The grand battle in EVE Online, who lost $ 300,000 and what did happen there
A few days ago on the Internet there was news about the biggest battle in the game EVE Online, in which ships were destroyed for 300,000 dollars . It was interesting to many how in a battle in an online game you can lose so much money. But most of the texts about this epic scale battle are written in a language in which a person who does not play in EVE Online understands only prepositions and abusive words. A couple of days ago I came across a very interesting article , where everything that happened was described in a very simple and understandable language.
This post is a translation of this article, plus, I gathered up some additional information and beautiful pictures so that it would not be boring. So, if you want to know what happened there after all, who eventually lost 300 thousand dollars , as the Russians kicked all their asses, what it is in the picture, and you are ready to spend some of your time in the evening, go under the cat.
')
EVE Online, the main title of the company CCP Games, the game is very big. If to compare with other games, where simultaneous battle on one map of 64x players is already considered great, then in EVE the battles can consist of thousands of pilots and last for several days. In July of last year, more than five thousand pilots participated in the battle for 6VDT-H , of which 4070 people were maximally online in one solar system. For comparison, this is about the same as the man in the same regiment of the US Marine Corps.
The battle for the B-R5RB is by no means the largest in terms of the number of people online; nevertheless, the total number of players in it greatly exceeds the battle of 6VDT-H . According to official data from the CPP, in one way or another 7548 pilots took part in the battles.
The battle for the B-R5RB will be remembered due to the incredible amount of lost ISK in one battle. ISK, short for Interstellar Kredits, the official currency of EVE Online is the universal measure of everything that happens in a game. For ISK buy ships, ammunition, materials and everything else. That is, each ship has a certain cost in ISK. The average earnings of players can vary greatly, but, for example, 100 million ISK are earned quite easily per hour of active play. The battle for B-R5RB surpassed the previous loss record in one battle, when in the so-called Valentine's Day Massacre losses were 1 trillion ISK , at least 11 times .
The number of players in the system. Zero peaks - lack of data.
In EVE Online, all big battles take place in the so-called Null Security Space . Complete anarchy reigns in Zuli - anyone can be attacked for any reason, and nothing will happen to you for that. To survive in such an environment, players unite in groups, which in the game are called corporations. When corporations began to form larger alliances, CCP introduced the concept of alliance . And alliances, in turn, are united in a coalition , the total number of players in which amounts to thousands.
In Zero, alliances are sovereign units (sovereign actors) in the current anarchist state. They can own space and build space stations in systems under their control. They may declare wars (officially or unofficially) to other alliances. These acts of sovereignty are not available to corporations, no matter how large they are, and coalitions do not exist at all within the framework of game mechanics, but are merely an agreement within the framework of alliances. But, nevertheless, decisions to declare war are mainly made at the coalition level, and not by the leaders of alliances.
In total, there are 2719 Zero systems that are available for colonization. Each of them is assigned a random alphanumeric name, for example, 6VDT-H or B-R5RB. Some regions and systems are more profitable than others. For many years, the main income of alliances was the income from the extraction of minerals on the moons, which are used to build ships. But, recently, the developers have changed the game mechanics, and made the extraction of minerals from the moons much less profitable.
This led to the emergence of rental business. The owner of the system can rent it to someone else, who, in turn, for a fixed fee, he will extract resources in this system. What is not a game mechanic, but rather is governed by the military authority of the alliance that leases the system. With the heyday of feudalism, each system became valuable.
* lat. casus belli is the legal term of the times of Roman law: a formal reason for declaring war.
The current war, called Halloween War, began when the Russian alliances joined forces to attack the coalition known as the N3PL . Once the N3PL fought against one of the alliances in the Russian coalition, SOLAR , and ousted it from its territory. One of the alliances in the N3PL , Nulli Secunda , almost two years ago fought on the side of the alliance from the Russian coalition, Against All Authorities , and after that was left to the mercy of fate. Needless to say that the atmosphere was saturated with hostility.
Immediately after the attack, another large coalition, The Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) , announced that it was going to transfer forces to the galactic east to promote the Russian bloc as a "neutral third person." Earlier this summer, the N3PL did the same when they fought with the TEST Alliance Please Ignore against CFC . Then, one of the leaders of the N3PL coalition, the Progodlegend, stated that the purpose of the existence of N3 is to destroy CFC . In addition, the N3PL took over the rivals of the Goonswarm Federation alliance, which is part of the CFC . Needless to say that the atmosphere was saturated with hostility.
In mid-December, the CFC leader, The Mittani, announced that CFC is fully entering the war, which means that a fleet of capitals and supercapitals is fighting. By this time, already most of the alliances living in Zuli, completely mired in the war. Another group, Providence Bloc , will become allies of the N3PL , but they will not be particularly involved in the fighting. The positional war began.
The game mechanics of capturing the sovereignty of the system are rather complicated and slow. To do this, you need to block the system and destroy in it the buildings that belong to the current owner of the system. Infrastructure Hubs (Infrastructure Hubs or I-Hubs) have tens of millions of hit points. The stations , which are the most powerful signs of sovereignty in the system, have hundreds of millions of hit points. Each of them enters the reinforcement phase after a successful attack: I-Hub for a day, a station for two days. After exiting the reinforcements, they need to be attacked again in order to enter into the reinforcement phase of armor. And only on the third successful attack, you can destroy them. The i-hub must be destroyed in order to attack the Territorial Control Unit, a sort of alliance flag hoisted in the system. After the Territorial Control Unit is destroyed, the system becomes “defenseless”, and any other alliance can put its flag. In order for the Territorial Control Unit to turn on, you need to wait 8 hours, which leads to fierce battles of alliances, trying to destroy someone else’s flag while it is inoperative, while protecting its own.
Here, the construction of capital-class ships and supercapital becomes an important element, since only these monsters can give enough of the damage necessary for the rapid destruction of structures ensuring sovereignty. Two hundred capital class ships can do the same damage in five minutes as four hundred battleship class ships in half an hour. It was capital and supercapital that dominated the battlefield in the B-R5RB.
To understand the difference between capital, supercapital and subcapital, you first need to understand the difference in their production and use.
From the translator: the relative sizes of different ships can be seen in this video.
Consider the Dominix , the most used battleship class ship in the Halloween War at CFC.
It is easy to manufacture. If a player wants to collect 10 such ships, he simply extracts 10 times more minerals than they need to build one ship, and puts the production according to the drawing for 10 cycles. One player, theoretically, can manage ten production slots at the same time, so if he has 10 Dominix drawings, it will take him 35 hours to make 100 such ships.
The main ship of the Dreadnought class at the CFC is Naglfar .
To build a class capital ship, and especially a supercapital class, it is necessary to produce a large number of different parts. To build a dreadnought you need 230 parts of eleven different types . So, if one player uses 10 production slots, he can build a dreadnought in about 14 days .
As you noticed, the dreadnought has an order of magnitude more hit points than Dominix. It can cause damage 8 times more at a distance of 2 times more. Also, capital class ships have jump drives , with which they can jump several light years straight to the desired system. A fleet of capitals can overcome the distance it will take more than 15 minutes for a subcapital to complete in a few minutes.
Nyx supercameras were actively used on the battlefield, as they give the most damage.
Just like the dreadnought, the supercierier is assembled from parts. But, to build one supercamera, you need an order of magnitude more detail than for the dreadnought - 2300 . To produce all these details, one player needs to spend a month , plus, another 20 days to build the ship itself. The last 20 days pose a particular risk, since supercapital can only be built in a special assembly hall, the Capital Ship Assembly Array , which can only be located near the base (starbase) in open space, and is not protected from attacks. By analogy with hubs and stations, a successful attack of the base will introduce it into reinforcement mode for two days. If, after this, the alliance that owns the base fails to prevent its destruction, the ship under construction will also be destroyed along with all the materials.
Unlike dreadnoughts and titans, supercameres use drones and bomber fighter to deal damage. The damage from the turrets strongly depends on the distance to the target, since the cannons cause the more damage the closer the target is to them. Drones fighter bombers do the same amount of damage, regardless of distance. The minus of drones is that they still need to fly to the target, and they can be destroyed by the enemy.
Superkerier's younger brother, kerier, can use the drones and conventional drones fighter used on subcapital capital, which can do much less damage than the bomber fighter drones, but unlike other capital and supercapitals, this allows the cariers to safely deal with small ships.
The Avatar- class Titan ship was actively used by both sides in the battle for the B-R5RB.
This is the largest ship in EVE Online. 15-kilometer ship clearly stands out on the battlefield. To assemble it, you need almost 7000 components . Production of which requires such costs that it is impossible for one person to build a titanium, but if such a person were found, it would take him 2 and a half months . After all the components are ready, the construction of the ship takes 40 days . Just like Kerier, it is built in outer space and can be destroyed.
Titan itself is a symbol of the sovereignty and power of the alliance, just like the dreadnoughts in the first half of the last century. Capital Ship Assembly Array can only be installed on the base in the territory under the control of the alliance; this cannot be done anywhere.
Titan on the battlefield is not useful for fire turrets, the damage from which is comparable with the much cheaper dreadnoughts, and the presence of "doomsday weapon". Each shot of his is worth 30 million ISK in fuel equivalent, and it can only be fired every 10 minutes. But the damage of 3 million per shot is worth it. This weapon can only be fired at capital class ships, but one of its shots may well kill an untrained kerier or dreadnought. Many titans, coordinating the target of an attack, can destroy another titan in a matter of seconds.
Also, titans are useful outside the battlefield. Jump caps are installed on the capitals, which allow them to move past the system gates. On the titans, you can install the jump bridge module (jump bridge), which allows you to throw sub-capital over long distances, as well as a jump drive.
The cost in the pictures, it is only the cost of production. Before you enter the battle, the player must install the necessary modules in the case. They can be divided into guns, modules that improve guns, and modules that increase the survivability of the ship. The number of hit points in the pictures, these are hit points of ships already ready for battle with all the necessary modules, which can cost from several millions to tens of millions for subcapital, hundreds of millions for capital, and from billions to tens of billions for titans and supercameras. Some modules are made by analogy with the ships - the player extracts the necessary minerals and produces modules in the factory, using the necessary drawings. But the best modules rarely fall out of the murdered even more rare NPC (Non-player Character), which are then sold on the market for incredible money. For example, the cost of a fully equipped titan, which The Kan player lost, was more than twice the cost of a new ship.
Just as with the dreadnoughts in the early 20th century, mass battles involving a large number of titans occur quite rarely, but more recently they have been occurring more often. But the battle of supercapital scale B-R5RB has never been, as alliances usually try to protect their strategic assets. In previous battles between CFC / RUS (Russian alliances) and N3PL , the latter always had an advantage in terms of the number of supercapitals. For example, the previous attempt to resist the fleet of supercapital N3PL in the HED-GP system led to the server being so overloaded that some players could control the ships, while others sat and looked at the black screen. As a result, CFC / RUS suffered a crushing defeat, losing 85 dreadnoughts. Proper planning for the N3PL paid off.
But, this time, the battle for the B-R5RB was not planned, rather, an occasional battle developed into a decisive battle, just as it did at the Battle of Gettysburg. Exactly one year after another large-scale battle, the Battle of Asakai , one of the corporations of the Nulli Secunda alliance forgot to pay a tax on sovereignty (game mechanics of withdrawing money from the public), and sovereignty in the B-R5RB system was dropped. Someone from the Nulli Secunda alliance even claimed that the reset of sovereignty resulted from a bug in the game. Normally, there would be nothing special about what happened, but the B-R5RB system was the main pandemic legion alliance system. The station in the system was overflowed with resources for hundreds of billions of ISK, if not more, and if CFC / RUS took over the station, these resources will become unavailable for the Pandemic Legion. At the same time, this does not mean that the conquerors will be able to pick up all these resources for themselves, but the enemy will also not be able to use them.
Nulli Secunda immediately rushed to begin the process of installing the Territorial Claim Unit to return the system (I remind you that it takes 8 hours). Since they controlled the I-Hub and the station in the system, if they managed to turn on the TCU, everything would come back, and in order to capture the system, the enemy alliance would have to do the entire operation described earlier with the destruction of the stations and waiting for several days. But, the Russian bloc hastened to take advantage of the situation. Left without sovereignty, the station in B-R5RB would not enter the reinforcement phase after the attack, and could be captured in one approach. At about 2:00 pm UTC on January 27, RUS / CFC transferred a fleet of capital into the system to capture the station, so that none of the N3PL could dock with it. Which would mean that N3PL support ships would have to fly from other systems, and they would not have the ability to quickly repair or change ships during combat. After the station was captured by the RAZOR alliance from CFC, RUS focused on installing their Territorial Claim Unit and destroying the TCU protected by Nulli Secunda. If they had not succeeded, the station could have been won back as easily as it had been conquered.
Answer N3PL followed immediately. Using IRC, XMPP and Skype, the N3PL leaders quickly alerted players to what happened. As soon as a sufficient number of players entered the game, the huge N3PL fleet of capitals / supercapital jumped into the B-R5RB at a distance of a shot from the fleet of Russian alliances, and at 16:00 the battle began. N3PL went for broke.
In EVE Online there is such a feature that as soon as the battle becomes too large for that (which happens quite often) for the server to cope with it, the time in the system in which the battle takes place slows down. This is called Time Dilation . Big fights can quickly slow down time to a minimum value of 10%. That is, for players in the B-R5RB in 10 seconds of real time, only one second of playing time passed. This effect allows you to quickly pull up reinforcements from other systems, since only 6 minutes passed in the real-time hour that was needed to collect additional fleet. Each side used all channels of communication so that more people logged in and flew to fight. Capitals at a distance of dozens of light-years began to gather in groups for transfer to the B-R5RB. Certainly, some players even reactivated their accounts just to join the battle. Another feature of Time Dilation is that the 8 hours required to turn on the Territorial Claim Unit are counted in real time, not in the game. So, at 22:20 the system would come under the control of the RAZOR alliance. At the same time, the Time Dilation makes the battles even longer, because the battle was still in full swing when players from Western Europe began to enter, and then from America.
While the main battle between the fleets of capital took place in B-R5RB , the CFC hurried to block the approaches to the system. Subcapital fleets headed to I-NGI8 and GXK-7F , other major N3PL systems to intercept reinforcements. This greatly helped RUS / CFC, as the Interdictor and Heavy Interdictor class ships, which were necessary to prevent supercapital jumps from escaping from the battlefield, were destroyed by CFC fleets from Dominix ships on the way to battle. Plus, partial transfer of fights to other systems helped unload Eve Online servers.
At about 10:00 pm UTC, East Coast Americans began to enter the game and join the battle. This was a turning point in the battle, because the CFC had more players in this zone than the N3PL. Fights are not always won by numerical superiority, but this is usually the case. Having gained numerical superiority, the fleet of capitals RUS / CFC ceased to be exchanged for losses, and began to destroy more ships than to lose. At 22:00 UTC, the number of lost titans was 18 for the N3PL and 7 for RUS / CFC. By 23:00 UTC, the fleet of CFC / RUS capitals had destroyed another 32 enemy titans , having lost only 5 during this time.
At 3:20 UTC on January 28, the N3PL commanders issued an order to retreat. Now the goal was to save as much as possible of expensive and difficult to replace supercapital, sacrificing conventional capital, if necessary. Also, at that moment they realized that they could no longer destroy the RUS / CFC supercapital because they did not have the critical mass of titans needed to use doomsday weapons at the same time to destroy the ship before it was repaired, that is, “healed” . They switched to dreadnoughts, trying to take as many enemy ships as possible with them to the grave. The latest RUS / CFC titan that was destroyed that day was the Chango Atacama ship from the Circle-Of-Two alliance.
Thanks to spies (and espionage is a huge part of the EVE Online metagame), the RUS / CFC commanders learned that the N3PL was about to retreat and ordered the pilots to transfer to the Interdictor and Heavy Interdictor ships to prevent the N3PL from escaping from the battlefield. The superiority of CFC in the number of players and the number of subcapital ships played a key role here, since the only capital that could easily destroy these small ships was a pretty frail Kerier. Huge turrets on dreadnought and titans are difficult to get on small and dexterous ships, imagine how the battleship USS Iowa is trying to get on a speedboat from its 16-inch cannons. Fighter bomber drones have the same problem. The only option to deal with these ships from the N3PL was the use of keriers who can control drones of comparable sizes.
But, they were not enough. Rescue for the remaining capital and supercapital N3PL would only come at 11:00 UTC on January 28th, when EVE Online servers shut down for daily routine maintenance . At this moment, all players will be forcibly disconnected from the server, and their ships will disappear. If the pilot does not want to log in again after turning on the servers, his ship will not appear in the game and will not be visible to other players. So, the battle continued until the very shutdown. The last supercapital lost that day was the Nyx class ship belonging to Craedda from The Kadeshi Alliance, which was destroyed at 10:40 UTC. The CFC / RUS fleet continued to kill the enemy’s capital until the last moment, when everyone was disconnected from the server. As was to be expected, the N3PL ordered their pilots not to log in again, after the most expensive battle of all time, EVE, was so suddenly interrupted.
CCP posted a post about the battle in their blog . The numbers are amazing. 75 titans were destroyed, of which CFC / RUS lost 16, and N3PL 59. In addition to this, 13 superkerriers were killed, 370 dreadnoughts and 123 keriers. In a CCP official report, it was said that losses amounted to 11 trillion ISK . For comparison, the previous most expensive battle was the Massacre on Valentine's Day, or the Battle of Uemon, in which 12 Titans were destroyed and the total loss was 1 trillion. The battle for Uemon was a turning point in the RUS / PL war against the now defunct Northern Coalition, the group that held the north of EVE Online Zeros for many years.
Around these losses, translated into real money, there is now a lot of hype in the news. The amounts given are both correct and incorrect. CCP sells cards to pay for playing time, which can be sold for ISK in the in-game market. At current prices, 1 dollar equals ISK 35 million . To get 11 trillion ISK, you will need to buy cards somewhere for 300-330 thousand dollars and sell them in the domestic market. However, a one-time sale of such a number of cards would have destroyed the market, as well as selling a huge number of shares on Wall Street.
Lost ships will not be easy to recover, even with the right amount of ISK. Of course, many alliances have reserve capital and supercapital in inactive accounts. , , Capital Ship Assembly Array . , , N3PL .
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PS !
This post is a translation of this article, plus, I gathered up some additional information and beautiful pictures so that it would not be boring. So, if you want to know what happened there after all, who eventually lost 300 thousand dollars , as the Russians kicked all their asses, what it is in the picture, and you are ready to spend some of your time in the evening, go under the cat.
')
The greatest virtual battle of all time.
EVE Online, the main title of the company CCP Games, the game is very big. If to compare with other games, where simultaneous battle on one map of 64x players is already considered great, then in EVE the battles can consist of thousands of pilots and last for several days. In July of last year, more than five thousand pilots participated in the battle for 6VDT-H , of which 4070 people were maximally online in one solar system. For comparison, this is about the same as the man in the same regiment of the US Marine Corps.The battle for the B-R5RB is by no means the largest in terms of the number of people online; nevertheless, the total number of players in it greatly exceeds the battle of 6VDT-H . According to official data from the CPP, in one way or another 7548 pilots took part in the battles.
The battle for the B-R5RB will be remembered due to the incredible amount of lost ISK in one battle. ISK, short for Interstellar Kredits, the official currency of EVE Online is the universal measure of everything that happens in a game. For ISK buy ships, ammunition, materials and everything else. That is, each ship has a certain cost in ISK. The average earnings of players can vary greatly, but, for example, 100 million ISK are earned quite easily per hour of active play. The battle for B-R5RB surpassed the previous loss record in one battle, when in the so-called Valentine's Day Massacre losses were 1 trillion ISK , at least 11 times .
The number of players in the system. Zero peaks - lack of data.
Zeros and Sovereignty
In EVE Online, all big battles take place in the so-called Null Security Space . Complete anarchy reigns in Zuli - anyone can be attacked for any reason, and nothing will happen to you for that. To survive in such an environment, players unite in groups, which in the game are called corporations. When corporations began to form larger alliances, CCP introduced the concept of alliance . And alliances, in turn, are united in a coalition , the total number of players in which amounts to thousands.
In Zero, alliances are sovereign units (sovereign actors) in the current anarchist state. They can own space and build space stations in systems under their control. They may declare wars (officially or unofficially) to other alliances. These acts of sovereignty are not available to corporations, no matter how large they are, and coalitions do not exist at all within the framework of game mechanics, but are merely an agreement within the framework of alliances. But, nevertheless, decisions to declare war are mainly made at the coalition level, and not by the leaders of alliances.
In total, there are 2719 Zero systems that are available for colonization. Each of them is assigned a random alphanumeric name, for example, 6VDT-H or B-R5RB. Some regions and systems are more profitable than others. For many years, the main income of alliances was the income from the extraction of minerals on the moons, which are used to build ships. But, recently, the developers have changed the game mechanics, and made the extraction of minerals from the moons much less profitable.
This led to the emergence of rental business. The owner of the system can rent it to someone else, who, in turn, for a fixed fee, he will extract resources in this system. What is not a game mechanic, but rather is governed by the military authority of the alliance that leases the system. With the heyday of feudalism, each system became valuable.
Casus belli *
* lat. casus belli is the legal term of the times of Roman law: a formal reason for declaring war.
The current war, called Halloween War, began when the Russian alliances joined forces to attack the coalition known as the N3PL . Once the N3PL fought against one of the alliances in the Russian coalition, SOLAR , and ousted it from its territory. One of the alliances in the N3PL , Nulli Secunda , almost two years ago fought on the side of the alliance from the Russian coalition, Against All Authorities , and after that was left to the mercy of fate. Needless to say that the atmosphere was saturated with hostility.
Immediately after the attack, another large coalition, The Clusterfuck Coalition (CFC) , announced that it was going to transfer forces to the galactic east to promote the Russian bloc as a "neutral third person." Earlier this summer, the N3PL did the same when they fought with the TEST Alliance Please Ignore against CFC . Then, one of the leaders of the N3PL coalition, the Progodlegend, stated that the purpose of the existence of N3 is to destroy CFC . In addition, the N3PL took over the rivals of the Goonswarm Federation alliance, which is part of the CFC . Needless to say that the atmosphere was saturated with hostility.
In mid-December, the CFC leader, The Mittani, announced that CFC is fully entering the war, which means that a fleet of capitals and supercapitals is fighting. By this time, already most of the alliances living in Zuli, completely mired in the war. Another group, Providence Bloc , will become allies of the N3PL , but they will not be particularly involved in the fighting. The positional war began.
Warfare in the virtual space
The game mechanics of capturing the sovereignty of the system are rather complicated and slow. To do this, you need to block the system and destroy in it the buildings that belong to the current owner of the system. Infrastructure Hubs (Infrastructure Hubs or I-Hubs) have tens of millions of hit points. The stations , which are the most powerful signs of sovereignty in the system, have hundreds of millions of hit points. Each of them enters the reinforcement phase after a successful attack: I-Hub for a day, a station for two days. After exiting the reinforcements, they need to be attacked again in order to enter into the reinforcement phase of armor. And only on the third successful attack, you can destroy them. The i-hub must be destroyed in order to attack the Territorial Control Unit, a sort of alliance flag hoisted in the system. After the Territorial Control Unit is destroyed, the system becomes “defenseless”, and any other alliance can put its flag. In order for the Territorial Control Unit to turn on, you need to wait 8 hours, which leads to fierce battles of alliances, trying to destroy someone else’s flag while it is inoperative, while protecting its own.Here, the construction of capital-class ships and supercapital becomes an important element, since only these monsters can give enough of the damage necessary for the rapid destruction of structures ensuring sovereignty. Two hundred capital class ships can do the same damage in five minutes as four hundred battleship class ships in half an hour. It was capital and supercapital that dominated the battlefield in the B-R5RB.
To understand the difference between capital, supercapital and subcapital, you first need to understand the difference in their production and use.
From the translator: the relative sizes of different ships can be seen in this video.
Consider the Dominix , the most used battleship class ship in the Halloween War at CFC.
It is easy to manufacture. If a player wants to collect 10 such ships, he simply extracts 10 times more minerals than they need to build one ship, and puts the production according to the drawing for 10 cycles. One player, theoretically, can manage ten production slots at the same time, so if he has 10 Dominix drawings, it will take him 35 hours to make 100 such ships.
The main ship of the Dreadnought class at the CFC is Naglfar .
To build a class capital ship, and especially a supercapital class, it is necessary to produce a large number of different parts. To build a dreadnought you need 230 parts of eleven different types . So, if one player uses 10 production slots, he can build a dreadnought in about 14 days .
As you noticed, the dreadnought has an order of magnitude more hit points than Dominix. It can cause damage 8 times more at a distance of 2 times more. Also, capital class ships have jump drives , with which they can jump several light years straight to the desired system. A fleet of capitals can overcome the distance it will take more than 15 minutes for a subcapital to complete in a few minutes.
Nyx supercameras were actively used on the battlefield, as they give the most damage.
Just like the dreadnought, the supercierier is assembled from parts. But, to build one supercamera, you need an order of magnitude more detail than for the dreadnought - 2300 . To produce all these details, one player needs to spend a month , plus, another 20 days to build the ship itself. The last 20 days pose a particular risk, since supercapital can only be built in a special assembly hall, the Capital Ship Assembly Array , which can only be located near the base (starbase) in open space, and is not protected from attacks. By analogy with hubs and stations, a successful attack of the base will introduce it into reinforcement mode for two days. If, after this, the alliance that owns the base fails to prevent its destruction, the ship under construction will also be destroyed along with all the materials.
Unlike dreadnoughts and titans, supercameres use drones and bomber fighter to deal damage. The damage from the turrets strongly depends on the distance to the target, since the cannons cause the more damage the closer the target is to them. Drones fighter bombers do the same amount of damage, regardless of distance. The minus of drones is that they still need to fly to the target, and they can be destroyed by the enemy.Superkerier's younger brother, kerier, can use the drones and conventional drones fighter used on subcapital capital, which can do much less damage than the bomber fighter drones, but unlike other capital and supercapitals, this allows the cariers to safely deal with small ships.
The Avatar- class Titan ship was actively used by both sides in the battle for the B-R5RB.
This is the largest ship in EVE Online. 15-kilometer ship clearly stands out on the battlefield. To assemble it, you need almost 7000 components . Production of which requires such costs that it is impossible for one person to build a titanium, but if such a person were found, it would take him 2 and a half months . After all the components are ready, the construction of the ship takes 40 days . Just like Kerier, it is built in outer space and can be destroyed.
Titan itself is a symbol of the sovereignty and power of the alliance, just like the dreadnoughts in the first half of the last century. Capital Ship Assembly Array can only be installed on the base in the territory under the control of the alliance; this cannot be done anywhere.
Titan on the battlefield is not useful for fire turrets, the damage from which is comparable with the much cheaper dreadnoughts, and the presence of "doomsday weapon". Each shot of his is worth 30 million ISK in fuel equivalent, and it can only be fired every 10 minutes. But the damage of 3 million per shot is worth it. This weapon can only be fired at capital class ships, but one of its shots may well kill an untrained kerier or dreadnought. Many titans, coordinating the target of an attack, can destroy another titan in a matter of seconds.
Also, titans are useful outside the battlefield. Jump caps are installed on the capitals, which allow them to move past the system gates. On the titans, you can install the jump bridge module (jump bridge), which allows you to throw sub-capital over long distances, as well as a jump drive.
Ship equipment for combat
The cost in the pictures, it is only the cost of production. Before you enter the battle, the player must install the necessary modules in the case. They can be divided into guns, modules that improve guns, and modules that increase the survivability of the ship. The number of hit points in the pictures, these are hit points of ships already ready for battle with all the necessary modules, which can cost from several millions to tens of millions for subcapital, hundreds of millions for capital, and from billions to tens of billions for titans and supercameras. Some modules are made by analogy with the ships - the player extracts the necessary minerals and produces modules in the factory, using the necessary drawings. But the best modules rarely fall out of the murdered even more rare NPC (Non-player Character), which are then sold on the market for incredible money. For example, the cost of a fully equipped titan, which The Kan player lost, was more than twice the cost of a new ship.
Reason for the battle
Just as with the dreadnoughts in the early 20th century, mass battles involving a large number of titans occur quite rarely, but more recently they have been occurring more often. But the battle of supercapital scale B-R5RB has never been, as alliances usually try to protect their strategic assets. In previous battles between CFC / RUS (Russian alliances) and N3PL , the latter always had an advantage in terms of the number of supercapitals. For example, the previous attempt to resist the fleet of supercapital N3PL in the HED-GP system led to the server being so overloaded that some players could control the ships, while others sat and looked at the black screen. As a result, CFC / RUS suffered a crushing defeat, losing 85 dreadnoughts. Proper planning for the N3PL paid off.
But, this time, the battle for the B-R5RB was not planned, rather, an occasional battle developed into a decisive battle, just as it did at the Battle of Gettysburg. Exactly one year after another large-scale battle, the Battle of Asakai , one of the corporations of the Nulli Secunda alliance forgot to pay a tax on sovereignty (game mechanics of withdrawing money from the public), and sovereignty in the B-R5RB system was dropped. Someone from the Nulli Secunda alliance even claimed that the reset of sovereignty resulted from a bug in the game. Normally, there would be nothing special about what happened, but the B-R5RB system was the main pandemic legion alliance system. The station in the system was overflowed with resources for hundreds of billions of ISK, if not more, and if CFC / RUS took over the station, these resources will become unavailable for the Pandemic Legion. At the same time, this does not mean that the conquerors will be able to pick up all these resources for themselves, but the enemy will also not be able to use them.
The user forceLain writes in the comments: “After the transfer of sovereignty into the hands of this corporation, the tick“ automatic payment for sovereignty ”was cleared (by default). After the transfer of sovereignty into the hands of the corporation, this checkbox must be turned on so that claims are automatically written off from the corporation's wallet at hour. Whether this tick was not set on purpose or is it really a fakap of the people responsible for this is another question. ”
The fight started
Nulli Secunda immediately rushed to begin the process of installing the Territorial Claim Unit to return the system (I remind you that it takes 8 hours). Since they controlled the I-Hub and the station in the system, if they managed to turn on the TCU, everything would come back, and in order to capture the system, the enemy alliance would have to do the entire operation described earlier with the destruction of the stations and waiting for several days. But, the Russian bloc hastened to take advantage of the situation. Left without sovereignty, the station in B-R5RB would not enter the reinforcement phase after the attack, and could be captured in one approach. At about 2:00 pm UTC on January 27, RUS / CFC transferred a fleet of capital into the system to capture the station, so that none of the N3PL could dock with it. Which would mean that N3PL support ships would have to fly from other systems, and they would not have the ability to quickly repair or change ships during combat. After the station was captured by the RAZOR alliance from CFC, RUS focused on installing their Territorial Claim Unit and destroying the TCU protected by Nulli Secunda. If they had not succeeded, the station could have been won back as easily as it had been conquered.Answer N3PL followed immediately. Using IRC, XMPP and Skype, the N3PL leaders quickly alerted players to what happened. As soon as a sufficient number of players entered the game, the huge N3PL fleet of capitals / supercapital jumped into the B-R5RB at a distance of a shot from the fleet of Russian alliances, and at 16:00 the battle began. N3PL went for broke.
In EVE Online there is such a feature that as soon as the battle becomes too large for that (which happens quite often) for the server to cope with it, the time in the system in which the battle takes place slows down. This is called Time Dilation . Big fights can quickly slow down time to a minimum value of 10%. That is, for players in the B-R5RB in 10 seconds of real time, only one second of playing time passed. This effect allows you to quickly pull up reinforcements from other systems, since only 6 minutes passed in the real-time hour that was needed to collect additional fleet. Each side used all channels of communication so that more people logged in and flew to fight. Capitals at a distance of dozens of light-years began to gather in groups for transfer to the B-R5RB. Certainly, some players even reactivated their accounts just to join the battle. Another feature of Time Dilation is that the 8 hours required to turn on the Territorial Claim Unit are counted in real time, not in the game. So, at 22:20 the system would come under the control of the RAZOR alliance. At the same time, the Time Dilation makes the battles even longer, because the battle was still in full swing when players from Western Europe began to enter, and then from America.
While the main battle between the fleets of capital took place in B-R5RB , the CFC hurried to block the approaches to the system. Subcapital fleets headed to I-NGI8 and GXK-7F , other major N3PL systems to intercept reinforcements. This greatly helped RUS / CFC, as the Interdictor and Heavy Interdictor class ships, which were necessary to prevent supercapital jumps from escaping from the battlefield, were destroyed by CFC fleets from Dominix ships on the way to battle. Plus, partial transfer of fights to other systems helped unload Eve Online servers.
CFC / RUS gained superiority
At about 10:00 pm UTC, East Coast Americans began to enter the game and join the battle. This was a turning point in the battle, because the CFC had more players in this zone than the N3PL. Fights are not always won by numerical superiority, but this is usually the case. Having gained numerical superiority, the fleet of capitals RUS / CFC ceased to be exchanged for losses, and began to destroy more ships than to lose. At 22:00 UTC, the number of lost titans was 18 for the N3PL and 7 for RUS / CFC. By 23:00 UTC, the fleet of CFC / RUS capitals had destroyed another 32 enemy titans , having lost only 5 during this time.
At 3:20 UTC on January 28, the N3PL commanders issued an order to retreat. Now the goal was to save as much as possible of expensive and difficult to replace supercapital, sacrificing conventional capital, if necessary. Also, at that moment they realized that they could no longer destroy the RUS / CFC supercapital because they did not have the critical mass of titans needed to use doomsday weapons at the same time to destroy the ship before it was repaired, that is, “healed” . They switched to dreadnoughts, trying to take as many enemy ships as possible with them to the grave. The latest RUS / CFC titan that was destroyed that day was the Chango Atacama ship from the Circle-Of-Two alliance.
Thanks to spies (and espionage is a huge part of the EVE Online metagame), the RUS / CFC commanders learned that the N3PL was about to retreat and ordered the pilots to transfer to the Interdictor and Heavy Interdictor ships to prevent the N3PL from escaping from the battlefield. The superiority of CFC in the number of players and the number of subcapital ships played a key role here, since the only capital that could easily destroy these small ships was a pretty frail Kerier. Huge turrets on dreadnought and titans are difficult to get on small and dexterous ships, imagine how the battleship USS Iowa is trying to get on a speedboat from its 16-inch cannons. Fighter bomber drones have the same problem. The only option to deal with these ships from the N3PL was the use of keriers who can control drones of comparable sizes.
But, they were not enough. Rescue for the remaining capital and supercapital N3PL would only come at 11:00 UTC on January 28th, when EVE Online servers shut down for daily routine maintenance . At this moment, all players will be forcibly disconnected from the server, and their ships will disappear. If the pilot does not want to log in again after turning on the servers, his ship will not appear in the game and will not be visible to other players. So, the battle continued until the very shutdown. The last supercapital lost that day was the Nyx class ship belonging to Craedda from The Kadeshi Alliance, which was destroyed at 10:40 UTC. The CFC / RUS fleet continued to kill the enemy’s capital until the last moment, when everyone was disconnected from the server. As was to be expected, the N3PL ordered their pilots not to log in again, after the most expensive battle of all time, EVE, was so suddenly interrupted.
Losses: size and consequences
CCP posted a post about the battle in their blog . The numbers are amazing. 75 titans were destroyed, of which CFC / RUS lost 16, and N3PL 59. In addition to this, 13 superkerriers were killed, 370 dreadnoughts and 123 keriers. In a CCP official report, it was said that losses amounted to 11 trillion ISK . For comparison, the previous most expensive battle was the Massacre on Valentine's Day, or the Battle of Uemon, in which 12 Titans were destroyed and the total loss was 1 trillion. The battle for Uemon was a turning point in the RUS / PL war against the now defunct Northern Coalition, the group that held the north of EVE Online Zeros for many years.
Around these losses, translated into real money, there is now a lot of hype in the news. The amounts given are both correct and incorrect. CCP sells cards to pay for playing time, which can be sold for ISK in the in-game market. At current prices, 1 dollar equals ISK 35 million . To get 11 trillion ISK, you will need to buy cards somewhere for 300-330 thousand dollars and sell them in the domestic market. However, a one-time sale of such a number of cards would have destroyed the market, as well as selling a huge number of shares on Wall Street.
Lost ships will not be easy to recover, even with the right amount of ISK. Of course, many alliances have reserve capital and supercapital in inactive accounts. , , Capital Ship Assembly Array . , , N3PL .
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/211088/
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