this is our dam, scrub
H1Z1 INVASION UPDATE: CONTROLLING THE CENTER
What a difference three weeks makes: we may not be the best FPS players in the world, but no one can out-adapt or out-organize our community when we go on the warpath; now that we have gotten our bearings and begun to sink our claws deep into this first ‘other game’ conquest, we’re starting to squeeze its heart. Our first H1Z1 stratop – an alarmclock at 14:30 EVE on Thursday, with only eight hours of advance notice – resulted in a total and permanent lockdown of the best territory on all six of this game’s high population servers. This is not a soft or timezone-variable denial, but a mechanically unavoidable conquest which will persist until the next server wipe.
HOW DID WE GET HERE: A WAR STORY
How did we go from floundering helplessly on Antidote on May 1st to locking down every G6 Dam location on every server that matters in only 20 days? The same way we have begun every invasion campaign in Eve in the history of this coalition.
Invasion day was an utter disaster, reminiscent of the launch of the Fountain War. We did not know the game, the new wipe and patch introduced a series of bugs which particularly impacted us more than any other player group (the dreaded Loading Bug, curse its name) and what we’d learned in the two days of casual play pre-Invasion didn’t apply to the terrain on the day of. Our first attack was on Antidote, a single high population server, and we found that our mass and the small size of H1Z1 shards left the game essentially unplayable. Within six hours of contact we had to completely scrap our plan and invent a new one on the fly, a familiar process to veteran sov-warriors.
The next few days we began importing our best practices from Eve: we redistributed our groups into small fleets led by skirmish commanders, except now they were squads under a base commander, and retreated to the Medium population servers. We spun up a Mentor org and a Logi org, created a H1Z1 directorate, began standardizing weapons doctrines and rapidly prototyped a standard Imperial Outpost design. When these advances were implemented, we began testing our new methods and doctrines by shifting our bases on every server from F4 to the crucial G6 Dam location, a hotly contested high value source of weapons, metal, and backpacks located at the center of H1Z1’s chessboard.
The outpost design was a success, our players had begun to learn the game and began using organization and mass to win over ~elite fps pvp~ foes. G6 became our world on the medium population servers, and then our raiding began. Established and secured, we soon found the Imperium were masters of dead shards: we owned the Dam, we annihilated the bases of our foes, and soon there were no more foes to conquer. Time to move.
Meanwhile, our skunkworks and hijinks department – never official, yet always a key to our victories – came up with Dicksticks. When that happened, I knew immediately that H1Z1 was ours. The mechanics for punji sticks changed at this last patch, yet our gestalt creative hive-mind came up with an even more obnoxious and effective tactic: the Tamp Stamp.
Which brings us to Thursday’s alarm clock op, and our inevitable dominance of the best location on every single high population server in H1Z1.
Map courtesy of www.h1z1db.net
THE IMPERIUM RETURNS TO ANTIDOTE: THURSDAY’S STRIKE
We will be doing this for every server wipe, and we will do it better and faster than any small group of hostiles will ever be able to accomplish. There is no longer any need for opsec, though until the op launched Thursday morning no one attending has a clue what our plan was besides our builders and commanders.
Like with Sov in Eve, control of territory in H1Z1 is key to controlling resources, supplies and weaponry. Before we arrived in H1Z1, groups would use a ‘ground tamper’ item to control a square of ground and build a base on it. Tamped ground lasts for four weeks and cannot be destroyed, and limits the tamping of anything near it by someone not affiliated with the original owner. On Thursday we prepared maps of the key locations around the G6 Dam, and sent six teams into six servers. They did not merely tamp the ground we needed for our own bases, but used the tamping mechanic as a denial method anywhere near our G6 Dam base.
Before Thursday, Imperium forces were engaged on every server with a number of hostile local groups who had set up shop on the Dam. After this op, hostiles must run a gauntlet on foot (because we have blocked the bridges to only allow our vehicles access to them) while being relentlessly sniped in order to get anywhere near the Dam. Meanwhile, all the high value item spawns of this area are being hoovered up into our Outposts, essentially uncontested by anyone save rogue hackers.
That is where we are today. Even if we choose to play actively on only three of the six high-pop servers to concentrate our forces, pubbies literally cannot build any effective base near G6 on any high pop server due to our tamps, nor will they be able to do so until the next server wipe.
IMPROVEMENTS OF THE PAST THREE WEEKS
We have changed just about everything we’ve done since the start of the campaign, as is typical of a coalition assault. We have upgraded TMC Mumble security to cut down on infiltrators. We have a much faster line of response on hackers by reporting them via email ( [email protected] ), we have standardized and optimized base designs, we have a G6-specific map with common geographical labels for ease of recon, and we have an excellent quickstart thread to onboard new players and rocket them up the learning curve in minutes instead of hours.
In terms of swag, our free giveaway items are now tradeable on the Steam Marketplace, and the bugs which rendered them suboptimal have been fixed – the His Regards Machete now cuts properly and our Tac Helmet stops as many bullets as the unskinned version. We’ve even got our own private server coming, named ‘Tranquility’ for maximum irony.
Perhaps the biggest surprise has been how willing Daybreak has been to incorporate our feedback, fix bugs, nuke hackers, and generally ~listen~ without needing to be bludgeoned with the obvious. You can drop your personal feedback for them in this thread.
THE SWAG MUST FLOW
We’re doing a marathon weekend of H1Z1 nonsense to capitalize on our capture of the G6 locations and consolidate our holdings. We now not only have been able to make NVIDIA items rain on our guys, but this weekend Razer joins the party with even more giveaways, on top of the existing in-game His Regards skins. We even have more World of Warships beta keys incoming as well.
What was once an alien, unproven concept when we laid it before our community, taken on faith alone (and thanks for that faith, by the way), has now been proven in practice. We have gone multiplatform, we have begun killing and sowing chaos, and we are seeing direct benefits as hardware vendors compete for the attention of our line members. Giving everyone SRP in Eve is grand, but making real-world stuff rain from the heavens on our guys is even better. Our coalition is even stronger in our home base in Eve Online as well, because when we play other games, we do it with our friends from this coalition, so when the shit hits the fan in New Eden our bonds will always be stronger than our single-platform foes.
JOINING THE CHAOS
We’ve made it stupid easy compared to the early ‘oh god what do’ days. Get in, the water is warm and full of tears.
- First, read the Quickstart Aryth helpfully penned. Everything is there! Seriously, that’s it. (Editor’s Note: the same basic information can be found in the Surviving the Horde guide on TMC.)
- Join [email protected] for pings and information.
- Get on Mumble and ask which server we’re murderzoning, it’s obvious from the op channel names.
- Here’s the SA thread, if you want to keep an eye on it.
- If you encounter a hacker, get their name and report them (video helps, if you have it) here: [email protected]
(Editor’s Note: Alliance Updates are aimed at internal audiences and usually are considered the gospel truth by their membership but vile propaganda by everybody else. You should definitely know this by now. This update comes to us from The Mittani)
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Ryan Vincent.
