It was announced at the Imperium fireside meeting this past Saturday that the coalition had taken 69 systems since the opening of the offensive against Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and the assorted members and hangers on that make up their coalition.  Sniggering about the obvious number aside, we have been busy.

These gains include systems beyond the Catch region, extending out to Tenerifis, Immensea, and Impass.  So the sov influence map… you can see the latest one here or the full historical directory here… has changed.

Here is the pre-campaign state of the map.

And here is where things stood on Sunday, August 18th.

Our foes have been pushed back and you can see systems in Immensea lit and ready to be taken from Legion of xXDEATHXx.  The enemy is mostly busy trying to reorganize their holdings further back to accommodate refugees and retreats from the front.  The alliance they created, Goons Failed to Defend This System, which was put together to goad the Imperium into attacking, has been wiped off the map.

All of which is less a chest thumping declaration of triumph than a cold statement of fact.  Pandemic Horde, Fraternity, and their gang has proven unwilling or unable to defend the space taken and has been sending messages out to its members and allies that they will just take all the space back once Goons get bored and go home.

In their narrative this has been a success in that they did, in fact, goad the Imperium into attacking.  Their claim is that on their side the whole thing was just a couple of SIGs.

A little more substantial claim on the Imperium side is the structure kill count.

• 2 – Keepstars
• 21 – Fortizars
• 1 – Tatara
• 2 – Azbels
• 59 –  Astrahuses
• 2 – Raitarus
• 22 – Athanors
• 23 – Metenox Moon Mining Drills
• 35 – Skyhooks

That list gives lie to the claim that this was just a couple of SIGs on their side.  I mean, when I go out on operations with SIGs on the Imperium side we try to live out of an NPC station, or maybe a Raitaru or an Astrahus.  We do not drop two Keepstars.  Keepstars are a commitment, targets that attract hostiles and which, if you are not out in force, will be attacked.

Dropping a Keepstar means serious business.  And two Keepstars on one grid… a potential clash of titans… I mean, unless one side just doesn’t show up.

Then there was the great hell camp of Utopia.

After blowing up the two staging Fortizars in the system of Utopia in Curse, we were told that Fraternity, Horde, and their allies had moved all of their capital ships to one of the NPC stations in the system.

We dropped a Fortizar of our own in sight of the undock and setup a hell camp.

A hell camp is when you have your foes in a single location and you bubble them in and put up a guard fleet around the clock to catch them if they try to break out.  Hell camps are a thing of legend, especially in Goonswarm, as they demonstrate the sometimes stupid lengths we will go to in order to best a foe.  Hell camps can for run for days, weeks, or even months if the goal is clear and the foe well and truly trapped.

The hell camp of the battlefield after the clash at M2-XFE during World War Bee was a classic example.  While likely a strategic mistake… to do the hell camp we had to let down the watch on the wall of Helm’s Deep, the protected industrial region we had held against overwhelming odds, and in doing so those three constellations were lost and all of our structures purged… it was tactically a very popular operation and did demoralize our foes for weeks.

You could log in and sit around for an hour or two and suddenly some foe would get impatient or log in the wrong character and a titan or a super carrier or a fax would appear in the bubbles and a hoot would go up on coms and we’d dog pile on the unfortunate for another easy kill.

I got on a few such kills.  We were all working from home during the pandemic, so I would just leave myself logged in and coms on a speaker so I could turn from my work laptop and join in if something came up.  Good times.

The hell camp in Utopia though… that felt a bit weak to me.  Unlike the M2-FXE hell camp, hell camping a station requires the hostiles to log in, see local, and still think they can undock.  You aren’t going to get very many accidental kills and the whole thing is prone to station undock games and what not.  I’ve been there and done that.  I remember us bottling up the Southern Coalition at the station in 319-3D in Delve a dozen years back.  As a tactic it has its place.

But this hell camp didn’t feel right to me.  It wasn’t clear that the enemy was bottled up or that they cared if they were.  They hadn’t bothered to show up for more than a couple of fights and their stated goal was to bore us to death, so why would they care if they couldn’t undock?  They were not going to do so anyway.

I nearly wrote a post about the hell camp, but my attention was elsewhere.  I did go out and get a few screen shots of it and our Ferox Navy Issue fleet hanging out, ready to unleash their aimbot accurate railguns on anybody dumb enough to show up, but I didn’t join the camp.

Certainly Gobbins made hay about us and our hell camp.  Apparently he openly and repeatedly pinged out on Discord to all who were listening that the Imperium were fools, that there was nothing there, that the capital ships had been withdrawn previously, and that they were gone, safely back in home space, out of reach of the Imperium and were not coming back.

The Imperium could go pound sand with their hell camp.

The Imperium took screen shots of those pings… we all have enough low level spies in each other’s organization that no general ping goes unread by all… and the coalition diplomats brought them to organizations in the area of operation who had previously declined to cooperate with us because they have assurance from Gobbins that Pandemic Horde would totally be there to help defend their space.  This did not bolster confidence in PH and their promises and we now apparently have cooperation from groups who were previously willing to defy us based on the backing they assumed they had.

This was all part of the plan, or so we were told, so the hell camp served a purpose, if not exactly the expected one.  And they probably got a few random kills in any case.  If you wait long enough anywhere in null sec somebody will eventually blunder in and get caught.

Which brings us to the other part of Saturday’s announcement, which was that the Imperium is expanding its space.  We have groups that want more space and we have a vested interest in preparing for however CCP’s plan to reinvigorate null sec with the Equinox expansion… launched back in June and expected to be a thing… maybe by November… turns out.

I previously wrote about how Equinox seemed to be the end of farms and fields, the old goal of being able to make any null sec system useful and able to support players, to the old pattern of some systems having value while others did not.  This was surprisingly… to me at least, I am not used to getting the point of things without having them explained with small words… taken up by the Imperium and other null sec entities and became the wide versus tall argument.

Farms and fields was a “tall” view of null sec, where a large group could provide for itself in a constellation or two.  The “wide” view of the world has only some systems providing enough value to fully upgrade so a large organization needs to grab more space to ensure it has the resources it needs to support its members.

So the Imperium is expanding as a hedge against that, getting the timers started on things because the sovereignty level take 60 days to get to five and you can’t do all possible upgrades until you get there.

We will likely be taking more than the 69 systems already acquired… and if Pandemic Horde and Fraternity want to take them back like they have said they are going to do, they might have to undock and put some effort into it.

Also, by the time this posts the Fortizar kill count will have gone up by at least one… assuming PH doesn’t come to defend it.  But that has been a very safe assumption so far.