The Triglavian Boat Roam

Dabigredboat, DBRB, announced earlier in the week that we wanted to have a celebratory roam.  I am still not clear on what we were celebrating… destruction in Tribute, a safe return home, some nice summer weather… but the roam was on.  The only restriction was the requirement to bring along a Triglavian ship.  It was to be an all-Triglavian roam.

That actually covers a few options these days.  Since CCP released the Into the Abyss expansion back in May of 2018 they have regularly added new Triglavian ships to the list.  The EVE University is behind on the list, showing only the seven available from before the Invasion expansion, leaving out the Nergal (Assault Frigate), Ikitursa (Heavy Assault Cruiser), and the Draugur (Command Destroyer).

These new ships actually got me to turn training back on with my main, since I was quickly falling behind in my old goal to be able to fly all of the subcaps.  For the two people who miss my skill point progress update posts, you can rejoice, as another one will probably hit in August.

As of right now, I can fly the whole lot of them, and even mount the tech II disintegrator on the Leshak battleship.  However, I didn’t actually own any of them.  As far as hulls go, they are still pretty exotic and more expensive that their empire contemporaries, especially the new tech II hulls.  And for a DBRB roam, where the expectation is always that you’re going to get blown up, buying into something that expensive seemed like a bad decision.

But I did have a cheaper option stashed away.  One of my high sec alts has been running level 3 abyssal sites off and on and had collected a enough materials and a BPC to build a Damavik, the Triglavian frigate, the baby of the bunch.  But DBRB didn’t say I had to have a Leshak or anything exotic, just something Triglavian.  So I had my alt fly it up into Aridia where I picked it up with my main.  I was soon docked up in 1DQ1-A and ready for the roam.

Of course I bought a SKIN for it

My fit, for those interested, was:

[Damavik, ▷▼◇△▽◄ ▷▼▽◄ ▷▼◇]
400mm Rolled Tungsten Compact Plates
Damage Control II
Limited Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I

Initiated Compact Warp Scrambler
Fleeting Compact Stasis Webifier
5MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive

Light Scoped Entropic Disintegrator

Small Ancillary Current Router I
Small Anti-Kinetic Pump II
Small Trimark Armor Pump II

Acolyte II x5

Nanite Repair Paste x8
Baryon Exotic Plasma S x500
Meson Exotic Plasma S x500
Tetryon Exotic Plasma S x500

That seemed enough like a tackle fit for me.  I couldn’t fit the tech II disintegrator, but I also wasn’t keen to pay the price for one either.  Anyway, if you’re going to tackle you don’t need a big gun.

When DBRB pinged for the fleet, I got into game and into the fleet, ready to go.  The fleet managed to swell up to about 100 players and, as DBRB reported, we had at least one of each of the Triglavian ships, with quite a few Leshak’s in the mix.

DBRB had us all name out ships using the Triglavian triangles text (some here) and spam local as we moved with that.  With that set we were soon warping off to adventure.

On our way at last

We took the Eye of Terror up into Cloud Ring, then headed off into Deklein to see if anybody was home.

A Damavik and a Vedmak in warp

Nobody was home.

To be fair, Ranger Regiment, a Chinese alliance, lives there now, and we were way out of their prime time.  But it was odd roaming through our old space with nobody about.

We traveled through there a while when DBRB decided that we ought to head more towards the east and Pandemic Horde.  As we headed into Tribute we ran across a Talwar fleet from Darkness, which the Leshaks pretty much destroyed.

Disintegrators hitting Talwars

43 Talwars and 2 Sabres were blown up, as the last few ships got away.  But I had to stick close, as our smaller ships were at risk.  The enemy managed to pick off a Kikimora and a few Damaviks, which balanced the ISK war out, probably in their favor, as I think Zkill undervalues the Kiki.  But at least it was action.

After that DBRB pointed us in the direction of Geminate and Pandemic Horde.  They seemed to be home and maybe up for a fleet action against us.  Word was that they were forming Feroxes to come and get us.  We hauled up on a gate not too far from PH space and waited for them to head our way.

Triglavians hanging around a gate

After some shifting around, we ended up meeting the Ferox fleet in 0-R5TS.

Things did not start auspiciously for us.  The Ferox fleet naturally wanted to keep at range and managed to take out a couple of our ships, including DBRB’s Leshak.  However, we managed to get a command destroyer to boosh us on top of the Ferox fleet and our Sabre… there are no Triglavian interdictors yet, so he was allowed in… managed to get a bubble up.  At that point a slaughter of Feroxes commenced.

At that point it also turned out that DBRB got some backup.  Seeing that the Ferox fleet outnumbered us substantially, he got The Initiative to show up with 50 bombers who joined in on the fun.  This time around I was able to get in close enough to get on a few kills, though having drones along for the ride made that possible as the tech I disintegrator is a short ranged weapon, even with the long range ammo.  The battle report went heavily our way.

Battle Report Header

After that DBRB reshipped in a Leshak when somebody needed to log off.  There was talk of PH reforming and chasing us down again.  However the Initiative bombers hung around behind us, and before we could turn around to assist they had inflicted enough damage to drive the hostiles off.

That left us up in Vale of the Silent, a long ways from Delve.  DBRB had us head to low sec, with the fleet docking up in Obe, not too far from Jita.  From there we were left on our own to get our ships back home.

I enlisted my high sec alt again, who flew out to Obe to pick up the Damavik and fly it back to Aridia again.  I was going to self destruct my main for a quick jump back to 1DQ, but the decided to just follow my alt through high sec in a capsule on auto pilot, daring anybody to take the shot.  An empty pod is worth less than most anything that can kill it before CONCORD steps in, so I arrived safely, picked up the Damavik to fly home.

And so it went.  Not necessarily a roam for the ages, but it was fun to see all those Triglavian ships hauling about space.

Triglavian ships in some fireworks

They’re still too expensive for me to thrown around, but they are a change from the norm.

Being a Distraction from Venal

We formed up again in Venal last night to put pressure on the locals.  There were several citadel timers in play around Deklein, so we formed up in Venal to be a force for which GotG would at least have to account.  If the fought us that would draw them away from the timers, which other groups were planning to contest.  If they let us be then we could get up to mischief of our own.

Ishtars were the doctrine for the night and we were given a bridge after we undocked to get us to the locals.

I wonder how many bridges I’ve take over the years…

That got us to WLF-D3, the gateway system to Deklein via DKUK-G and the GotG staging system to counter out move to Venal.

We moved around the system, visited next door, came back and decided that the locals were going to stay away to deal with the timers deeper in Deklein, so we went looking for targets of our own.  The first on the list was an Athanor that was mid frack, a giant hunk of moon being drawn slowly towards it.

The moon chunk looming large

We were not going to be able to stop the frack, which would require us getting it down to the structure timer, but the Athanor was in the process of being unanchored.  All we had to do was get the first timer set and the unanchoring process would be halted and would need to be resumed again after the timer passed.  So we pulled up to shoot it.

Ishtars strung out and shooting

A gunner got going on the Athanor and began lobbing bombs at us, so the small stuff had to warp off and logi had to wake up for a bit and cover anybody who caught the brunt of a couple of bombs, but otherwise we carried on.  The wind up for a bomb was such that when the Ishtars were stopped and had sentry drones deployed they could pull the drones, take the blast, then drop them again to carry on shooting.  We succeeding in putting the Athanor into its first timer, scuttling the unachoring.

We then spent some time shooting at a POS, deactivating a few modules.  Shooting a well armed POS is a bit different as the weaponry will start shooting even is nobody is gunning the POS.  As we did that the news came down the line that the GotG had successfully defended its timers and it seemed like we might be headed home at that point.  We started moving back towards our staging.

However Asher stopped us a few systems into the trip then turned us around and back to DKUK-G.  We were going to see if GotG would take a fight when they returned home.  In DKUK-G it seemed like we were being setup for a capital drop.  Asher said they were trying to draw us in, bubble us, and drop carriers on us.  We bounced around the system a bit, then went through to WLF-D3 again where we ended up facing off against GotG’s Eagle fleet on the far side of the gate.  Things went well for us there, the Ishtars chewing up their logi and then burning down Eagles until they started moving off.  Logi had some work to do, but we kept most everybody alive.

The Oneiros I was in during the fight

NCDot had some Jackdaws around as well and we managed to pick off a couple of those including the ship of LadyScarlet, the CEO of Destructive Influence, a corp whose alliance history shows it being in Band of Brothers, KenZoku, and IT Alliance, all past foes of the Goons, so every time she is on grid she is the first target called and there is a cheer when he ship goes up.  Blasting an old foe is always a morale booster.

We also blew up another of Hendrink Collie’s Monitor FC ships.  Expensive ships are always fun to blow up, though they are getting cheaper as production of them ramps up.

We ended up in control of the grid around the gate, in sight of their Keepstar, not too far off from where Sort Dragon lost his titan on Saturday. (See this Reddit post for a screen shot.)

Trailing our coats in sight of the enemy Keepstar

Overall GotG won their objective, but we managed to extract a cost and give them a few minor headaches.  The battle report from both fronts showed the ISK war well in our favor.

Overall Battle Report for the Evening

Things were tilted more in our favor if we exclude the other front and just look at the battle report for the Venal end of the engagements.

The Venal end of the night

That was the sort of fight we’ll take every night if we can get it.

Afterwards we went back to our staging and stood down.  There was an AUTZ timer coming up in a couple of hours, but staying up until 07:00 EVE Online time on a weeknight is well beyond my capability.  And so it goes, we continue plinking away at GotG.

Capital Ships Battle in VFK-IV – What Year is This?

In the ongoing tribulations for Guardians of the Galaxy in the north, a director of Slyce Alliance defected and flipped a Fortizar citadel in VFK-IV to the Imperium.  Nice to see that EN24 can still get a scoop these days.

Fortizar in VFK-IV

(Screen shot from this Reddit post)

For those not paying attention or with short memories, VFK-IV was once the capital of the CFC, the staging system from which operations were launched back when I joined TNT and went to null sec.

Me, in a Drake, at VFK-IV station in 2011

It was the scene of the “VFK Headshot” against Goons back in the summer of 2011 which led to the tightening up of the then somewhat loosely aligned DekCo into the unified CFC.

It was also the location that ended up as the oft repeated catch phrase “VFK by February” back when White Noise Alliance said that Deklein would be free of Goons by then.

And, come the Casino War, it was a location we did not bother to defend.  Instead, we holed up in the Quafe Company Warehouse in Saranen to concentrate our forces and try to resist the invasion by chipping away at the invaders.  Eventually we packed up our husbanded resources and took the long trail to Delve to setup shop and rebuild.

The old station at VFK-IV

We lost VFK-IV almost exactly two years ago.  That feels like a long time ago.

VFK-IV Station Today, good through June 5

And then I woke up this morning to find that not only did we suddenly have a Fortizar in our staging system of old, but that a battle had developed.  GotG was using fighters to reinforce the Fortizar and we dropped dreadnoughts on those and GotG escalated with their own dreads, and soon a full on battle was going.  The battle report still seems to be updating, but the numbers look to be in our favor so far.

Of course, I missed the whole thing, but I thought it was one of those moments worth noting in the ongoing and seemingly escalating conflict in the north.

Notes from the Pure Blind Front

We’ve been out on this deployment to the north for a while.  I do not think my main has been back to Delve since some point in November of last year.  Back at the start we were running around in VNIs shooting ratters with the same ships they were using.

VNIs leaving the station

I haven’t written that much about the deployment as this sort of guerilla warfare doesn’t always make for interesting tales.  We go shoot structures and drop on miners and ratters.  There are a few posts if you click on the Reavers tag and scroll down the posts, but that does not represent our level of activity.

However, recently a few things have happened, not all of which I was there to see first hand, so I thought I would sum up a bit of the situation.  A year from now we’ll see how all this played out, but for the moment this is what has come up.

Changes Over The Last Month

As I noted previously, Pandemic Horde moving to Geminate left something of a hole in the north that the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition was looking to fill.  They started off right after the whole million dollar battle thing by clearing all of our structures and aggressively camping our staging station, keeping it bubbled and watched.

This is a bubble camp

They seemed to tire of that after a few days and we were soon able to undock to clear the bubbles and kill some of their forces.  Eventually they gave up on that, but would aggressively defend the structures they had planted all over the system and attack any that we dropped.  Then they lost some titans and seemed to give up on activity in our staging system.  We have since been able to drop structures and chip away at theirs in system.

The New Normal

Recently we have had to go into GotG space to get them to form up, since they mostly leave our staging system alone.  We have been into the Darkness capital system to drop structures, or to reinforce their structures, on grid with their Keepstar, acts that don’t always get a response.

Shooting one of their structures, Keepstar visible

We’ve been into Deklein drop structures and reinforce their stuff to see if we can get a rise out of them.  We don’t always form up to defend what we drop or reinforce.

Deploying a Raitaru, visible between the Keepstar uprights

There was a Sotiyo engineering structure we hit, setting a timer.  A Sotiyo is where you build capitals and super capitals.   That they formed up to defend, but when the timer hit we were nowhere to be seen.  Depending on who is telling the tale, one of the titan pilots that formed up either blew up his own titan by playing the self-destruct dare game because they were bored or self-destructed and rage quit the game because they were assured we would show and we didn’t.  They self-destructed a super carrier as well.

Either way, reinforcing that Sotiyo ended up costing them a titan.  So we went back and reinforced it again, along with other structures.  And when we’re not doing that people are still out hunting miners and ratters.

A Rorqual we got after reinforcing that Sotiyo again

The Strange Tale of Bad Juice

At one point in a prod at GotG Reavers chief Asher Elias went to Reddit and posted a link to an enthusiastic video showing the locals shooting a small, undefended Imperium tower.  It was very much in the usual spirit of what happens in /r/eve, a bit of a laugh about them posting that but not fighting us.  Golf clap level stuff.  The video itself got some extra views and a few wry comments and the person who made the video, who we saw in space later that day, seemed chill about it.  More views are better, right?

Then the video maker freaked out, posted another video accusing Asher of cyber bullying for posting the link which ended up bringing legions of haters to his video and declaring that Asher could be facing up to 10 years in prison (according to Texas law).  And then there was the declaration that he wanted to face Asher in an MMA style cage match, a post which he took down because he said CCP Scorpion threatened him with a ban if he did not.  CCP Falcon showed up in that thread to say there was no CCP Scorpion and that he didn’t know anything about any of that.

The drama seemed to be too much for all concerned and the pilot ended up the week looking for a new home.

A MOA Defection

Mordus Angels, who long waged a low key guerilla war against the CFC then the Imperium when we lived in the north.  While their solo war was never more than a nuisance, once the Casino War opened up they found themselves with many allies as we were swept from our space and, in the aftermath, found themselves holding sovereignty.  They soon became part of the GotG coalition, “blue-trals” to their neighbors, and open to ratters and miners and getting fat on the bounty of null sec space.

Now it is us sitting in an NPC station waging a guerilla war against them and their allies.  Despite the occasional hysterical cry that we’re there to invade, we’ve just reversed things.  We just happen to have the economic power behind us to drop suicide dreads.

As the Monthly Economic Report earlier this week indicated, ratting and mining is down and not so very lucrative in Fade, Deklein, and Pure Blind where a lot of GotG lives.  Up in Branch however, some of the coalition are working away relatively unmolested being out of easy bridge range.

That MOA was suffering while others were making bank seemed to set off one of the MOA corps who defected to The Imperium, bringing with them some assets and snapping the local MOA owned jump bridge network.

Anyway, having been in our coalition for almost six years at this point it is bizarro world strange to have a MOA corp defecting to us.  But then, the MOA that lives in Pure Blind now is hardly the MOA that used to live in 5ZXX-K for all those years. (And a couple more corps, FWCEF and FWS, left MOA after A.N.D defected.)

Space Violence Arrives

While a couple of Imperium SIGs have been wandering the north for a while looking to harass and interdict the locals, it has often been a low key affair.  And then the Space Violence SIG announced that they had arrived with ~400 dreadnoughts and were looking for trouble.

The thing with low key is that, while the locals know you’re around and can guess pretty accurately what you can muster (and what it will take to counter), but the rest of New Eden is pretty oblivious unless something big happens, and then they only know after the fact.  That is too late for third parties.

Will a big splashy announcement about Space Violence’s arrival in the north shake things up?  NCDot has come over from Tribute to support GotG on occasion, but they know the drill, that we’ll just fade away if they bring enough supers.

Response by the Locals

Confirming what I mentioned up a way, the GotG response to our presence has gone from aggressively going after us to not forming to fight, this coming from a leak from GotG leadership.  The expectation is that they can time zone tank their structures and we’ll get bored and go away. As Asher notes, not fighting is a legit tactic, and one we have to use ourselves up in the north where we can easily find ourselves outnumbered if the locals form up.  But given our past, I think it will take a while before we tire of shooting structures and dropping our own.

Anyway, unless a war involving us breaks out somewhere in New Eden, I think we’ll be the north for a while longer.

Delve – Now With Contract Values

The Monthly Economic Report for March dropped on Friday and contains all the usual fun data to peruse.  This is the first MER since CCP Quant left the company, so we get to blame any errors on the new minder of the report, CCP Larrikin. (We’ll get to that.)

Going down the usual path I want to look at mining first.

March 2018 – Mining Value by Region

Mining value was up in Delve by almost a trillion ISK.  This came in the face of sagging mineral prices in the market overall.

March 2018 – Economic Indices

That means that there was just more mining going on in Delve, likely related to the ever expanding moon mining operations in the region, all of which left Delve at the top of the stack again.

March 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

Of note are the rather static month over month value of Querious.  I was wondering if that might go up due to Locust Fleet, the attempt to mine out all of the moon mining operations in a single day.  Perhaps that did not go as well as planned.  I heard it was of to a rough start, but did well enough to carry on again this month, running yesterday.  We’ll look back again next month to see if that raises Querious.

Also of note are the falling mining output numbers for Fade, Pure Blind, and Deklein, regions in the north that have been hunted by several Imperium SIGs.  They are all down noticeably over last month, more so than the dip in prices would explain. With the departure of Pandemic Horde for Geminate, the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition has pretty much ceded the staging systems being used against them and has adopted a defensive posture, allowing the Imperium to do its fighting on their home turf, inhibiting mining and ratting operations in those regions.

And since we’re on about that, I might as well move to NPC bounty payouts where, as expected, Delve remains at the top.

March 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

The change is moderate, up about a trillion ISK for Delve… what a world when that much ISK is a moderate change… so holds its place in the stack ranking.

March 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

As noted above, the regions in the north being stalked by Imperium forces saw some impact.  Deklein, once number three on the list, fell back to fifth, having shed nearly a trillion ISK from its 3.6 trillion ISK February number.  In this case a trillion ISK represents more than a 25% drop.  Likewise, Fade saw a significant drop, while Pure Blind wasn’t hurt too bad, but its February number wasn’t that hot to begin with.

As usual, null sec remained the prime recipient of NPC bounties, with its percentage dropping a bit, from 93.3% last month to 93.1% this month.

March 2018 – Bounties by Space Sec Rating

Overall however bounties saw a noticeable dip on the sinks and faucets chart during March, though it recovered somewhat by the end of the month.

March 2018 – Top 8 ISK Sinks and Faucets

I am not sure what was going on during that part of the month, but overall NPC bounties are down some.

On the production front Delve saw a huge surge in March, jumping from 29 trillion ISK in value in February to just past 40 trillion ISK last month.

March 2018 – Production Values by Region

This surge managed to push Delve past The Forge, the region that is home to Jita, in total production value.

March 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

That is quite an accomplishment but, as I have noted in the past, Jita sits at the intersection of three regions, The Forge, Lonetrek, and The Citadel, so production centered on the marked hub of New Eden still exceeds Delve overall.  Still, the Imperium is building a lot of stuff as The Mittani encourages people to train into titans.

On the trade value front The Forge remains dominate.  There is a reason manufacturing is clustered around there, it is the place to sell things.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region

The dominance of The Forge and its Jita market nexus is made starkly clear by the bar graph.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

The next two contenders, Domain, home to Amarr, and Delve, fade in comparison to such an extent that CCP provides the same graph without The Forge every month, just so you can see how the rest of New Eden compares.

March 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

There you can see how the other regions compare to each other when the shadow of The Forge is removed.

This month we got an additional insight into trade when CCP Larrikin added charts about the value of contract transactions per region.  Unfortunately, the main chart appears to have problems.  It is not labelled correctly (it just says trade value by regions) and the number for The Forge is clearly wrong. (Blame assigned.)  However, the accompanying bar chart appears to be correct both in labeling and data, so I will toss that in.

March 2018 – Contracts Trade Value by Region – Bar Chart

Here The Forge is still on top, but Delve is not too far behind.  This is likely due to the fact that doctrine ships are generally purchased by line members assembled and loaded via contract and because capital and super capital purchases are also often done by contract.

Finally, I will end on the usual chart, the comparison of various stats across key regions.

March 2018 – Regional Summary Stats

Things to look for next month:

• Will Fade, Pure Blind, and Deklein remain down?
• Will the Space Violence SIG showing up in the north push them down further?
• Will the “Bee Control” attacks on Delve suppress its numbers?
• Will the Locust Fleet boost Querious mining?
• Will Delve production remain this high?
• Am I going to have to bring up Fountain at some point?

Anyway, that is my look at the New Eden Monthly Economic Report.  The report itself has many more charts and the raw data on which they were based, so if numbers are your thing you should go take a look.  Over at INN they have taken the raw data and rolled a few of their own graphs, if you want to see some of the data presented in a different way.