Mass flipping tonight. Caldari have started, but the short notice has them at a disadvantage. They'll still likely flip a large number of systems over the coming days, perhaps enough to swing the warzone heavily into their favor. Things are more dire for the Amarr.
Color me surprised. The situation actually turned out in reverse.
The Amarr rallied rather well, especially given their outnumbered state. They flipped every system they could get their hands on. Battle lines are setting and, while the Minnies are making a major Kourm push, I can see this war front settling into a stable parity with the PvP focal point being the usual three or four systems. Amarr militia went from 2% on the FW bar to tier 2 and rising. That's impressive, given the odds arrayed against them.
The Caldari, on the other hand, are doing much worse than I expected. I thought they'd secure the majority of systems, or even dominate the war front except for a handful of Gallente systems. This is why I thought they'd accomplish this:
1) The Caldari remain the largest militia, numerically. This isn't just a matter of farmers flooding their ranks (the Minnies have the same issue). They've got some rather sizeable and active pvp blocs that are spread out throughout the war zone.
2) The Gallente / Caldari warzone is the larger one, and 50-60 of all Gallente systems were Vulnerable when this change was announced. That is a
lot of deplexing - it takes quite a few more man hours to secure the Gallente/Caldari warzone as compared to the Minmatar/Amarr one.
3) The Caldari have demonstrated the capacity to deploy many dreadnaughts in bunker-busting. The Happy Endings alliance did this during their last tier 5 push, popping bunkers at a rate of one every ten minutes.
Privately in the Gallente militia, we were discussing the worst-case scenario of being pushed back to just our staging systems and having to mount a concerted campaign on neighboring systems to get the bare minimum to push into tier 2.
This scenario didn't happen. During the last three days since the announcement, the Caldari flipped a dozen systems on the first, three systems on the second, and just two systems on the third. Their lethargy as we brought more and more systems out of vulnerable was hard to understand, and we were often asking each other "What are they doing?"
At the moment, the Gallente hold a rather strong majority of systems. There is still room for the Caldari to flip the 6 or so remaining systems that are vulnerable, and make a push to seize many of the systems still above 90% vulnerability. We'll see what the next 48 hours bring.
