This is a discussion thread for friendly out of character questions and answers, debate and brainstorming to support the in-character campaigning of the Star Fraction in Placid Region.I’m going to begin the thread with a recap of history to include the initial deployment and conflict with Moira/Rote Kapelle/Veto corporations and link to some IGS campaign writing and outcomes from our perspective and would welcome other participants to link to their own IC material if they please.
I’d urge everyone to keep their tempers, post constructively and look for ways to progressively collaborate on storylines and involvement in the future. Let’s have as little nit-picking as possible and absolutely no suggestion that anyone is doing their roleplay wrong!
So background to the current events: With the conclusion of the Fraction’s deployment in Kamela/Providence with the fall of Ushra’khan Providence to the Evoke/Ewok hordes and our rearguard against On the Rocks/BDEAL/Teutonic Guard (and many others) at the beginning of the year – we decided to go back to basics for the Star Fraction.
We’d had our fill of 0.0 politics again, we’d supported our allies in the destruction of CVA Providence – we’d tried our hand at building a FreeSpace outpost in YWS0-Z and we’d have a pretty damned good narrative in its defence and our terrible revenge against those that betrayed the Ushra’khan and ourselves in the fall of free Providence.
But our membership wanted to do something different now, and wanted an entirely new region and focus, with different roleplay ideologies at work and a different cast of characters to interact with in various ways. We’d had the vote running for a while and Placid Region was coming tops. I think truth be told we were done with Amarrian space and the 24th Crusade vs TLF conflict and done with CVA – we’d been focusing on this for years and it was time for something new and perhaps a return to some anarcho-capitalist strands in the tapestry of our foundation.
Placid was favourite because its proximity to Intaki / the likely presence of I-RED and their allies (for good or ill) the generally pirate-haunted systems (very busy for plenty of pvp) and the close availability of 0.0 when we were in the mood to roam. We felt that simply by setting up in Ostingele (a notorious pirate hotbed system that predates on neutral trade from stacmon) we’d create a splash and get all the interest we needed to build freeform intrigues and adventures.
Roleplay wise we were looking to come with no preconceptions this time and to let diplomatic engagements take their own course. We didn’t know if we’d be fighting I-RED and their allies in Intaki or concentrating solely on pirates, or getting targeted by some other entity out here. We left it to dynamic interaction.
Our first weeks were pretty exciting – we got slaughtered by the local pirates! Every time we put out a gang of shield-battlecruisers or armour hacs we got countered by somebody bigger and better prepared than we were and even the local Australian timezone group were kicking us ten ways from Sunday! We chose to call the general campaign we were fighting “Welcome to Osten-hell” for this reason and resolved to wise up or die since this was exactly the kind of action we came to Placid to find.
Roleplay possibilities were happening already though – I-RED proved to be considerably more open to negotiation and coexistence than we’d expected and their own experiences with Nationalism in the area were forming their opinions in tandem. We agreed a ceasefire and neutrality and attended the memorial service at their invitation this year to the surprise of many. Local Intaki separatist corporations were also in touch with us – looking for ways to cooperate and coexist and we could simply respond with our intentions to boost the economy of the region and respect all neutral trade and commerce while hunting gcc hostiles and regional road-blockers. Was good stuff!
We were learning our lessons from underestimating the local pirates also, but then a new factor reared its head. Rote Kapelle (mainly in the guise of a trial corp) Lucifiers Hammer were getting involved with our operations – while an ex-rote kapelle corp “Moira” were interfering with our pilots while we were fighting pirates in Ostingele. Moira had already earned their -10 for shooting one of our torpedo-bombers in Syndicate a few weeks earlier.
For a few days a cold-war environment persisted – the Moira CEO trying to goad our pilots into gcc’ing on stargates and larger Moira gangs bumping our ships around while we were trying to catch the local rats in Macherials. It was increasingly provoking our pilots and when Moira finally spoke up in local to the effect that Star Fraction “wasn’t welcome in placid” we decided enough was enough and proposed a snap wardec to the membership to allow our pilots to deal with these -10 (but not gcc) hostiles.
The Vote passed and we were at war. Initially we considered this purely a tactical decision to stop Moira messing with our patrols and decided not to declare it a formal campaign with attendant IGS threads etc. But Moira on the other hand decided they could make mileage from the fighting and launched a thread + blog post + twitter feed to show their appreciation for the war.
***
As I said in the earlier locked thread by Scagga. This is definitely an RP war from start to finish. The Star Fraction has been roleplaying freespace anarchists since the server was switched on. We’ve produced ideological material with a richer campaign history than most PF entities and I think we’re probably as recognizable a faction (fraction) as anything in the npc sphere. Most players in the game understand what we’re about and how to provoke a conflict with the Free Captains.
I believe Moira also have a clear RP identity that promotes their opposition to Sansha alongside their Federal Gallente nationalism so when we hear in local that Moira pilots consider SF presence in placid to be an unwelcome destabilizing factor in the region that symbolizes a desire for decent RP interaction that allows both ideologies to tangle in space. More or less I think the progress of the fighting thereafter developed this to good effect.
We decided to establish a staging and manufacturing tower in Pelille System a few hundred thousand kilometres (ie next moon over) from the Moira HQ “Argos” where they had their laboratories/reactors and silos and was the central base for their operations. It’s our belief it is always best to risk something in space during these conflicts and since Moira had a tower in the conflict zone we needed one also for them to have a chance at shooting back at. Also, we wanted to demonstrate our commercial credentials by having our tower manufacturing combat drugs in space for our enemies to see.
In terms of win conditions for the conflict we were content to be dynamic again. At the baseline our “win” is simply to remain in placid and not be interrupted in our business in space – we wanted to react to Moira’s win conditions on this occasion and since the initial public RP statements from Moira suggested they wanted to drive us from the Region this seemed quite compatible and a good basis for conflict.
Over the first 45 days of the war we saw a lot of interesting development:
Early on we took quite a few losses while Moira were competent as a tight unit and punished our unwise pilots taking on heavy odds. But we were still in a logistics phase truth be told and for the first 10 days most of our pilots were still moving appropriate ships to place – or preparing for action in Pelille System We were evolving tactics we’d ultimately need to eliminate the Moira HQ tower in the dangerous environment of lowsec Placid. It was quite amusing to read the IGS posts from people betting on a Moira "win" that that early stage - we stayed quietly confident and said little while getting our warmachine into high gear.
By the end of week 2 we’d turned the tables on Moira and were beginning to be fully dominant in space while the Cruise-Missile Raven fleets we’d designed were able to incap the Moira tower with impunity – things were going pretty well up until the farrago over Veto’s involvement as intermediaries seeking a peaceful solution to the conflict etc.
This was ultimately to come to nothing because Moira proposed that an IGS posting ban would be part of the ceasefire term and that was never going to fly with our free captains.
I also get the distinct impression that neither Soter nor Verone really believed me when I told them I could not make the ceasefire/accept their surrender terms unilaterally and would need the free captains (full membership of the Fraction) to vote on the issue. This in itself will make an interesting follow-on discussion because I do think the existence of a genuinely democratic corp/alliance structure in Eve online does blow people’s minds a bit and I’d like to answer people’s questions on that matter.
Anyway, ceasefire didn’t happen and SF went on to suffer the most painful 24 hours in the entire conflict. Veto and Rote Kapelle got involved on Moira’s behalf and destroyed a couple of expensive ships during our POS attacking (Rooks and Kings also randomly hotdropped us killing another 6 ravens) – temperature of the dispute increased and I think my message to Veto telling them its ceo would no longer be required as an intermediary might have added to the fury!
It got brutal – large fleets of Rote and Veto kept backing Moira and looking for a decisive fight against us while we got increasingly cunning in our tower assaults against Moira – operating with stand-off vessels in short duration strikes to incap half a dozen tower modules to force Moira to spend hours in toil repairing them only to do the same again the following night. Rote got frustrated with this and claimed we never wanted to fight them – we agreed, we never did want to fight them while we were busy with the Moira POS, which was very true. We are guerilla fighters and we'd much rather pick off loners with high powered sniper rifles than go toe to toe with a massive enemy force in trench warfare.
Then came the 2nd day of the alliance tournament; Rote Kapelle and Veto assembled (what I’ve been told) was the biggest CTA in their collective history – a force of 102 vessels with a significant proportion of capitals and supercaps that arrived in precise timing as our tournament match began, in order to assault the Star Fraction towers in Placid. Each of the Rote/Veto ships were named “gl in the tourney” and their cyno ship was named “better luck next year” – and fortunately for Rote/Veto we lost badly in round one with our curse/bomber tactic disappointing in its failure.
It was quite a hit but rather than getting despondent it actually motivated our pilots and there was a mood of grim determination now to overcome this enemy coalition, survive, save our towers and continue with the destruction of the Moira HQ. Rote decided to add insult to injury by wardeccing us (presumably to take less sec loss during the reinforcement battle for the tower)
Still we've been the underdogs before (more often than not in fact) and we simply did the preparation and hard work needed for victory.
We saved our towers with a huge flock of logistics ships when they came out of reinforcement (22 shield logistics at one point) – we’d been both hurt and aided by the patch day downtime – on the one hand it did get in the way of rote/veto planning for the reinforcement battle / but it also moved the timing of the reinforcement battle from midday euro (our chosen fight) to mid evening euro (which rote/veto can operate in) and for some bizarre reason the Pelille tower had remained on 25% shield throughout the entire extended downtime ... bah. But in the event Rote and Veto could not muster a force and we saved the towers and then took the opportunity to massively upgun then for a potential 2nd round of defensive warfare.
The following week was cagey – we again decided to play carefully only attacking the Moira tower in 20-30min slices while watching Rote/Veto extremely carefully in their home system with a vast collection of subtle spies.
We knew we could keep up the attrition warfare as long as it took – but an organization like Rote/Veto needs to feed the “thrills” of its membership and give them kills during a fleet op so denying this is generally as good if not better than actually killing their ships. Remember at this point we are laser-focused on the objective which is the Moira HQ – Rote and Veto at best a distraction at worst a way of letting our primary targets off the hook.
And then of course there’s the wilful independence of free-captains. Thinking of ways to hurt our new war-enemies a small group of our pilots decided to find and assassinate Rote Kapelle mission-runners over 20 jumps from the conflict zone. We managed 3 of these high-profile kills and each time there was quite an impact from the Rote killboards on the issue and some apparent divides came to light about the willingness of Rote to actually fight such a war.
Which is another interesting aside really, since traditionally when we thought of Rote Kapelle many of the old guard of Star Fraction imagined they’d just be like we were in the Kimotoro campaign but x10 in terms of member numbers – and we had this vision of being permacamped and hunted by ourselves in effect. But reality was dawning – adding 10x the numbers doesn’t make 10x the number of resolute and enthusiastic hunters and as an organization Rote currently is probably much less dangerous than KD era SF was simply because of the necessary focus on kills and killboard activity over targeted assassination and genuine psychological warfare.
In actuality Rote functions just like any other 0.0 power really, powerful in a group certainly, but difficult to motivate for individual acts of creativity and genius most especially in relation to principled ideological warfare. The only people we really need to fear would be an enemy who could put in our own levels of effort in mission stalking/intel-gathering/deep and surgical assassination of targets. Post conflict assessment of Rote Kapelle is that the rank and file simply doesn't care enough about the old ic feud to put the effort in to progress it.
Anyway, 2nd weekend of the alliance tournament came around and we put in a good result that was unfortunately not quite enough to qualify but we left the competition with our heads held high after thrashing the opponents with route one battlecruisers and now eager to finish the job on Moira with no further distractions.
It also looked like Moira itself had decided to “advance in the other direction” from Pelille because their CEO declared a new operation on their killboard called Dikosyn based around Sinq Liason and the Rancer pirates. This was 20 jumps + from Pelille and most of the active Moira fighters were disappearing fast. No public notification or diplomacy but you learn to read the signs when an enemy decides it’s not happy with the status quo.
We planned a finishing blow on the Moira tower knowing they’d either have to come back from Sinq Liason to fight it or leave their HQ to burn. Then to our amazement discovered the tower appeared to be improperly fuelled and all the weaponry had gone offline (happens when you run out of liquid ozone) – seizing the opportunity with Fedaykin bombers we reinforced the tower and then incapped all the offline weaponry setting ourselves up for a favourable opportunity to finish matters at primetime on the following Sunday.
The fight itself was quite a good one. Moira did show up and skirmished with tech2 frigates and cruisers and eventually opened a cyno for a small group of Rote Kapelle carriers to jump through and attempt to smartbomb our bomber group. This was marginally successful for Rote (they killed a bomber) but they almost immediately withdrew to their home system and played no further role in events.
We completed the destruction of the tower and salvaged the economic structures – ferrying those across to Agoze where we placed them on the market at the Moira Lowsec Bazaar.
***
So in conclusionThat really is the current state of play and I think it’s likely that will be all she wrote on the Moira war. We quite happy with the outcome in the Fraction and consider that we’ve proven our point and asserted our ability to travel freely where we choose and conduct economic activities anywhere we want to. We see the conflict in the context of a Nationalist/road-blocker aligned entity attempting to deny access to the radical anarchism of the Fraction and being defeated in that aspiration. It was excellent to see a smallish conflict spiral into something bigger with two very large and powerful alliances attempting to lean on the Fraction and attempt to support Moira as a Proxy and created a lot of entertaining back and forth on the forums to be sure!
A couple of days ago I sent an open letter to the Moira membership with a suggestion of the surrender statement they might provide if they wanted a formal end of hostilities (ie return to neutral standing). It’s entirely up to Moira if they want to do this or simply withdraw to another region of space and remain -10 KOS after the formal wardec elapses when we decide its usefulness is over. The detail of the surrender terms is up to Moira to mull over, but I don’t mind if Julianus was to repost it here – my intention was simply to assure the Moira players that we had absolutely no intention of insisting Soter should leave his corp as a price for peace.
Speaking personally I quite like a proper tidy outcome to wars where one side will publicly acknowledge its defeat but I do accept it can be a difficult thing to do when trying to save face etc. I think we'd be happy to see Moira remain -10 if thats what they choose and who knows - we'll probably get many more opportunties for snap recurring wardecs in the future should they get involved with public events again - everyone wins from this kind of entertainment.
In any case I’d like to thank Moira and their CEO for this conflict and their part in providing some quite good roleplay at times and interesting IC propaganda, blog-posting and such. It has been good to re-acquaint ourselves with Gallente Nationalism in this way and definitely provided a significant boost for the enjoyment of our membership this summer.
For anyone interested in the IC progression of events the following IGS posts tell the story quite neatly: Soter's Opening post (sets the terms of the war etc)
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=1#1Soter updates with some kills and Titan sighting
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=1#27Our first public report (war so far)
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=2#58Our second public report (post veto/kapelle intervention)
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=2#60http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=3#61http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=3#62Timeline of the conflict (to the veto/kapelle intervention)
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=5#148http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=5#149http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=5#150Our third public report (post destruction of the Moira HQ “Argos”)
http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#219http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#220http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#221http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#222http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#223http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1505380&page=8#224***
Looking forward to post conflict Placid I think now we’d be very interested in future collaboration with other RP organizations in the area while we get back to honing our skills and engagement methodology against gcc regional hostiles and roving marauders intent on sucking the life from free trade and open commerce!
As noted at the beginning of this thread I’m very happy to answer questions posed in a friendly and open manner and I’d love to get involved in a respectful discussion over any elements of Fraction roleplay and ideology people might like to explore.
All the best!
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Topic: Star Fraction in Placid: Now what? (Read 14808 times)