EVE New Citizens Q&A

Each large coalition has a large number of players. They usually have a region (or a few constellations) that they call home, with lots of citadels and outposts deployed. Quite a few POS starbases to extract moon materials that are critical for T2 and capital ship production. If they perform activities such as mining and ratting in the area, the "index" increases, resulting in better ore/rats/resources. Some of the bases are used to manufacture supercapitals, which take months and can only be done in 0.0 sov. space.

A sov war is basically when a different coalition takes over this space, one star system at a time. POS'es and citadels are destroyed and replaced, outposts are taken over (and access is denied to the previous residents), the indices are reset. The losing side has to retreat to low-sec space and/or NPC-owned 0.0.

Typically both sides will bring super-capitals to the fights, possibly resulting in even more financial loss. At the end of the war (or when the war is declared lost), with no remaining bases to protect them, the surviving supers have to be extracted to more neutral space.

So, basically, stations and ships are lost, amounting to huge sums of ISK. Sources of income for the alliance (moon goo, asteroids, PVE anomalies, production facilities) are lost. And the super-capital fleet is possibly lost, reduced, or locked down in hostile territory.

Only the biggest alliances can survive a loss like this, typically by immediately conquering someone else's space. Smaller entities experience a failure cascade, with players leaving en-masse, and some of the leadership quitting the game when they reach 0 ISK in their personal wallets from donating everything to the war effort. Dotlan tracks some of the membership statistics and failure cascades are obvious in the graphs.

Thaks for your detailed answers (in all of my Topics)!



I may was a little unclear, what i meant with war, what i ment was an ongoing conflict, not a single battle. So looking at your first post, i assume there is usually an end to a war, if the teritory of one party is taken... are there also diplomatic ways out of a war?

greetings

Losses in these conflicts might be easier to handle than they used to be. Part of the pain of losing space is getting all your stuff out after you've spent months moving assets in. However now with player citadels you can even have your capitals docked up and you can asset safety your stuff out.

So when you lose the war you lose the space, the player structures and the ships that fought, but everything you had docked up or stored in the hangers can now easily be moved to low sec and then jumped out from there to your new home pretty easily. That's no small thing.

Edit: Didn't see Do Little's post where he already mentioned asset safety. I'm really curious to see how much asset safety will impact null life.

(a)
War is a word that is often open to interpretation. When people ask about wars between the large coalitions they are usually talking about the very large scale ones that are intent on the destruction of the other side. Those types of war are not all that frequent in this game. They happen but it's not an everyday thing.

Far more common is the smaller engagements for various reasons.

There are times where one group just wants to take a few more systems than they currently control or maybe they want a specific system for strategic reasons or whatever. Those types of smaller wars can start and end and still have both sides be fully intact.

There are also situations where neighbors will reset standings just to mix things up and get some fights going when things get stale.

There are also the forever wars which are just neighbors that are red to each other and go roaming in each other's space when looking for trouble but neither is looking to take sov from the other.

(b)
That really depends on what the goal of the war was and who started it. And again some wars just continue indefinitely as they are really just an excuse to fight. There are even times where if one side is winning too obviously then they will pull back and give their opponents a chance to build back up resources. The thought being that if you have neighbors that are fun to fight you don't want them to go away.

(c)
Much like my answers to a & b I will tell you that this can vary as well.


I would guess that you were mostly asking about the large wars that get headlines. That has been answered by other posters better than I could have. So I choose to just go a little further and point out that most wars in this game are not as black and white as the big ones that people like to talk about.

One further note about determining winners.... similar to real life there is a lot of propaganda and posturing within warfare in Eve. There are times when determining a clear winner or even a clear end can be difficult.

The fallout of a lost war goes beyond just the space, as Memphis points out.

For example the Casino War didn't change much as far as the map goes. One big blue donut got replaced by another. The same major players in Sov are the same ones that have been since DomSov. Overall not much changed except where on the map the same names appear.
What you can't kill is the organizational infrastructure behind huge coalitions of players. More than actually owning space, what matters is the ability to do it, both militarily and administratively. TEST is a good example here. More than once they have been tossed out of sov, usually squatting in FW to rebuild war chests before going right back to owning sov. They can lose a war and remain fairly intact, even profit at farming some other content. Losing all your space isn't as painful as it might seem.

Losing leadership is what hurts. Losing FC's, losing the guys that JF in all the stuff you take for granted to be stocked locally....that's a bigger fallout of wars (win or lose). It's during a war these guys get burned out quickly. Many alliances are very much reliant on a small group of core players to remain viable. Losing them to boredom or burn out can cripple an alliance much worse than losing moon goo income.

For the average line pilot, it's not much of a big deal. Long before we lost our space, my stuff was safely in a low sec NPC station. Because of pheobe I already stopped actually living in my space long before the war. Losing all that space did very little to affect my fortunes.