Esoteria War Update

Posted by prometheus09 on October 26, 2009

The Captains Log 26/10

 

The last week has seen the steady grind of POS warfare on both sides of the fight. Goonswarm would put our POS’s into reinforced, we would then rep them and then put some Goon POS’s into reinforced only for Goons to rep them. So far this has only taken place in two systems, A1-AUH the chokepoint for Esoteria as it divides the region into four parts (North, East, West and South) and G-YZUX, which is one of the station systems allowing for SOV 4 to exist. There is little actual fighting going on between us due the time zone differences between the alliance (Goons US and Sys-k Euro), despite this there have being a few battles when the play time of both the alliances overlap, with Goonswarm putting Stealth Bomber fleets to good use when attack the Sys-k battleship fleets.

The start of the war also saw the start of a new propaganda war with the Mittani releasing chat logs of a Simmering Rebellion taking place in Systematic-Chaos, in which the CEO and a Director of I.M.M and a i.NET director were talking with Zapawork about siding with Goonswarm in the coming war. Liam Freeman (the Sys-k leader) passed this off as a joke of which he was fully aware of. The fact that these chat logs have being released to me indicates that any deal that may have been made has fallen through otherwise the Goons would not be releasing this information and giving away their hand. Furthermore, as a member if I.M.M I can say that there is a lot of anti-goon feelings in the rank and file and that any pro-Goon decision made by the leadership would not sit well with them and probably lead to a insurrection in the corp ranks.

The biggest battle to take place so far occurred on the weekend when 16 Goonswarm POS where coming out of reinforced, which lead to a 500+ strong allied fleet turning up for the fight giving them the numerical advantage. The battle resulted in a large number of Goonswarm capitals being destroyed along with the majority of the POS’s that were coming out of reinforced. Goons claim the capitals lost were a suicide fleet as their insurance was about to expire.

While this loss may have not bothered the Goons much the loss of their Titan in a separate battle with Red Overlord probably did. Apparently a Goon mining POS placed in ROL space came under attack so Goons jumped in a Titan without support which was promptly tackled and engaged. So Goons launched a rescue mission with another Titan, which successfully allowed the original Titan to escape only for the second one to be caught and destroyed.

 

So the big question is why is Goonswarm invading Systematic-Chaos space? Well the first and the simplest answer is to give their members something to do. As a PvP alliance they have to keep their members active otherwise they may just disappear forever. However, the possible strategic reasons for the invasion offers further insights, which can be seen in the Goon post here. Basically the objective of this war is not about territorial conquest but to induce a failure cascade in Sys-k as they are the alliance the fields a lot the sub-capital support in the Stainwagon coalition. Be removing Sys-k from the equation the Stainwagon coalition will have a large cap fleet but limited sub-capital support, thus removing the whole coalitions as threat for awhile. Furthermore there had being rumours going through the alliance that Sys-k would soon be invading the space formally occupied by KIA and now Zenith Affinity. Invading Esoteria therefore is a pro-active from of defence.

So how long is this war going to go for? Well providing that Sys-k doesn’t failcascade I don’t foresee this war going on past Dominion (depending on how Sov is going to work) as with the release of the new Sov system all the major alliances are going to have to pull back and consolidate what they currently hold. Also from what CCP has released so far it does not seem that interregional wars are going to be the norm now, instead there is going to be more intraregional wars. Even if Goons mange to obtain the space occupied by Sys-k they will most likely not be able to hold it very easily post Dominion (again depending on how Sov works) thereby allowing Sys-k, or whatever it is afterwards, to reclaim it. So all Sys-k has to do win is hold the fort for one month. If we can do that we have won the war.