Last weekend the word went out at the weekly fireside that we might be in for some action.  China has a holiday week, referred to as National Day Golden Week, which kicks off with the National Day celebrations on October 1st that commemorate the declaration of the People’s Republic of China back in 1949.  And when there are holidays in China Fraternity, a largely Chinese alliance in EVE Online, often finds time to for big operations.

Welcome to a truly global video game.

This time around Fraternity and their Winter Coalition allies decided to push at our holdings in the Geminate region.  Those were a remnant of the Vexor War that ran from early April into middle May.  This is the history lesson, if you are interested:

  • May 12, 2026 – Home From Geminate and the End of the Vexor War Campaign
  • May 5, 2026 –  All Quiet on the Geminate Front
  • Apr 29, 2026 – WinterCo Staging Keepstar in 4-HWWF Destroyed
  • Apr 22, 2026 – CCP Reviews Atioth and Bungles B-R5RB
  • Apr 20, 2026 – Notes from the War in the Geminate Flood Plain
  • Apr 15, 2026 – Notes from the War in Geminate
  • Apr 10, 2026 – The Imperium Picks Itself Up, Dusts Itself Off, and Drops Two More Keepstars
  • Apr 7, 2026 – The Imperium Loses 33 Titans Battling WinterCo and the Server in Atioth
  • Apr 4, 2026 – The Imperium Marches on Geminate
  • Mar 14, 2026 – Ongoing Fighting in Southern Geminate (pre-war)

That left us in possession of three constellations in the region, giving us a direct connection to Fraternity space.

In anticipation of the potential push, GSF initiated an alliance job to pay some bonus ISK for killing rats in the three constellations in order to raise ADMs a bit.  I actually flew an Ishtar out there to collect a bit of extra ISK and raise my security status a bit after it took a huge hit in Amamake last week.

In a Guristas Forsaken Hub

I haven’t shot Guristas rats since 2016.  Delve is home to the Blood Raiders and Insmother and much of the southeast hosts the Angel Cartel.

Anyway, I am sure I didn’t help very much.  Fraternity did as expected and reinforce the sovereignty in our holdings, focusing mostly on the NK-AOZ constellation, the one closest to their space.

Geminate State of Play on October 1

This set a series of timers for a sovereignty contests, and the thing about timers is that they give a lot of warning to the defenders.  Also, the time zone for the timers are set by the defender.  When we went in and destroyed the WinterCo staging Keepstar… the one famously lacking armor plates… we had to fight in Chinese time, which meant fighting through downtime and in the very early early morning for me.

For these sovereignty contests WinterCo was going to have to fight in European time.  And while WinterCo has EUTZ allies… and it is a holiday week, so they can stay up late themselves… the Imperium also has a lot of Euros.  And with the promise of some action and a possible escalation to capital ships if things got spicy, the moment the timers were set move ops to pre-position caps started, jumping them to K-IYNW in the Great Wildlands region and then taking that long regional gate into Atioth, where they could dock up in our Keepstar, ready to jump into any battle.

Basically, it has been pretty quiet in null sec, with our primary foe being CCP/Fenris and their desire to inconvenience us until we quit (again, they clearly don’t bother to try and understand null sec), and a lot of people were hungry for a big fight, even if it was a sov contest, which themselves are another exhibit in the case of “CCP doesn’t understand how people play their game.”

The whole thing was set to kick off around 17:00 UTC on the first, which rather awkwardly for me is in the first half of my work day.  Being on the west coast of the US tends to put me in an awkward time slot for a lot of these things.  But I had jabber running and could see the fleets being called up.  Ravens, Maelstroms, Typhoons, dreadnoughts, all being collected into fleets and moving to the front line.

Then, as the fights started, the reinforcement fleets, bringing new people and people who lost ships into the fight.

When we hit lunch my time I saw a reinforcement fleet go up and I decided to jump in and see if I could get in on some of the fight.  I wasn’t ready, or in the mood, to commit to a battleship for the brawl, so I picked a Confessor, the Amarr T3 tactical destroyer, which is one of the support ships that fly with the Typhoon doctrine.

My Confessor undocked, with Ravens and a Maelstrom in frame

Being support means you have to stick with the fleet but you can also screw around a bit and find your own targets.  The default fit even came with a target painter and, in sharpshooter mode, could target out to nearly 120km with my skills, so it seemed likely I might even get on a couple of kill mails.  I could hit my quota of one on the first day of the month!

I was just in time.  As I got myself together, made sure to fit the rigs in my newly acquired ship, and undocked as the reinforcement fleet took a couple of gates to a waiting titan that sent us into the Great Wildlands.  We then gated into Atioth.

A mixed doctrine reinforcement fleet taking the gate

In Atioth we were warped to the Keepstar where another titan waited.  It opened up a bridge as shortly after we landed… kind of an optimistic move as we had bridged so recently, but my jump timer had run down and the FC was probably tracking that.

Getting the bridge into the fight

We were sent straight to 4VY-Y1, where the main battle in the sovereignty contest appeared to be happening.  It was full of capsuleers and time dilation was down to 10%, so things were moving slow.

Me and about 2,600 of my friends in 4VY-Y1

That is some serious tidi, but it wasn’t awful.  Everything was running at 10% of normal speed, but commands were being processed immediately from the queue.

I supposed I speak as a bit of a connoisseur of tidi.  I am one of those people who hits shift-alt-control-M to bring up the queue to see how things are really performing.  I have a sense of the dreaded “server weather” after a decade of half of dealing with its squalls and storms.

Some people see any sort of slow down of the game and throw themselves on the floor and have a tantrum about it.  They rage at CCP for bad code, they rage at them for not upgrading their servers (like they’re going to spend any money on us when they’ve fallen in love with their blockchain scam game), they range at the players for being eager to form up in huge numbers and throw themselves into what is obviously going to be a tidi traffic jam.  They treat it like we’re all conspiring to keep them from having fun.

But I’ve been around since tidi became a thing and have come to appreciate it as a game mechanic.  In my experience, this was “good” tidi.  It was not worth fretting about at all.

On landing in 4VY-Y1 we were told which fleet to join based on which doctrine they were flying… I was there for a Typhoon doctrine fleet… and was able to drop fleet, swap coms, and join the new fleet readily enough.  Then it was time to warp to the FC for the fight already in progress.  I had put myself into sharpshooter mode and was soon aligned and in warp to the Typhoon fleet.

The Typhoons are in there somewhere

The fleet ended up being strung out in a long line, the slow, armor tanked Typhoons running their microwarp drives and consuming cap boosters to try and catch up to the FC.

I landed in the scrum, caught up quickly enough in my zippy little destroyer, put my target painter on about half a dozen targets, shooting at a few more than were at close range, before the FC called for us to align to the O-VWPB.  The slugfest had been going on for about 90 minutes at that point and WinterCo had decided that they had had enough… how to use the word “had” four times in a single sentence there… and were looking to extract.

We, in turn, were going to do a bit of extracting ourselves, in the form of some targets of opportunity as they fled the battle.  Up to that point the scale of losses were about even, but once you start to retreat things are going to weigh against you.

The FC warped us to the gate, which had bubbles all over so nobody could simple land and jump.  Everybody had to slow boat to the gate from 20-50km out, so the FC was calling for support to get through and tackle what we could.

Racing to get to the gate

You can see in that image our Typhoons coming in at one angle with another stream of Ravens… ours and theirs intermixed… running for the gate along another axis.

Some of the battleships were not going to wait to get to the other side, sending volleys into hostiles still running for the exit.  Even as the gate pulled me through to the next system a large volley was hitting a hostile Raven

Somebody not willing to wait to fight on the other side

When I was through and on the other side we managed to catch a few.  Bubbles were up and I even tried to tackle, though with a 9km scram most stuff was dead before I could get within range.

Through the gate and in the mix

The hostiles were getting out of the bubbles and headed to the VSJ-PP gate.  We continued to give chase, popping into that system to grab a couple more stragglers.

But that was the end of things.  We were now into their space.  They warped off when they could and we went back to the gate and jumped through.  We paused there for a bit, more to let other fleets move ahead than to make sure the hostiles were not coming back… they were not, they were done… before starting our own run back to Atioth.  The tidi was subsiding a bit by that point, but still there due to us pushing multiple fleets through gates.

We grouped up in Atioth… sort of.  There was a change of instructions which ended up with half the fleet on the Keepstar aligned to the K-IYNW gate and the other half on the in gate, also aligned to the K-IYNW gate.  But when the FC said “take this warp” we were on the ball enough to all warp to the gate and go through.

From there it was another titan bridge and a couple gates and we were back home.

The battle report I am looking at put the price of the battle at 220 billion ISK.

Battle Report Header

While we dropped dreads… and even lost a couple… it was not a capital fight and you don’t get big big ISK numbers until you get capitals on grid and brawling.

Still, enough destruction to keep the economy of New Eden turning for another day.

And, in the end, the status quo was maintained.