Dominion: Gold Rush or Fool's Gold?

A lot of buzz has been going around about the upcoming changes to sovereignty, what I've termed D-day. With a severe lack of solid information (even so close to it's supposed release dates), I've been hard pressed about writing anything and giving any sort of firm opinion on the subject. I can however say a few things with almost complete confidence. This is NOT going to be end of the current 0.0 empires! This is NOT going to be the mad space rush that people seem to think it will be.

Pay enough attention to the forums and you'll begin to see, the only people that will be in 0.0 are the people familiar with 0.0 as it currently is. Yes, there may be some alliances that fail cascade under the new mechanics. But alliances such as Goonswarm, Atlas, AAA, Tau Ceti, Razor, and even my alliance, Systematic Chaos, are not just going to suddenly disappear. And all that space they hold? Okay, sure, they may consolidate the actual space they have their names on, but if empire dwelling corporations and alliances think they're suddenly going to move out to 0.0 and stake their claim in the vacated areas, well I say they're in for a real eye opener.

I think Eve Monkey said it best in the last line of his blog post. "...it will be difficult to gain any space your neighbor doesn’t want you to." And that is 100% true.

Basically, take a look at this map. We'll take Goonswarm space as an example. Currently, on that map you see a huge yellow blotch covering the areas that Goonswarm maintains sovereignty over. After D-day, yes, that may very likely change. That blotch of yellow will probably shrink quite a bit. Does this mean the surrounding areas, the areas that will no longer be covered in that ugly yellow, will suddenly be open turf and gobbled up by other, previously unknown, formerly empire based alliances? No. It may no longer have their name on it but don't think for a moment that it will suddenly become open game to just about anyone. They may not have their name on it but in essence it will still be controlled by Goonswarm. It will likely still be patrolled and regulated by their fleets on a consistent basis.

In my opinion, Sovereignty will no longer be a "put your name on as much space as you can" game. Instead it will be, "this is our home, but nobody can live around our home unless we want you there and you pay us to live there or at least work out some sort of agreement."

So okay. Not being one to beat my own chest and insist I am completely right on a subject of which a lot of information is still lacking, let’s consider the other difficult aspect of 0.0 living. This isn’t like wormholes. This isn’t a situation where you’ll fairly often be able to find a nice route back to Empire space. You have got to take into consideration logistics.

Currently, my alliance resides in the region Esoteria. Referring to that same map, you can see it’s quite a distance between there and empire. And between us is a number of other alliances. However, the reason we’re able to survive there is because we have a very well established and organized logistics system. But more importantly, we have agreements with those alliances between us and empire allowing us use of their jump bridges and safe travel through their systems. Without that, we would be hard pressed to survive in the area we are. Not impossible mind you, just a lot more difficult. This is what Goonswarm was actually trying to break in this last war. They had hopes of ruining our relationship with the other Alliances and thus breaking our ability to survive. Unfortunate for them, they failed.

So I suggest to all those corps and alliances that intend to move to nullsec after D-day, start thinking about where you'd like to go. Then speak with the diplomats of the current sovereign alliance about possible relations or treaties. Otherwise, don't be surprised when you get your butt handed to you and sent back to empire via the clone vat express.

Oh, and for those wondering about the war, it ended just about as quickly as it started. There was a lot of bullshit that flew around about it, but I think this sounds to be the most logical.

Originally Posted by The Mittani
THE FALL OF ESOTERIA

STANDING ORDERS:

1. Withdraw to TPAR.
2. Prepare to defend PA-V in Period Basis against Romulans

WHAT THE FUCK:

Vietnam is a poor gimmick for this war, because since we're opting to cut our losses it has instead become something of a Bay of Pigs. We could bog down in A1 after losing a host of towers in the face of 700 hostiles last night in our primetime, or we could say "Here's what went wrong" and sever.

WHAT WENT WRONG:

First, the attack should have focused on stations, not logistics hubs, with GS at the tip of the spear and not ZAF. Instead, ZAF was given a station to take, and GS was assaulting a bridge system. Should GS have succeeded, the enemy would have been impacted somewhat, but not as grievously as if we had been grinding on a station. ZAF was distracted by their loss of sov in PA-V and the Romulan invasion of that system, and so couldn't really concentrate against their Esoteria station target; moreover, they don't have much experience in the vanguard assault position. That station was not taken and the hostile bloc could concentrate against us in A1.

While losing a capfleet is no big deal to us, combined with the IGNE titan loss, our enemies saw weakness and surged over the weekend to bring 700 people against our 100 in our primetime. Pubbies don't understand that we think the IGNE thing is funny, they just smell blood in the water and swarm. Our timers and pos-fittings haven't had a chance to recover in A1 and our foothold on that system never fully established.

This invasion was planned by someone who does not usually do our war planning. It was a 'final exam' of sorts, and that exam was failed. However, you can legitimately blame the directorate for entrusting such an important plan to someone who screwed it up.

For example, allies were going to be making some distracting assaults on the blocs involved to draw attention away such that Atlas couldn't gangpile in along with Stainwagon, ROL and -A-. Those assaults did not happen because the person who was planning the war never confirmed these plans with our allies, nor followed up with them.

Logistics was also a disaster with GSOL essentially being unprepared for the invasion and left scrambling to pick up the pieces while understaffed.

In sum, the directorate fucked up by delegating the invasion to the wrong person and not making sure these critical issues were being handled competently.

WHAT NOW:

Expect an energized foe to strike us. Romulans moved six Jump Freighters into PA-V, in Period Basis, a former ZAF station system. In the near term we will be retreating to TPAR and preparing to help defend PA-V.

Meanwhile, ROL has been running distraction attacks on us in Querious, so we need to trim out a few small staging towers they dropped on us, and possibly make some reprisal attacks on their moons in Khanid.

Now, honestly, given my lack of time in the pod lately, I’m not sure what happened after that between the “Romulans” and Goons. As for Systematic Chao’s involvement, if you want a better look into what transpired from our perspective of the war, hop on over to Prometheus09’s blog. He did an awesome job of writing about it.

For me, all I know is that things in Eso have gone back to its usual business. In fact, with D-day coming, and the latest war, we haven’t been bothering much with Brick squad. Guess they were so saddened by the sudden lack of engagements, yesterday they decided to declare official war on us through Concord. All I can say is, good luck with that…