Yesterday’s post was about the Delve front in the war, and today I am going to write about action in the Great Wildlands.  But at least the Great Wildlands is a region adjacent to the action in Scalding Pass and Insmother.  And in the Great Wildlands in the system of HB-1NJ, there is a PanFam Keepstar.  Also, HB-1NJ is just 5.4 light years distant from the current Imperium invasion staging system, X2-ZA5 in Scalding Pass.

If we can jump to them, they can jump to us, which means that Keepstar has to go.

So on Tuesday there was a 300 billion ISK brawl which escalated up to capital ships in order to drop a Fortizar on the same grid in space as the Keepstar, from which it could be used to siege and destroy the PanFam structure.  That went successfully in a battle where the ISK losses were fairly closely split between both sides on the battle report, though the Imperium losses were boosted by the loss of several Zirnitra faction dreadnoughts.

Since the Great Wildlands is NPC null sec, there was no six day delay before the Fortizar came online.  That timer was just 24 hours, at the end of which the Imperium would again have to defend the Fortizar, install a core, and keep attackers away long enough for it to online.

Once the Fortizar was online supercarriers could jump to it, tether up, and send fighters to attack the Keepstar at their leisure, the current meta for Keepstar assaults.

Both sides pinged their members to get maximum participation for a fight that might well decide whether or not that Keepstar lived or died.

All of which was going to happen in EUTZ while I was working.  So I put on Mind1’s Twitch stream to watch the slow progress as the battle began to unfold.

There the 24 hour time had just completed and the fight for the Fortizar was kicking off.  I let that run for a while as I worked.  There count in local exceeded 3K.  All PanFam had to do was commit enough ships to keep damage on the Fortizar to destroy it.  If that is the objective, you commit to it.  I was in battles back in World War Bee where we committed trillions of ISK to knock down enemy structures as they anchored.  You can buy those victories, but it costs ISK so the objective has to be worth it.

I went through my meetings, had lunch, more meetings, and then hit the light end of my day.  At that point the fight was still going on and there was a new fleet on Alterari Phoenix, the seventh fleet of the day, forming up reinforcements and getting people who had been blown up back into the fight.  I figured I would go on that fleet.  After all, it was a tidi fight with people reporting the command queue was taking 3-5 minutes to process.  That meant pressing a button might not generate a result for 600 seconds.  Some latency.

So I got into the fleet in a Vulture, got on the titan, put myself in the “no chatter” channel on voice coms so I would only hear FC instructions, and routed Mumble through my monitor speakers so I would hear when the bridge was up, and went back to work.

A while later, the command came and I took the bridge into the fight.

Bridge is up!

That was a good five minute journey before I landed in system and maybe as long again before the things had loaded on screen, during which the client took a break a couple of times and just sat there not responding.  Typical for a lag fest tidi fight like this.

Eventually though, things settled.  I got myself on anchor and followed the FC into the thick of things.

Vulture fleet heading towards the enemy

the Fortizar itself was still in play.  We had managed to install a core, the first step of the process, but the following 15 minute repair cycle was still paused and damage to the Fortizar looked like it was very deep in the wrong direction.

My first view of the Fort

From there it was a matter of locking up targets and shooting… both of which took long stretches of time to accomplish.  Admittedly, I wasn’t giving this my full attention either.  But I did end up getting on a few kills, including old school foe of our Lady Scarlett. (I actually met her at one of the EVE Vegas events.  But in game you shoot the other side.)

I had the monitoring tools up and was watching my memory usage as things went along.

The client memory meter

You can see where I hit tidi as we jumped into the fight, the red line jumping from 4GB to 6GB, then a long stable stretch was mostly loading and the client being unresponsive.  Then there was a drop, then things started to ramp up as I was shooting.  This, by the way, is why 64-bit is important for the game client.  32-bit could only access 2GB of memory and would crash at that point.  Now I just leave the graphics turned up and let the client hog all the memory it wants.  I invested in a 64GB system, might as well enjoy the view.  No potato mode for me!

Of course, there were a few people outraged at the tidi.  There are always a few.  My response these days is always the same.

Time dilation is around our necks in every fight in null sec

One Redditor posted that the null sec blocs should be broken up to prevent these sorts of fights.  I am pretty sure most of the 3K pilots who showed up knew exactly what they were getting into.  I can totally understand why somebody might not want to be in these fights, but don’t tell us how to play the game.  We’ll play however we like.

After a while I heard over coms that the enemy was pulling out.  We were told to free fire on all hostiles.  This actually was somewhat viable as the tidi was starting to diminish as one side was trying to stop combat so their aggression timers would run down, allowing them to tether, dock up, or exit the system.  The repair timer on the Fortizar had been counting down and was under a minute when I checked it.  And then the Fortizar was online, fully repaired, and ready to go.

At that point the battle was pretty much over.  The battle report showed close to 250 billion ISK destroyed, so less than the previous day’s fight over dropping the Fortizar.  But the spread of the loss favored us this time around at about a 4 to 1 ratio.

Battle Report Header

Notable among the PanFam losses was this PH pilot in his unfit, save for cargo expanders and a prop mod, Ferox Navy Issue.  No doubt looking to loot the field, that plan did not turn out well for him.

So the Imperium carried the day, willing to commit more to the fight as we showed up with nearly 500 more pilots.

Then again, this Keepstar is not a critical defense structure for PanFam.  It is off in NPC null sec and its significance was mostly due to the fact that it was in range of our staging Keepstar, so could have been a been used to mount a counter attack.  We have to kill it… and we probably will… as it might compromise our invasion, but PanFam losing it doesn’t diminish their defenses all that much.

Still, it feels like a Keepstar kill mail will be coming.  We will see how hard they choose to defend it.  But, given we have another Fortizar coming online later in EFM-C4, also on grid with a Keepstar, and one that is critical to their defense as it sits astride the route into the Dronelands and their actual home regions, they might opt to give it a miss. [Update: We won that fight as well and that Fortizar is also online and ready to host a Keepstar siege.  USTZ only got ~1.3K pilots on the field… I missed it because I had work to make up after the first fight.]

Once our Fortizar was online, titans were able to jump in and tether up so we could get in range for a bridge home.

Fleets forming up on their titans to go back to base

Meanwhile, the Fortizar is there on grid with the PanFam Keepstar.

The Fortizar sits, waiting to host the attack

That battle is coming… and if you look closely at that picture above, in the bubbles off to the left, you can see another Fortizar.  That was our backup plan, a second attempt if we lost the first one.  That one is online now as well.