The Casino War: Establishing The Baseline In Fade

Yesterday I posted a little about the situation in Cloud Ring and Pandemic Horde's plans to deploy to Fade, the home of SpaceMonkey's Alliance of The Imperium. The operation, which involves the mass deployment of AFK cloaky ships in order to degrade the activity defense multipliers of SMA's systems, began on 19 February. I was a bit late to covering the action, so I put together a map to get everyone up to speed.

The situation early this morning

Since the leadership of Pandemic Horde laid out their victory conditions, I thought I would start to measure them. As a reminder:

We have a very clear goal and strategic objective with this operation:

• Reduction of SMA’s member count http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/SpaceMonkey’s_Alliance
• Reduction of Fade indexes and eventually sov http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Fade#adm

The way we plan to achieve this is intense denial of isk making activities in their home system of Fade by constant hunting and cloaky camping their most valuable constellations. However, this will not be your average cloaky camp and blops campaign.

The initial plan called for the constant AFK cloaky camping of the 13 systems in the VNX-P0 and 7X-X1Y constellations. These constellations contain the best truesec, and thus money making potential, in Fade. The plan is working, at least over the 24 hours covered on the map. The 2,668 NPCs killed is a extremely low number in a region like Fade. As a comparison, system CR-AQH in the neighboring region of Pure Blind, with a truesec of only -0.28, saw 12,639 NPCs destroyed during the same period.

The Pandemic Horde leadership also spelled out the acceptable outcomes of their deployment to Fade:

If done right this kind of ratting and mining shut down leads to the collapse of ADM indexes which then means extremely easy to entosis ihubs, which leads to breakdown of logistics and upgrades, eventually leading to worthless adm 1 station systems and easily taken sov. It also has a very significant impact on the morale of residents who are suddenly unable to use their own space at all. This tactic is particularly vicious because it cannot be countered by a few weekly blobs or spamming supercaps. This is the vietname-esque crawl that Fozzie envisioned. Failure or success will really come down to sustained activity throughout all timezones and whichever faction gives up first. We foresee three possible outcomes:

A) Goons send patrols of light doctrines to keep SMA ratters safe. Many skirmishes and dessie brawls ensue.

B) Goons abandon fortress Saranen and redeploy near Fade to prop up SMA using heavier doctrines backed up by supers.

C) Fade rots, SMA loses their sov and their income streams.

All of these outcomes are favorable so let’s go for it.

The victory conditions are known. The starting position is recorded. Now, time to grab the popcorn and witness what may turn into a long, drawn out war.