Warfare & Tactics

It is only proper to retaliate once you take into consideration the Gallentean Codex for combat operations. Basically you focus on a scale.

Scale:
Is my ship bigger and more advanced?
Do I have more people at my disposal in which to take the enemy?
Is my current fitting a direct counter to my opposition?
Can I reship if necessary ASAP?

If all these conditions are not met, then you do not fight.

It's usually the better decision, although I never leave a corp to magically get rid of them. Alts are fine for not having to care about them. I don't really care about highsec wardeccers. I pay some private mercenaries to feed me intel about TAXU though.

One day that will come in very useful. I can wait a year, or two, or three, I have quite a lot of patience.

This is completely false. The code goes like this:

Can we kill more isk than we'll lose?
If not, do we have enough Derp Atrons available?

Although not on the same level as chatgrus, at least somebody is finally mocking my corp! +1!

we block out the sun with our forum posts

I go to great lengths to claim my own killrights if the offender frequents hisec. Those, or being at war, are great incentives to actually start using your ISK for meaningfull PVP by protecting your mates and corporate investments, making gankers regret their actions, or leeching kills to make yourself look leet. We just got out of a war where an enemy Bhaalgorn was popped by Blues that had a dec by the same group... in the 24hr period before the war started.

While the enemy looks better in the war report, we kept them docked, running and logging off by immediately responding to their presence in a given system. We even camped their lowsec HQ a few times. In a 100+ member Alliance, you are bound to have some people who start mining, oblivious of the war going on. Our strategy is to try and minimalize those kills while our PVP element gets their groove on. It's mainly a PVP game, a corp policy to never fight back is just a bad policy IMO.

I'm getting the impression that your experience of highsec wars consists entirely of being part of a non-highsec entity that has had war declared on it by people that want to camp trade hubs and that even that experience isn't exactly extensive.

You know how I can tell? Nobody camps a station if they intend to actually fight anything or if their opponent engages in any kind of substantive activity in highsec, after all there are no belts in Jita and neither missions, anoms or wormholes spawn there.

If you actually try and fight a highsec PVP corp or alliance that actually operates against other highsec entities you'll find that the second you show up to try and shoot them suddenly there are vindicators, Bhaalgorns and guardians everywhere and you just blew up.

It's also a fallacy if you think you can't inflict significant losses on a highsec PVP entity, it's just not true. The larger an entity is and the more wars it has the less likely individuals are to be paying attention to exactly what they are fighting, additionally the individual members regularly fly super expensive things around, often with little regard for their own safety because the defenders in wars tend to be so utterly passive.

Case and point: Whores in space, a large, trade hub camping mercenary alliance declared war on my alliance, a smaller, non trade hub camping mercenary alliance. On the first day of the war we killed a 8 billion isk navy megathron on the Jita 4-4 undock. The only reason that was possible was the total complacency of the members of the aggressor corporation. Moreover many members in those corps engage in side activities that result in them being in situations where they are absurdly vulnerable, such as suspect baiting where characters will often be aggressed to something in a multi-billion isk faction battleship for several minutes.

The current climate in highsec is one where you simply don't expect anyone you declare war on to actually try and shoot you back, so people just hunt missioners and miners and camp trade hubs. A mining OP is a more likely activity for a corp to engage in while at war than putting together a combat fleet.

There are buckets and buckets of opportunities for defenders in wars, particularly where the aggressor is very large and has predictable and unfocused methods of operation, to inflict really embarrassing losses on the aggressors without risking very much but they are so utterly convinced that nothing they can do will work or that it is not worth trying because [REASONS] that they're unwilling to take victories that are practically being handed to them.

That is what those people who sit on undocks in tornadoes or on gates in interceptors rely on. If their war targets (of whom there are often thousands) even attempted to do anything they wouldn't be able to operate that way.