Warfare & Tactics

The best way to avoid wars is not to present a desireable target and not to atagonise people who are likely to declare war on you.

There's no point bothering to increase the wardec cost against a corp by declaring war on yourself with an alt corp, you'd be better off making an alliance with a holding corp and then dropping your main corp out immediately if you get wardeced. 4 million isk isn't enough to prevent anyone from declaring war on you, but 50 million might be.

The problem with relying on that kind of mechanic to protect you from wars is that it is extremely likely to stop being effective come summer. The better solution is to not be people that other people want to wardec in the first place.

The OP is in an alliance. My instructions are for increasing the price on an alliance dec. And you can get the price pretty high at an exchange rate of 4mill to each 50mil increase.



Most of the time, there's no real reason for the dec. It doesn't matter how nice you are.

As far as I can tell, the reasons you might get war dec'd:
- You have a corp description that identifies you as non-pvp or whatever. Most dec'ing corps are looking for easy kills, not a fight.
- You are in a populous region near a trade hub - near Rens, Jita, Amarr, et al.
- You have a large number of members
- You have members that are mouthy or act (or are) completely nooby - i.e. one or more players has shown that they totally don't understand can-flipping mechanics and aggression.
- You have a history with a dec shield alliance - I believe some corps are targeting these corps hoping to get the 'cheap' war dec on the dec shield alliance, and the possibility of lots of targets, or just to grief those that have attempted to 'grief' the dec'rs.

Possible ways to lower your profile:
- Skip the in-depth corp description. Leave a basic statement about who to talk to about membership and maybe what your public channel is. Most griefers are not working that hard to find their next target.
- find a hub further from the high-traffic areas, although this may limit your PvE agents a bit more than they were.
- Ditch dead-weight members - look small and uninviting. If you do get dec'd, have members leave the corp temporarily and join an NPC corp, or have NPC alts that can use a little polishing. Do not give them any targets at all.
- Do not talk to anyone that is acting aggressively - even if you get flipped, ganked, bumped, whatever, pretend it did not happen. Do not block them, but do not accept chats (nor decline). In all regards, act as if you are AFK or that it never happened. Be un-entertaining. No tears. No acknowledgement at all. If you get war dec'd, the same thing. Do not chat them up in local, do not engage them in fights, do not PM them, do not ask why they dec'd you. This is for all members.
- Skip the dec shields, they just aren't really that useful.


Sometimes, they are random (sort of). I think there was a griefer corp dec'ing everyone that had an office in a specific system.

Let me give you my perspective as a former CEO of sizable hisec corp

My corp was always in an alliance. For the last 3 months until I resigned and take an EVE vacation, we were mercifully decced every week by griefer corps. For the most part, we could handle it. No one was scared per se. It was just a nuisance not being able to log on and perform daily activity. Luckily,the executor corp could tolerate hisec pvp and station games whereas I, and many of my pilots had better things to do than to wait for opponents to undock. Most of us were in a WH anyway so the wars were kinda irrelevant. I didn't mind PVP but just found hisec pvp to be a waste of my game time.

All of the above are great advice when it comes to actual tactics. But let's talk about 'mindset' and paradigms. Here's something many non combat or sizable hisec corps/alliances will have to come to grips with about this game; you are awarded for aggression in this game. The more aggressive you are, the more likely you will be able to handle yourself and deter bullies. The more passive you are, the more likely you are to get your butt whooped in this game. Bears, by nature, are passive; They won't learn to become aggressive. And for that, they will get bullied .

As a leader, your job is to also instill the mindset of aggression into them even if they are bears. There are many things you can say or communicate on a weekly basis to slowly transform some of them into more hardened bears. Not all will transform but some will. Your life as an alliance leader becomes alot easier when your grunts will come to accept that hisec isn't safe.



You can't avoid war in this game. You can't control what your opponents do. But you can control how you perceive things in this game. Change the way you look at things, the things you look at will change.



Edit: Shamless plug but if you want CCP to consider revising how hisec wars are done, then look to my sig and let your folks know to vote for that candidate. CCP's Summer expansion will focus heavily on how wars are managed in all parts of space and it is up to us to have competent candidates representing us.

Refusing to communicate with an aggressor won't actually help you. It'll just mean you lose any chance of actually negotiating an early end to your war. The people who declare war on you aren't mad slathering animals, or screeching 13 year old COD kiddies (at least not usually) it is entirely possible to work something out.

And by that I mean most people will take a bribe that will be considerably less than the value of the ships you'll lose.

You have a good point. Some might respond to a friendly chat.

I personally would never consider paying them a bribe as a way to end a war - once you are a known payer - it would encourage more wars.

1. Kick their spy

2. Do one of the wardec evasion tricks. Use alliance hopping to shed off wardecs, corphop, do whatever.

3. Collect tears.

This is a popular misconception. In reality there is virtually no information exchange between the majority of highsec PVP corps and there is certainly no bank of information that records who has paid ransom to whom (confidentiality is good business).

It might seem logical that similar corps and alliances with the same methods and goals would work together to help screw over carebears, but a combination of gigantic egos, incredible incompetence, paranoia and grudge bearing make it much more likely for any two given highsec war entities to shoot each other than to have a conversation about how they got paid. (and by shoot eachother I mean stare at eachothers logistics with covops alts for hours while both fleets sit logged off on the undock of the same station).

In fact if you manage to work out an amicable resolution to your war with your aggressor it is entirely likely that your former aggressor will be willing to work for you in a mercenary capacity in the future.