Greedy Goblin

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Weekend minipost: asymmetric warfare

This is a great battle report. An approximately 70-men Goon fleet caught a half as big ragtag fleet, or rather multiple independent small groups. The result is what everyone would expect, the ragtag pirates got their ass kicked. Goons lost 5 ships and 2 pods, the invaders (the battle was in Deklein) lost 27 ships and 14 pods.

The question is: "who won the battle?"

Captain obvious is wrong! The massacred pirate rabble lost 1.6B, while the victorious Goons lost 4.4B, thanks to a 3B ratting paladin, its 900M pod and a 500M ratting Gila.

Tiericide greatly decreased the power difference of T1 and T2/faction ships, making cheap crap competitive in PvP. This means that total destruction of a doctrine fleet is more like a nuisance than a loss. The only way to damage your opponents is catching his haulers and ratters. This is why enemy coalitions do less damage to CFC than random pirate rabble.

People don't see the effect of tiericide on the meta. There is no point of fleet battles anymore. The enemy won't care if they lose, it's rather just "content" to them. It's already replaced. The future is in asymmetric warfare, going after assets they actually care about.

This is the future!

7 comments:

Arrendis said...

There's only one problem I see with your assessment: the Paladin dies half an hour before the fight.

He's the thing that's gonna take the longest to kill, and he dies thirty minutes before anything else. So he's not part of the fleet battle.

Which makes the numbers for the actual fight very different.

Gevlon said...

He was the purpose and reason of the fleet battle.

Pirates came, hit ratters, killed some bling. Then defensive fleet formed and killed them.

CFC Grunt said...

Congratulations, you have once again re-discovered Asymmetric warfare.

It's not only the future, it's also the past and pretty sure from my current actions - the present.

The point of fleet battles, tiericide or not, is to win a timer and claim the sov. Asymmetric warfare rarely gets you far, especially against big alliances - and is most effective when combined with an actual, successful fleet offensive.

Anonymous said...

If the future of Sov warfare lies in fielding several caracals in order to kill four literally worthless retrievers, then of course, the Goons will be purged from sov Nul by next weekend.

Sorry, as entertaining hilarious Goon losses may be, they don't matter in the game of sov space!
As long as no one challenges their sov, they won't lose.

Killing their ratting ships might be a little annoying to the individual goon, but, hey, we know who's got alts in hisec?
Right, everyone...
Asymmetric warfare is fun and entertaining, but it won't purge Goons from Hisec or Nulsec.

But it still is an entertaining show...

Arrendis said...

Oh, I won't disagree with that, Gevlon - he clearly counts as part of the losses of the day - but it's a distinction worth making, because otherwise it presents an impression that there was a paladin, with a fleet and logistics around him, that still got killed by those few hostiles.

We're bad, man, but we're not that bad.

Anonymous said...

Your efforts are focused on the wrong area. As others have pointed out, whilst hilarious kills are hilarious they don't make an impact on the shape of space ownership - and ultimately if you want to hurt Goons you have to hurt their space. If you want to turn their pilots against each other you need to attack things which impact quality of life. This isn't ratting or mining ships... this is things like the jump bridge network, the market place that saves the majority of troops having to fly to Jita to purchase things. You could actually cause lasting harm by running a campaign against their freighters but these operate out of corp so the chances of being actually effective in this endeavour are slim.

Also looks as though your Coalition of Good is collapsing already.

Anonymous said...

Actually the Paladin is some rich goon who felt like baiting the gang without telling anyone.