Week 15 of World War Bee had 13 battles and 18 total hostile actions, per INN’s tracking, roughly on par with last week’s 12 battles and 20 hostile actions. Querious and Delve dominated the headlines with multiple major fights in NPC Delve and SVM-3K, a key entrance point to Delve.
The ISK split in the war zone of the Southwest spread again slightly after the major fights to 66.76% to 33.24% for the attackers. In theater, 36.4 trillion ISK has been lost, up 7 trillion ISK from last week, with 310,500 ships lost, up 32,000 from last week. Across New Eden, since July 1, the ISK divide is now 56% to 44% in favor of the attackers, with 45.7 trillion ISK and 369,250 ships lost, up 7.5 trillion ISK and about 26,000 ships from last week. The war populations remain steady around 53,000 for the Imperium and 150,000 for PAPI. The average ship lost cost around 123,755,000 ISK. A rough estimate of the real world cost of the war is no less than 635,000 USD/476,000 GBP/533,500 EUR.
There were five battles in week 15 that exceeded total losses of 20 billion ISK. Two of the fights were the Keepstar kills, which INN treats as inconclusive results. One was a draw, while two were successes for the PAPI coalition, including the unexpected failure of Operation Enho.
The two major theaters are the North (Fountain and the border with Aridia and Cloud Ring as well as northern Delve) and the South (the rest of Delve, Paragon Soul, Querious, Stain, Period Basis, and Esoteria).
THE NORTHERN THEATER
As in previous weeks, Fountain is largely down to entosis warfare between The Initiative (INIT) and The Bastion versus enemies of the Imperium. Only five systems in player-controlled Fountain have non-Imperium iHubs, while many systems have no iHubs whatsoever. Tuesday, however, did have some action as Frenchswarm groups in the Imperium surprised a hostile gang in central Fountain, killing 4.3 billion ISK for 291 million ISK in losses.
THE SOUTHERN THEATER
Week 15 in the South began with Keepstar fight number three. The fight in 319-3D began in tandem with the initial anchoring period. Imperium scouts quickly discovered the station as Pandemic Horde was attempting to drop it in place. The Imperium quickly scrambled defense fleets and then, for seven hours, the Imperium sieged the Keepstar with thousands of ships, including hundreds of dreadnoughts, battleships, and battlecruisers. The Imperium traded 3,380 ships worth nearly 735 billion ISK to destroy the critical citadel, one of the least expensive trades for the same strategic objective of the Southern Theater. INN covered the action on its Twitch channel.
After the fight cooled down and the two forces returned to their various staging systems, Imperium forces regularly appeared on grid to contest evacuation ops to get PAPI ships home. Over the following 11 hours, the Imperium destroyed 13.7 billion ISK for 2.9 billion ISK in losses. While the Keepstar fight itself was happening, the Imperium’s Ranger Regiment and Dracarys fielded a Cerberus fleet and caught an Army of Mango Alliance Muninn fleet, killing 12.9 billion ISK for 4 million ISK lost.
After a largely quiet Monday, except for the low level battle simmering on the former Keepstar grid, Tuesday was a bit busier as PAPI forces attempted to assault SVM-3K and take down critical infrastructure in the important border system. The Imperium was able to save the Ansiblex jump bridge and the cyno jammer in system, but traded 85.5 billion ISK in losses for 38.6 billion ISK in kills. Later in the day, the Imperium’s Theta squad took back the iHub in W6V-VM, a system home to an Imperium Keepstar, two jumps from one of PAPI’s major staging systems in P-ZMZV.
Wednesday an Imperium bombing gang attempted to defend the Ansiblex in 0-HDC8, one system south of SVM-3K. They were unsuccessful as PandaFam successfully destroyed the Ansiblex and only lost 2.6 billion ISK, while killing 6.6 billion ISK including the jump bridge. The highlight, however, of the day, was the Imperium’s aforementioned Operation Enho, the fight on a Fortizar armor timer that led to one of the great strategic gambits of the war. INN covered the action on its Twitch page.
Once the timer fight was set, the Imperium staged 20 titans in the system, logged off with pre-assigned safe warp-ins. The Imperium believed that PAPI forces almost always deployed supercarriers to the same areas, allowing for mutual defense in offensive fights. This, however, would allow for a spectacular ambush of titan AOE doomsdays, with maybe a couple dozen titans wiping out hundreds of supercarriers. The Imperium tested the theory as exhaustively as possible, except they weren’t able to test it in time dilation.
As the fight kicked off, the Imperium escalated to supercarriers and used them on the Fortizar grid to fight against the hostile dreadnoughts, chewing loads of them and inviting PAPI supercarriers to the fight. As if scripted, the supers loaded into the grid close to the Fortizar, clumped together. The trap had been sprung as the bubbles went up around them and Imperium titans warped in and fired their mighty weapons. Ten minutes or more passed by and the horrible truth began to dawn – the server hadn’t registered the devastating hits, it was a horrid damp squib. From that point forward, the rest of the battle was largely mop-up as PAPI dropped titans to wipe out the helpless Imperium titans. The effort cost the Imperium 2.5 trillion ISK in exchange for 806.9 billion ISK on the PAPI side.
Thursday was interesting as PAPI anchored their fourth Keepstar in Delve, catching the Imperium partially flat-footed as they tried to get dreadnoughts on grid to begin pausing the timer, only for the titans on grid to doomsday and wipe them away. Quickly, the Imperium determined that there was too little time to finish stopping the ticking clock and decided to postpone the fight to the onlining timer on Friday. The Imperium lost 31.8 billion ISK in the attempt. The remaining action boiled down to two fights in the SVM-3K pipe. The Imperium caught a PAPI Ferox fleet, killing 7.1 billion ISK for roughly 2 billion ISK in losses. A bit later, the Imperium killed 2.1 billion ISK for 600 million ISK in losses.
Early Friday morning, the Imperium successfully defended iHubs in SVM-3K and D-3GIQ. Friday’s action was mostly down to the 4th major Keepstar siege. Beginning after mid-day EVE time, the siege extended 10 hours as the Imperium once again threw dreadnoughts, battleships, and drone boat battlecruisers at the citadel. The grid began flooding with the opposing sides shortly ahead of the onlining timers, filling the system with crushing tidi and ostensibly preventing PandaFam from docking, manning the gunner’s seat, and installing the critical Quantum Core, giving the Imperium half an hour or more of time to attack the Keepstar with no damage cap and no repair timer starting. INN covered the action on its Twitch page.
The human wave siege cost the Imperium 1.2 trillion ISK and drew spotlight-intensity focus from the Imperium’s leadership. The back and forth of the fight provided immense human drama as the timer came unpaused several times, getting as low as six minutes away from onlining in real time. During the fight, a TEST entosis gang managed to take the iHub for RJ3H-0, a distant Period Basis system, and TCAG-3, a border system with Paragon Soul.
Sunday the PAPI coalition successfully onlined a Keepstar in NPC Delve, their fifth attempt, although largely uncontested as Imperium pilots reported that they were unable to load the grid and experienced crashes, even in performance mode. This was due to 149 warp disruption bubbles completely surrounding the Keepstar, which denied the attackers the ability to land on its grid.
ELSEWHERE IN NEW EDEN
During the Keepstar fight, Dreadbomb caught a hyperspatial fit Brave Vendetta with nearly no tank.
