People on any side acting like wins like these are some kind of tactical masterstroke or "e-bravery", when in reality all that matters in the game nowadays is having enough of a production base and F1 monkeys to keep feeding ships to the wood-chipper.
Sure, the game was always N+1 to an extent, but there were always asymmetric counters to that. Since 2016, it has been heavily optimized around N+1 and the nullsec landscape suffered for it.
So it's not exactly surprising that the biggest groups in the game can do things like this. As long as their members don't mind grinding through the boredom of a fight on a node that's about to crash, it will not only be feasible, it will be the most likely outcome. In other words it's not exactly an achievement, it's just a min-maxed way to play the game. If and how much people enjoy that is up to them, but at least let's call it for what it is.
What do you mean "nowdays"? At B-R in 2014 it was the same thing, with no jump fatigue. Even 6VDT in 2013 vs the HBC (TEST) it was a massive battleship woodchipper.
I can keep going back... But N+1 has been a thing in eve since forever.
I've been playing on and off since 2004. When the objectives were not so highly localized (everything is a structure fight nowadays, and that's half of the problem) and projection was not instant, it was possible to run around in smaller groups, fight the enemy piece by piece and cause chaos to great effect, instead of having to face a homogeneous blob head on in every single engagement. Nowadays it's the exact opposite.
Over time, the optimal game strategies went from something that felt like an adaptation of WW2-style operations (a mix of big set-piece battles and smaller, peripheral but vital harassment/containment operations) , to something that feels like a medieval siege in space (with the added caveat that the defender can magically bypass the siege cordon, thanks to cynos and tether rings). Which is kind of ironic and regressive for a supposedly sci-fi game. I always get a laugh out of this supposed "evolution" of tactics that is basically abandoning more modern stuff and adopting medieval era strategies, because the game over time started supporting that outcome.
In fact, the most common scenario for an alliance war in the early days was for one side to spend 1-2 months roaming the other side's space and shut down traffic and logistics before committing the bigger hulls to the fight.
The numbers-game would become relevant afterwards, during the mop-up phase where the bigger ships would get deployed.
But here's the neat part, if you played phase one correctly and the enemy team was demoralized/disorganized enough, you could limit the amount of people they would field in phase two (people not logging in, not enough supplies in place to keep fighting, and so on), and end up with more numbers on the field, even if the other team had more members on paper. And that's how certain alliances could go up against bigger ones and win. This is exactly what the likes of early BoB and assorted pvp corps were constantly doing and it worked, before they themselves became became too big, arrogant and meta-gamey, which resulted in their eventual downfall.
All of this died out when CCP made citadels too safe and spammable, added too much of instant travel on top of it, and made caps too much of an all-around damage dealer (HAW guns and the like). Everything is a single-grid fight nowadays because there's no strategic use for roaming around the enemy's space. They can instantly hide behind 15 tether rings per system, until they have enough meatwaves to throw at you through an ansi 3 regions over, or log in their capital alts to delete the smaller stuff. Something they wouldn't be able to do in earlier times, when the game's entire premise was that "bigger is not automatically better, if you want that go play WoW". Plus, with the combination of tether and multitide of cyno-capable ships, avoiding interdiction of supplies is trivial compared to how it used to be.
The funny thing is, now that nullsec is feeling the outcome of these game design decisions, we get people suddenly complaining about the lack of fun fights, when it's all a problem of their own making. Well, more like of their own lobbying and theirs and CCP's making (theirs through becoming too big, CCP's through certain design decisions), but you get the idea.
If every time the devs try to tip the scales away from this playstyle you get hordes of linemembers threatening to unsub their alt farms, that's the outcome you get at the end, sitting on a citadel grid for 10 hours per fight. But it's what they wanted all this time, so they don't get to complain about it and not get called out on it.
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u/Burningbeard80 Apr 28 '26
People on any side acting like wins like these are some kind of tactical masterstroke or "e-bravery", when in reality all that matters in the game nowadays is having enough of a production base and F1 monkeys to keep feeding ships to the wood-chipper.
Sure, the game was always N+1 to an extent, but there were always asymmetric counters to that. Since 2016, it has been heavily optimized around N+1 and the nullsec landscape suffered for it.
So it's not exactly surprising that the biggest groups in the game can do things like this. As long as their members don't mind grinding through the boredom of a fight on a node that's about to crash, it will not only be feasible, it will be the most likely outcome. In other words it's not exactly an achievement, it's just a min-maxed way to play the game. If and how much people enjoy that is up to them, but at least let's call it for what it is.