Warfare & Tactics

Perhaps you should drop this line and just admit that your week old farming alts can also capture any caldari plex too, unless you dont know how to fit you boat or what skills to train.

And don't give me the usual bullcrap line about "You have to do it in pve fit". You and I both know that farming character will not stick around to fight anyway and even if you are in pvp fit, 9/10 players wont engage bigger boat in plex if they are also dealing with npcs shooting at them.

Not trying to argue, just pointing to an obvious game balance issue that works in your favour.

I know for a fact that my 7 months old alt capable of fully t2 fitting incursus still can't do all caldari plexes. And yes, I'm talking PvE fit (and t1 frigs).
For testing purposes I trained another alt for 2 days, got him the minimum of skills required to fit a cap stable dualrep frig (and it's not even incursus), signed it up to state protectorate and - lo and behold, that one can do gal majors. Swithced it to minnies, barely can stand some cal mediums. Would it be able to tank caldari majors in a week? Dunno, but doubt it.


True, but it's also true that you won't place such chars in high trafic systems, where pvp is likely to occur. On a sidenote, I found chat in cal mil hillarious with certain folks complaining how we don't let them plex peacefully in immuri or hikkoken

They haven't.
"Oh but they're not all active."
Yes, we've heard that before several times... as if they're the only one's with inactives.
(Is there even 1500 active members in any one militia?)

For instance: I look and see that in 2009 Caldari captured every FW system available to them. Would they have been able to do that without a numbers advantage? I highly doubt it. Up until the patch the Gallente had the numbers advantage as far as active FIGHTERS, but combine the Caldari missioners and fighters against the Gallente missioners and fighters and voila. Then the patch hit and they got a nice, swift kick in the pants with recruitment and new incentives and now the advantage is showing itself.

You'd be surprised. ^_^

I like how everyone attacks the op for not being spacerich and concerned about isk. How dare he wonder what sort of isk you can make in faction war!

He has valid questions and the same sort of questions I had when I was joining faction war. Why would we expect people to join the faction that pays less isk?? RP reasons?

Anyway to answer your question minmatar have it the easiest and they have always had it the easiest. However now that the ccp is actually starting to balance the npcs minmatar are starting to wilt. Thanks to outside organizations like Goons and the gross npc imbalance they were originally able to hit tier 5 lp store prices regularly.

However ccp started to address the npc imbalance and definitely addressed goons. Since then Minmatar have not hit tier 5 once and now they don't even have enough systems to hit tier five.

So bringing some balance has already caused the minmatar to start to collapse. But even with those changes the npcs are still unbalanced in favor of minmatar. We anticipate ccp will address this even more. When that happens minmatar will likely continue to fail cascade and not make it back to tier 5 for a long time.

Caldari is the faction that traditionally gets the most players. Not only do they have the race most players pick at the start, which beocmes the default militia for many, they also have opponents that will tend to be cut off from jita. Which is often a hardship newer players would prefer not to suffer. So long term I anticipate Caldari has the edge.

However, CCP did do something smart when they designed faction war. They decided not to give lp for defensive plexing. Because they did this I anticipate all the factions will hit tier 5 if they fight with a strategy that takes advantage of this fact. (for example don't flip systems until you have enough to hit tier 5) Its just a matter of who will get their first. So yes amarr lp are not valuable right now. And I don't think they will be that valuable in the next few months.

However, as long as ccp doesn't cave to minmatars crying to have lp for defensive plexing amarr will hit tier 5 eventually - assuming we stop flipping systems as soon as we can thereby allowing minmatar plexers to get lp.

What items should you get in the lp stores? That is and always has been a fairly guarded secret. People tend not to share that information and you will need to do the math yourself. I will say pay attention to how fast stuff moves so you don't see that amarr 400 mm armor plates are on contracts for 40 million isk only to find out no one ever actually buys them for that.

We can talk all day long about the best places to farm, but you should know a couple of things:

1.) Minmatar doesn't need anyone showing up just to farm isk. If you're not contributing to PvP you're just watering down the market, so we don't want you Than again, we can't stop you either, and it's not like watering down the markets is going to leave us penniless. You may not receive a warm welcome in the minnie side, but the Caldari seem to be a lot nicer about teaching people how to farm the system for profit, they'd probably do more than we would to help you get set up with the right strategy.

2.) The day-old alt farming game has gone on far too long, and its at the top of my hit list. You can get all excited to farm all you like, but know that the days of blitzing plexes in 10mn warp stabbed frigs are limited. This activity has plagued Faction Warfare for ages and measures will be taken to kill it in the next expansion. I'd rather be upfront with everyone on where I stand right now, rather than have everyone continue in a "race to the bottom" and get too invested in a farming playstyle that essentially has a death warrant on it.

The ways to accomplish this are being discussed in the official thread on the subject, accesible here:

FW: rebalancing NPCs and you

Except you might have to actually put a tank on your frigate and train something other than afterburner I and hull upgrades I since the rats will *gasp* do damage to you.