Kesper North, of The Imperium’s Corps Diplomatique, delivers the August 2015 Diplomatic Update.
AUGUST DIPLOMATIC UPDATE
an update in August from the august body of diplomatic professionals in Corps Diplomatique
Dabigredboat rides Dabigredhorse into e-honoureable spacebattle on a Providence command node. Boat looks fabulous in that purple tabard, doesn’t he?
Welcome once again, friends. Another month has passed, and what a month it has been! We’ve led the first major campaign, brief though it was, in the FozzieSov era, and come away from it having learned a great deal. Unfortunately, most of it didn’t have much to do with diplomacy. We will, however, discuss the achievements of each Imperium alliance in the Provi campaign briefly, followed by our customary clockwise tour of the galaxy. On the other hand, isn’t any journey that involves faster-than-light travel clock-unwise by definition? These things could keep a man up at night. I don’t know how astrophysicists live with it.
The Imperium
Thanks to the Imperial Statistician, Kismeteer, we have some insight into our overall impact as a coalition. Keep in mind that our stated goal was not to capture sov or stations or any of that, it was all about the ihubs. (Hubba hubba!) Blowing up the ihub significantly lowers ADM and resets sov index to 0, which means that it is the key thing to accomplish when you want to take sov under the new system. This makes TCUs and stations more vulnerable, and means that the Providence residents, or Providents as we shall now call them, now have to contend with a much more precarious and vulnerable sov situation to deal with. Then add to that the significant investment they had made in upgrading all those ihubs – pretty close to half a trillion isk throughout the region. We managed to kill a simple majority of those ihubs. We didn’t succeed in burning the whole region down in three to five days, but we made a pretty serious dent in the Providents, and we learned a whole lot that will make our next campaign run much more smoothly.
The Bastion
The Bastion fared best out of all of us, destroying 7 out of 7 ihubs – one of the few perfect scores on the roster. Modest as ever, Carneros credits good organization on the part of his pilots and FCs, but also the fact that they encountered only token resistance in their assigned constellation.
Circle-of-Two
CO2 did not manage to kill any ihubs. They attribute this to MoA attacking their backfield in Tribute and generating timers that exited at the same time which CO2 was forced to save. Lesson learned: Retime your structures when you go on campaign into another TZ so that you can bounce back and save them later. This also highlights the benefits of having a bit of TZ spread in your alliance.
Executive Outcomes
EXE also wiped out all six of their assigned ihubs. This achievement should be noted, as EXE is a much smaller alliance than BASTN – however, again, they seemed to encounter only light resistance.
Fidelas Constans
FCON looks to have bit off more than they can chew – they took on a double-helping of 14 ihubs and only managed to kill 3 of them. The problem in this case seems to have been the difficulty of coordinating a large number of small fleets across spread objectives; having fewer objectives probably would have helped considerably. FCON found greater success when concentrating their forces, but by the time this was learned and implemented the campaign was coming to a close.
GoonSwarm Federation
We did pretty good! [:shobon:] 1011 out of 12 ihubs down, right in the CVA home systems, including their capital. Despite welping a titan in YA0 on the first day, and a fleet on the first day, and the absolute impenetrability and chaos of Alpha command chat. Good job, goons. But you should probably yell at that idiot Kesper North, who absolutely ruined your killboard by being the top ship loser across the coalition during the Providence campaign, and #8 overall across all alliances, according to Eve-Kill and Kismeteer’s stats. Better deny reimbursement until someone straightens him out.
(I haven’t applied for reimbursement.)
The Initiative
INIT had a respectable showing, bringing home 4 out of 6 ihubs home despite significant resistance. They cited the same comms and organizational issues as other alliances; a common theme, but it impacted INIT more than other alliances due to the fact that they run tight, disciplined fleets, and they can’t achieve the same level of coordination on our more chaotic comms. They also had some key personnel sadly unavailable during the deployment. INIT really took the initiative on this deployment, though, as they headed to Catch ahead of the rest of us and stayed after we went home.
Razor
Elite PVP alliance Razor destroyed one out of their six assigned ihubs.
SpaceMonkey’s Alliance
SMA also took on a ton of ihubs, capturing 5 out of 16 assigned despite heavy resistance, as well as flipping one system entirely, freeporting three stations, and snapping that constellation’s jump bridge, not to mention assisting BASTN with the destruction of theirs. They also did so with style: CVA sold them the dreadnoughts they used to do it, making it clear that CVA did not learn the fatal lesson of the old Northern Coalition. SMA worked hard, tried out a variety of tactics, and was starting to have greater success when we left Provi, but we had to monkey around on them.
TNT/LAWN
TNT and LAWN decided to work as a team on a pair of constellations, and ended up killing 45 ihubs out of 12. They encountered extremely heavy resistance from Yulai Federation and CVA, with substantial third-partying from Pandemic Legion, making it very difficult for them to make much headway. Adding to this difficulty was the fact that Mordus Angels tried to headshot TNT’s capital during the deployment, and TNT ended up having to go home and deal with that, impeding their progress. TNT also reported a similar issue to INIT, with key personnel being unavailable during the deployment for RL reasons.
Overall
We learned an Imperial ton and gathered a Metric ton of data. Most of the Imperium’s member alliances acquitted themselves well considering the circumstances, and we’ll be applying this very educational experience to our future campaigns.
Flyover Regions (Cloud Ring/Syndicate/Outer Ring)
Not much going on here. The OSS, I like your goofy mobster bear logo as much as the next gent, but I think you should be a bit more ambitious with your next AT ads. As often as we saw them, they got a little stale, whereas Camel just fucking knocks it out of the park every time. Watch and learn, guys, watch and learn.
The Southwest (Fountain/Delve Triangle)
So much news in this quadrant, you’ll need a quad bike to get around! In Fountain, Black Fleegion is evaccing back to lowsec following an announcement by their lead diplomat, Capri Sun Kraftfoods stating that FozzieSov is untenable and un-fun. This isn’t terribly surprising: Black Legion have always been more of the rootless mercenary types, and seeing them bother to hold Fountain in any meaningful sense at all was a little odd. Some of their renters are trying to form an alliance and hold some of the space they are vacating – fun content for the Fountain Core residents, no doubt.
Capri Sun Kraftfoods is notable for getting his character names off the back of his food packaging. He clearly ran out of Pizza before naming his character, because Pizza is actually disbanding! Primarily due to leadership burnout, loss of sov, and the collapse of their nascent coalition. The individuals behind Pizza are scattering in the wind, but they have a habit of staying in touch, so we may one day see a fresh ex-ex-Confederation of Pizza (ex ex).
However, it would seem that Capri Sun is out of juice. In an explosion of internal toxicity, disorganization and political coups we haven’t seen since the last time Brave Newbies tried to go to the corner store, Elo Knight and Ipsemus got into a dispute over a member who was overly critical of BL that led to Elo Knight using his shares in the executor corp to reclaim the alliance CEO position ingame. At this point it appears that Elo is now the official leader of BL once again. However, he and Capri Sun have very different outlooks on the future of the alliance: Capri Sun said that BL was “functionally dead” in a SOTA and was critical of the plan to become a lowsec alliance, saying that most of the current alliance leadership had no interest in following it whatsoever. Elo Knight gave his own SOTA a few hours later, which appeared to cause the internal conflict to spill over onto Reddit. Taking a “keep calm and train blockade runners” approach, Elo downplayed concerns about his leadership style and focused on the lowsec plan. You can read more about the conflict in r/eve and this helpful summary from TMC, which links to Soundcloud recordings of both SOTAs.
Meanwhile, NCDOT has been pushing into Delve and seem to be trying to become sovhavers once more. :ughh: We don’t need to deploy there again…
Southeast (Stain through Cache)
Not much to report here – Stainwagon continues to fight RA and friends, but it’s mostly a relatively low-key slapfight rather than a serious campaign at the moment. GemCo was too occupied with their own concerns about FozzieSov to participate much.
Providence
The Providents, particularly CVA, have generally been very diplomatically decent about all this. For the first time in history, we actually had diplomatic contact with them, after CD veteran Cindare dropped into their public channel and started speaking to them in their own language. We’re on a path to having regular diplomatic relations with them for the first time in history – generally they simply refuse to speak to us at all, so Cindare deserves a lot of credit for tearing down that wall!
On the other hand, Providence never did bend the knee and kiss the ring of Max Singularity. The True Emperor himself is rumored to have retreated to a secret desert planet, a holy place spoken only of in rumor and whispers until now: a world known as the Burning Man. Our Emperor is taking refuge there following death threats after the sudden and unforeseen termination of the False Empress by Drifter forces. He has still been hard at work, however, as he has built a new temple there in the desert wastes. We have received a transmission from him saying that he is safe and well, and that work on the new temple has begun – and he included a picture:
Northeast (Geminate and Drone Regions)
UAxDeath is mad as hell, and he ain’t gonna take it anymore! Death really, really hates FozzieSov, and he took XIX on a two-pronged campaign to demonstrate that displeasure to CCP. First, he instituted a “Russian Burn Jita” campaign that got your humble narrator’s Ibis killed on the 4-4 undock, which went on for the better part of a week. Then XIX deployed with us to hit the “fake Provi” constellation of Catch that stitches two segments of Providence together. This took us a little bit by surprise, as we hadn’t planned to bring them with us, but Death wanted to have the opportunity to show ways in which FozzieSov is broken, and he figured the best chance of finding cracks in the system would be to tag along with us as we got into the nitty-gritty of it. We’ve had no word on their level of success, unfortunately, although it’s unlikely that they were able to get any object lessons from the exercise that CCP will take seriously.
Nulli Secunda
Making a quick note to mark the passing of Nulli Secunda, who disbanded formally in an orderly drawdown following their defeat in ATXIII. Nulli has been in organ shutdown for some time now, but our final victory in the South at the end of the Dominion era pretty much caused them to flatline. Still, they were a great alliance and a big name for many years. We wish their former pilots well in their future endeavors. However, we do have to note that the death of Nulli Secunda does not come as much of a surprise. CCP has a long history of tolerating inactive members on the CSM – I should know – but Gorga was so inactive that he was actually removed from his position on the council after Jayne Fillion’s call for his resignation last month. If you’re so inactive CCP boots you from the CSM, your alliance is clearly not going to be getting the attention it needs either.
Confederation of xXPizzaXx
As mentioned in the Southeast section, Pizza has gone stale. We actually tried to reheat it with some fresh sovsauge on top by offering Pizza a couch to crash on, but Pizza’s members declined to eat that particular meal and instead decided to compost themselves. Their caloric content will be snapped up by other alliances, scavenging raccoon-like through the dumpster of dead alliances.
We’re very sad to see them go – Lucia Denniard is a leading light in the diplomatic world, and Pizza was great to work with. We wish them well, and hope we see them again wherever they end up.
The CSM
Stepping in to replace Gorga is UAxDeath, a guy you may have heard of. Death, as mentioned previously, is very unhappy about FozzieSov, so I suspect that CCP is about to have a whole lot of angry Russian in their Skype channels to contend with.
Back to the studio
Thanks for joining us for this, the third Diplo Update in three months! We’ll be back next time for more fun-filled [:words:] and maybe, just maybe, a pun or two.
If I have played my part well, clap your hands, and dismiss me with applause from the stage.
– Augustus Caesar, while dying.
(Probably in a Hecate, trying to kill tackle before getting owned by a RLML Cerb, if he was anything like me.)
Editor’s Note: The above was authored by Goonswarm Federation’s Corps Diplomatique, and is posted for the entertainment of all. CEO, Alliance, and Diplomatic updates are best understood as works of propaganda geared for internal consumption. The views expressed here in no way reflect those of TMC.
