or go gate camp, or station camp, or go kill some SBUs (which, I led a Naga fleet the other night to kill some SBUs and ended up losing about 20 Nagas (at a cost of about 125mil each) to bombers. Oops).

As for as generals and commanders.. sorta, yeah. We have our high bloc-level fleet commanders (FCs) that run our main fleets in large battles, then quite a few skirmish FCs that run our fleets in big battles if the bloc guys aren't around, or for smaller battles. Then we have our bootcampers (of which I'm a part), which basically anyone can join, and we go lead fleets on roams or some structure shoots (like SBUs, sovereignty blockade units), and other stuff that really, we'd like to come back alive but it's not always a guarantee.

Does that answer your questions? I feel like I got a bit rambly/off-message there, so let me know if I didn't.

@theimmortalbum: I have to applaud you for explaining that as well as you did, good job.

@gkhan@theimmortalbum

I don't know all the facts, but IHUB & TCU are things sitting in space that convey benefits and establish ownership (also known as Sovereignty) of a star system to a certain alliance/corporation. To "own" a system you need own the IHUBs & TCUs in that system and your enemies need to blow them up and "anchor" their own to take ownership of the system.

Owning the system confers benefits. For example it lets the owner control who can dock their ships in the stations in that system. Being able to dock means being able to change ships, get into new ships when they invariably get destroyed etc etc. It gives you a "safe" (as long as you own the system, or are on friendly terms with the owners of the system) place to put all the stuff you need in order to keep fighting.

I just thought that might be worth adding...

Pretty much everything that @theimmortalbum: has said. Fountain is being invaded for a massive landgrab of the R64 moons. CFC had a cushy life before, where they managed to control a large amount of ISK and they had it easy. Now the money has been taken away from them, well, they want it back.

I've been out on a few fleets so far with guys from TEST (With them myself) and it's brilliant. Seeing jumps into system with 500+ people is incredible, especially with some of the battles that take place. A good place to, well, at least see a lot of media surrounding the current war is going to be here or here. However, both of these places will have ~spin~ placed on them, because one side will always spin things to their viewpoint.

But, it's also a great way to keep at least mostly up to date, without asking/trying to follow the action within the systems.

Good to know

because you're here forever.