Alpha Mael: Reloaded

I’m finally getting out of Saint Louis.  I’m sitting at the airport, waiting for my flight with nothing better to do.  So I figured I’d post.

A couple of days ago I posted a description of the Alpha Mael fleet doctrine that most alliances have adopted.  Now, I’d like to go over its limitations and usability as an effective fleet doctrine.  Keep in mind that I am just a peon in the beast known as TEST Alliance.  Another brick in the wall, as it were, ready to absorb the impact of yet another TEST dummy.  Most of my ideas are either my observations, or opinions based on those observations.

Critical Mass

Because the alpha fleet doctrine is based on doing huge amounts of damage in one shot, alpha fleets require a certain “critical mass” in order to be effective.  If there aren’t enough Maelstroms in your fleet, then your combined alpha might not be enough to get through your primary’s buffer.  Therefore, you’ll have to cycle your guns and get off a second shot.  By that time, the enemy logis have already locked up your target and have repaired whatever damage you did in the initial volley.

Counters?

The Alpha Fleet doctrine is based on arty Maelstroms, which means its weaponry is largely ineffective against close range, fast moving, low-sig res shiptypes.  If you’re an Amarr pilot, the first thing that should come to your head is “ahacs!!!!”  The ahac, short for armor heavy assault cruiser, fleet doctrine is designed to be effective against most long range battleship setups.  It typically consists of pulse zealots armored with a 1600mm plate and decent resists.  They use 10mn afterburners, as opposed to MWDs, in order to keep their speed up and sig radius down.  Coupled with damnations for armor gang boosts, mindlinked lokis for sig radius boosting, and guardians for logistics support, the ahac tank is extremely tough to crack.  In addition to their incredible tanking power, they have a huge punch for being fit with very few damage mods.  And as a final touch, as if they weren’t already totally awesome, they run cap stable with hardeners, an afterburner, and five heavy pulse lasers.  Ahac fleets are my favorite. 

In theory, ahacs should be the perfect counter against the long-range BS based alpha fleet model.  This theory, however, is shattered by lag.  If you’re not familiar with large scale sovereignty warfare, lag is EVE as air resistance is to the real world.  It slows everything down, drains energy, and makes theories difficult to test.  If it weren’t for air resistance, a bowling ball and a feather would both hit the ground at the same moment if dropped from the same height at the same time.  If it weren’t for lag, ahacs would dominate alpha fleets.  In the early days of the fountain war, IT put this idea to the test and called for ahacs to counter the Dekco alpha fleet poised to defend the PNQY station.  The IT ahac fleet failed miserably.  Although I can’t say for certain why it failed, it’s widely known that lag was particularly bad during the assault.  In order to be effective, ahacs have to be able to maneuver very well.  They have to be able to get into range as a group, as well as warp in and out at will.  Lag does not permit this.  In addition, module lag means that the differences in cycle time that level the dps between artillery and lasers are nullified, and large artillery ends up heavily out-dpsing pulse lasers.  In this particular instance, ahacs were not the best of choices, and IT paid dearly for their mistake.

As far as I’m aware, ahacs have not been properly tested against the alpha fleet doctrine, and they likely never will be.  The “critical mass” requirement described above means that alpha fleets are inherently large.  Large fleets mean serious lag, even on reinforced nodes.  It’s not likely that ahacs will ever have a fair shot at beating alpha fleets, and even if they do, it won’t be a fair fight because the Maelstroms probably won’t have enough in fleet to actually be effective anyway.

$$$

Alpha fleets were implemented with the intention of limiting the effectiveness of enemy logistics.  Given their popularity, what you often see on the battlefield is two alpha fleets throwing volleys at each other until one drops bellow its critical mass and is no longer effective.  Both sides often take heavy casualties, and a fully rigged and fit Maelstrom is an expensive ship to lose.  Like 240mil+ expensive.  Considering insurance, lose five or six Maelstroms, and your fleet has already lost over a billion isk.  That’s too much loss for the average Joe to support on his own, so only alliances with hefty reimbursement programs can support this kind of warfare.  Listening to the Sys-K alliance meeting, they make two points very clear: 1) no, they don’t have a reimbursement program, and 2) they want their dudes to show up in Maelstroms for the fountain war… I hope they have some serious tricks up their sleeve, because it won’t be long before their members jump ship, so to speak.

On the flipside, large, powerful alliances like IT have huge coffers (according to Molle, IT has a thousand billion isk!!!) and can spend spend spend.  Because of the heavy losses endured by both victor and vanquished in alpha battles, the richer alliance can, in theory, wage a war of attrition, hoping to eventually bleed the enemy of its resources and its will to fight.  After the loss of Z30, this is the position that IT took, and SirMolle told his alliance that he has plenty of money to spend of reimbursements and that his FCs were instructed to never call off ops for any reason.  Listening to him say this evoked images of the opening scenes of “Enemy at the Gates”, where Jude Law and his comrades are mercilessly thrust into German machine gun fire, only to be shot by their own commanders when retreating from a hopeless situation.  Thus far, Molle’s tactic has yet to be tested, as the stunning commitment of Dekco forces in the siege of 6VDT seems to have taken Molle aback, and IT seems to be less active militarily.

These are just my thoughts.  Any insight is appreciated.

:Facepalm:

OR-F2F

That... I... oooooppphhhh.

Ok, to be fair, close range (CR) battleships (BSs) (sporting webs and target painters) is a very good way to beat ahacs.  And Evoke are very good PvPers.

That said, this battle shouldn't have been that one sided.  the NC ahacs had Evoke out-dps'd and had more logis.  From what I've heard from others, it sounds like the NC FC anchored his fleet 40-50km off of the enemy fleet and started calling primaries.  This is outside of ahac range (about 30-35km for pulse scorches) but almost exactly at CR BS optimals.  It sounds like he didn't know what he was doing.

There are some reports that command assumed that Evoke was bringing long range (LR) BSs, which are really popular in 0.0 warfare nowadays.  And if that was the case, then their tracking would have been horrible at 40km.  But tbh, you should never assume long range when you see a ton of abaddons and tempests on field.

There are also reports that a lot of the NC dudes brought a sniper hac setup instead of an armor hac setup, which would have been disasterous.  I don't know if this is true.  I didn't look at every killmail individually, but the ones that I did see were all armor hac setup.

Alpha Mael

No, the title isn't a typo.

I'm currently snowed into Saint Louis because of the storm that's stretching across my continent.  I'm about 2000 miles from my desktop, so atm, I'm not very busy in EVE.  I decided to take a break from watching Weeds (great show) to write about the current fleet doctrine that most (if not all) major alliances have adopted in last few months: the alpha fleet.

It's a pretty simple concept, really: overwhelm your enemy's logis by dealing so much damage on the initial blow that they can't lock and repair the primary target fast enough.  But let me back up for a moment.

I like to think of myself as an educator... no really, before I got into nulsec, I had no idea what the hell a "logistics ship" was.  Since I heard a statistic that more than 70% of characters never see nulsec, I'm thinking that at least one of my readers has no idea what I'm talking about when I say "logis."  But I digress.  Typically, in a large gang warfare there will be two general shiptypes essential to your fleet: a tank and gank shiptype and a logi shiptype.  Tank and gank is pretty straight forward: ships with heavy buffer for tank and ok dps.  The logis (short for logistics) are a shipclass in EVE that are roughly equivalent to priests in WoW; they repair freindly ships that are being primaried by the enemy.

Lag is bad... obvious right?  Well, in large gang warfare, it causes a lot of problems for logis.  In a high lag situation, when an enemy switches primaries suddenly, some of your logis are going to be trying to cycle their reps and won't be able to respond very quickly.  Therefore, you would only expect a fraction of your logistics force to be responding to a friendly crying out for help.  This makes things easier for the enemy fleet commander (FC) and forces you to scream at your dudes for more logi participation when you formup a fleet.  Despite lag still being horrendous, CCP has made quite a few improvements that have made it much less of an issue than it was six months ago.  So, a few months back, FCs started to realize that the now heavy logi participation (with reduced lag) was making the drake army (the popular fleet doctrine at the time) very difficult to kill.  This is when FCs started to think of ways to take logis out of the equation.  They came up with an elegant solution: the Maelstrom.  The Maelstrom has a decent buffer tank and, fitted with 1400s, does a ton of alpha damage.  Its damage is somewhere on the order of 10k damage per volley.  Of course, the cycle time is insanely long, which evens out its dps.  Nevertheless, with this fleet doctrine, at least in theory, your boys should only be able to get off one shot each before the primary target goes down anyway.

Practically speaking, this fleet doctrine has lived up to its promise.  I remember hearing stories about the early days of the Fountain war, where we would jump our alpha fleet right on top of a group of enemy carriers and pop them in two volleys.  And, damn my name for starting with A-j, every time I bring an alpha fleet ship onto the field against another alpha fleet, I get one-shotted before I can lock anything on field.

Most alliances use the maelstrom as the backbone of their tank and gank, but they also supplement the doctrine with another battleship.  The first time I heard of the alpha fleet doctrine, it was being used by IT in Catch against AAA.  They added beam Apocs to mix because they wanted to accommodate their members who had Amarr but not Minmatar skills.  This would be a tactical mistake that they would realize a bit later during the Fountain war.  Shortly after hearing about IT's doctrine, the goons announced their own alpha setup, using heavily tanked scorpions to add a little ECM to the mix while supporting the fleet close-range with smartbombs and neuts.  The goons refused to accommodate their non-matari pilots, reasoning that CCP was giving everyone an sp reallocation and that their pilots could use that reallocation to get the necessary skills for the maelstrom.  PL came out with a similar setup that used rohks instead of scorps, but nothing really came of it.  I think PL decided to stick with their famous hellcat setup instead.

Once the Fountain war rolled around, the differences in alpha setups would be tested.  The goon setup came out on top in most cases.  The reason: apocs can fit a weak shield buffer, at best.  The IT apocs would melt very quickly, and their number of effective combat ships quickly dwindled in every engagement.  This, along with the added ECM support from their scorpions, meant that the Dekco would win in almost every engagement.  Since the beginning of the Fountain war, IT has been trying to follow the goon lead a little bit and has been encouraging more of their people to bring scorpions to the battlefield.

If you live in highsec and you're wondering what impact this has had on you, check out the market data on maelstroms and everything that compliments the alpha fleet doctrine.  Keep in mind that the alpha fleet started to become popular in November/early December 2010.  Here's some six-month price histories on a few things that I literally just pulled up on my jita alt:

Since last November, the price of a Maelstrom has risen from a stable 95M isk to 125M isk.  Likewise, Scorpions have risen to 60M isk from 45M isk.  Meta 4 1400 prices have more than doubled from less than 3M isk to about 6M isk.  Also note the rise is sale volume.  It’s a sellers market.  The heavy battleship use nowadays might have something to do with the steady rise in mineral prices over the last few months.  But I’m burnt out on this post, so I’ll let you do the research on that one.

Until next time, good hunting, and I'll see you on the front.

6VDT

Hopefully you've heard, but just in case you haven't, the primary IT staging system in Fountain has been camped by Dekco/NC forces for the last four days.  All you have to do is open your map browser to see it.

Despite several scheduled formups and Sys-K chest beating during their alliance meeting, IT has made no serious attempt at breaking our control over the system.  Several small gangs, including stealth bombers logged off in system, have tried to temporarily disable our rape cages (warp inhibitor bubbles arranged to completely cover a POS, station, or stargate) by targetting the bubbles themselves, but they've been unsuccessful thus far.  Unless IT can muster a decent number of pilots to put up a defense, the system will fall to Dekco tomorrow morning when the station exits its last reinforcement timer.

Significance?  Taking the system is only one objective of the 6VDT camp.  We don't need to camp the system if that's all we wanted to do.  The theory is that IT keeps most of their military assets in their staging system... one system.  If we can camp in their assets, then they can't fight back.  The vets will remember the PR- camp when the goons pulled the same ploy against BoB and took all or most of Delve.  It happened again in H-W, the main NC staging system, where southern bloc forces attempted to take the system, only to be counter camped by resurgent NC forces.  Now it's happening in 6VDT.  In his blog, PK says that "6VDT is a joke... there aren't any assets in that system. We all evacced to Delve about 2 days before."  I find that hard to believe, for two reasons: 1) In the IT meeting two+ days before the 6VDT invasion, SirMolle told his entire alliance to stop running around like headless chickens and move all their stuff back into 6VDT, and 2) There has been no major military action on IT's side since the camp began, in 6VDT or anywhere else.  That's odd, considering that a 300-ish man IT fleet reinforced the 9R4 just hours before the 6VDT invasion. Yet they didn't bother to formup up when it came out of reinforcement, even knowing that Dekco forces weren't leaving 6VDT for any reason.  IT hasn't been this inactive militarily since the fountain invasion began.  You have to think that the 6VDT camp is having some kind of effect.

Anyway, IT is in a tough spot here.  If you imagine the fountain campaign as a game of poker, SirMolle bringing INIT and Sys-K into the war was like making a re-raise.  The 6VDT invasion was like Dekco responding by going "all-in" (not my analogy).  Everyone that's still blue to IT is in Fountain, which probably isn't even enough to counter Dekco's blob.  Additionally, Stain Wagon has begun their invasion of Querious, and Romanian-Legion has begun their invasion of Period Basis.  Now everyone that has a grudge against IT or their allies is invading, and IT is surrounded on all sides.  Considering this and their internal issues, I'm surprised that they're still hanging on.  Granted, the "internal issues" are mostly rumors now that finfleet and x13 are gone, but rumors can do the damage of reality when alliance morale is hanging in the balance.

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In his blog, Easley makes some interesting points about the differences in leadership between Dekco and IT.  Easley's analysis is pretty comprehensive, so I won't get into it, but I will say that most of these differences are reflected in their respective alliances.  The goons are all about having fun and not caring who they offend while they do it.  IT is about serious business.  At the end of the day, the goons enjoy being on comms with each other while they crap all over everyone else in the forums and local chat.  How else do you get hundreds of people to camp a system 23/7?  Just from the forum leaks and listening to their alliance meeting, IT seems to be just as content insulting and conspiring against each other.  I couldn't imagine enjoying myself in that kind of environment.  To put it simply with an anology, the goons are the joker to IT's batman (and yes, I get the irony).  For everyone that hates the goons: I totally understand why.  I wasn't a fan myself, until I joined TEST.  They're obnoxious and incredibly annoying... but I've never had as much fun in EVE as I've had since I joined TEST.

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A couple of 70-ish man gangs tried playing with us in 6VDT today.  I was in jabber and got the alert that a fight was going on in 6VDT.  When I logged on, there were 500 people in 6VDT local.  Shortly thereafter, local had reached 800.  That's 300 Dekco (at least) able to log on at a moments notice.  Nulli bridged a mostly sniperhac fit gang next door to 6VDT and tried getting into system.  We chased them around for a while in our maelstrom/drake fleet before finally getting decent tackle on them.  They're entire gang was wiped out so fast that I couldn't get a lock on anything.  Almost immediately after, Sys-K tried getting another 70-ish man gang into system.  Their's was mostly drakes with some assorted hacs and logis.  It was wiped out imediately after jumping into 6VDT.  I wish I could report more from the front, but IT isn't fighting, and until they do, there isn't much to say.

The Fountain War in Brief

For all those out of the 'know', probably the most significant war in nulsec at the moment is being waged in the Fountain Region, currently under the control of IT alliance and their pets.  The root of this war is the infamous goonswarm/IT(BoB) rivalry, which has pitched Goonswarm Federation and IT Alliance (and their former incarnations) against one another for several years.  I've only been heavily involved in sovereignty warfare for about a year, so I'm not much of an authority on events prior to IT living in Delve/Fountain/Querious/Period Basis and goonswarm living in Deklein.  Therefore, I will begin with more recent events.  Although the conflict between goonswarm and IT has been going for years, the current phase of hostilities began when goonswarm inherited Deklein, a region rich with valuable Technetium moons.  The Deklein Technetium moons provided the means by which goonswarm could rebuild themselves and begin preparing for war once again.

In addition to bolstering their own numbers, goonswarm took under their wing a new alliance known as Test Alliance Please Ignore (TEST).  Under the newly formed Deklein Coalition (Dekco), each alliance grew to over 4000 people.  In addition, another alliance, Wildly Inappropriate (WI. or widot) joined Dekco.  At the time, goonswarm and TEST were #2 and #3 in terms of member count, and widot was not far behind.  This made Dekco one of the largest forces in EVE.

It wasn't long before Dekco began its first major campaign, eliminating Evoke from Cloud Ring.  They made their military debut with a massive op in which two Evoke CSAA towers (POSs building supercapitals) were reinforced and destroyed.  This gave Dekco a chance to flex their muscles and show the rest of New Eden that the goonswarm bloc was back in action.  Despite being fairly competent at sov warfare, Evoke could not match the numbers that Dekco (and a few bitter NC vets) could bring to the fight, and after a few valiant attempts at repelling the invaders, Evoke abandoned Cloud ring and moved on to their current home in Providence.

The Cloud Ring invasion was significant for two reasons: 1) it gave the nascent Dekco its first real shot at managing its own invasion (like a dress rehearsal for later campaigns), and 2) it put goonswarm right on the doorstep of IT-controlled Fountain.  IT did not lift a finger to try and stop the Cloud Ring invasion.  At the time, the majority of IT forces were deployed in the south to help The Initiative (INIT) eliminate Against All Authorities (AAA) from Catch, and they came very close to eliminating AAA from the 0.0 map completely.  Around the time  that the Cloud Ring campaign was coming to an end, the tide of the war in the south began to turn in favor of AAA and the Stain Wagon (SW) forces.  They began to push back into Catch, and with TEST help, they kept IT busy.  Goonswarm agreed to begin their push into Fountain as a means of potentially distracting IT away from the war in the south.  After goonswarm took the first system in Fountain (J5A-IX) and reinforced the first station system (PNQY-Y), IT redeployed to the north to stop the goonswarm push, leaving INIT on their own against SW forces.

PNQY-Y fell into Dekco control on Dec 22, 2010.  IT attempted to recapture the system several times only to be stopped in their tracks every time after the first reinforcement cycles.  Despite the constant counter assaults waged against all Dekco holdings in Fountain, Dekco held firm and defeated IT forces in every engagement.  Soon, the second station system (9R4-EJ) fell into Dekco hands.  Despite having a very strong EUTZ presence relative to Dekco forces, IT's strategy of timing their sov structures to end their reinforcement cycles during EUTZ was not working.  IT then adopted its strategy of setting their timers to come out during Australian primetime, right around downtime, where Dekco had the weakest presence.  Initially, the strategy seemed to work.  IT forces successfully defended their infrastructure hub (ihub) in the key jump bridge node of Z30S-A, and gained their first significant victory of the campaign.  Dekco forces struck at Z30S-A again.  However, this time they snuck in a massive NC-supported supercapital fleet after baiting IT to finally deploy their supercapital fleet into combat.  The result was significant blow to IT morale.  Two IT Titans and two IT Supercarriers were lost, vs. a single NC supercarrier destroyed.  Both sides lost many regular capitals in the engagement.  Dekco and NC forces held the field, destroyed the ihub, and left system with a new-found confidence in their ability to counter the IT timezone war machine.

On the same day, two corporations (X13 and Finfleet) within IT decided to issue an ultimatum to the IT leadership.  The ultimatum included several points that addressed the fermenting discontent within the leadership structure.  If their demands were not met, they threatened  to leave the alliance.  Of course, the demands were not met, and X13 and Finfleet left IT for a new alliance known as Raiden..  Coupled with the loss at Z30S-A and the departure of X13 and Finfleet (and X13's significant supercapital fleet), IT requested assistance from its allies Systematic Chaos (Sys-k), from Period Basis, and INIT, freshly evicted from Catch.

It was at this time that Dekco leadership decided that the time was right to begin their assault on the primary IT staging system of 6VDT-H.  After a rousing speech by goonswarm executor TheMittani in his "State of the Goonion" address, Dekco formed up a force of just under 1000 pilots and blitzed 6VDT-H, covering every stargate, every POS, and the station with warp inhibitor bubbles to prevent anything from warping or jumping from those locations.  They then proceeded a campaign to keep the system camped with several hundred people until the system fell under their control.  The idea behind the extended camp is that they would trap most of IT's military resources within the station or within the POSs.  At the time of writing, the ihub within system has been destroyed along with most of the IT POSs.  The system has been camped for three days straight with hundreds of Dekco pilots, and there has not been any significant IT military action since the camp began, despite many reports of intended IT formups.  No significant IT supercapital assets have been destoyed, but the station is in its last reinforcement cycle.  If IT cannot form some kind of defense, the system will fall into Dekco hands, along with assets in neighboring systems.

In addition, SW forces, reinvigorated and bloodthirsty for revenge against IT, have begun their invasion of Querious, adding another front to IT's defense of its soveriegn territory.  Amidst rumors of continued discontent with the IT leadership structure, only time will tell if they can survive being hit on multiple fronts while dealing with their own internal issues.

#1

So this is my first blog, and like many others, I've centered my blog around the internet spaceship MMO "Eve Online".  I've been playing EVE for about two and a half years now, and I've explored pretty much every aspect of the game.  Like others, I'm passionate about it, and I have a lot of ideas that I like sharing.  So instead of posting long-winded flames on the forums or in comments section of other people's blogs, I decided to start my own blog where I can write about my experiences or just whatever's on my mind.

What motivates me in EVE?  Put simply, the scale.  Eve is unlike other MMOs in that its scale is momumental and PVP (player vs. player) driven.  In EVE, players create empires and then duke it out over control of the conquerable territories of nul security space.  They form coalitions, make pacts, crush their enemies, get crushed by their enemies, and even stab their allies in the back, all done with the power of thousands of players organized under a common flag.  This is why I play EVE, and this is what I plan on writing about.

A lot is going on on my side of the cluster right now, so I expect to be posting often.

Good hunting, and I'll see you on the front.