Spoopy Eviction Defense AAR – Hole Control
(Written by Hole Control lead FC 7o)
Originally to Reddit here: https://new.reddit.com/r/Eve/comments/1d1p9x1/aar_spoopy_newbies_brave_eviction_attempt/
TLDR: A group of friends planned to take over the wormhole J133632 for its strategic advantages. Despite initial successes in establishing control, we faced strong resistance from Brave, leading to intense battles. Outnumbered, we adapted our strategy and sought reinforcements. After mixed results and mutual respect, both sides agreed to a ceasefire, ending with a fair exchange of loot and recognition of Brave's strong defense.
After AngerGames 6, Yaentei and Xarayac were thinking of starting a small gang group together. We wanted to conquer a hole for high skilled PvP and tournament veterans, who are still willing to log in on Tranquility. We agreed that J133632 would be the perfect hole for this project, since it would be easy to defend, due to the Red Giant effect and the very small size of the system. On top it has some nice planets, so permanent inhabitants would be able to do some passive industry.
Radakos and his group Plug N Play got evicted at the same time, so we added him in on the plan, as he’s a high APM gamer, and friend of ours.
Brainbashi already had planned an eviction for a really similar but overall slightly worse system. His plans for the hole were roughly the same, a summer cottage, as the finns do, for blopsing fun with the next expansion. On top of that he proved to be an eviction master and very valuable member of our organization team during the run.
Together we all agreed that we would try to evict this hole as it is an amazing system to live out of and appeared relatively inactive according to our scouting the weeks before the eviction. If Brave would decide they cared a lot about this hole, we hoped it would turn into a nice challenge.
Yaentei would bring Lethal Devotion, Xarayac would bring marakuga, Radakos would bring Plug n Play and Brainbashi would bring Avanto for the initial infill to take on hole control and hopefully make this a successful operation.
We decided on a doctrine that was versatile in different situations and should be capable of taking on capitals on grid, since our structure scans had revealed a capital shipyard on one of the industry facilities. Ikitursas should do the job, with the added benefit of them being quite efficient at reinforcing structures.
For the mainline fleet we originally decided to bring Ewar heavy brawling Ikitursas and Guardians, combined with a few Nestors for their refitting capabilities. We assumed that during the first few days we would have to either refit and reship in space or, hopefully, live out of a POS. Living out of POS was uncertain since the system was originally moonlocked. We also prepared some Bhaalgorns to shut down eventual Faxes, some assorted ewar and bombers, as well as the necessary rolling equipment to hold hole control once we were in.
On infill day, Bob decided to be generous and connected quite a few wormholes to our target, among those a convenient Pochven border system and a low class hole with a HS static.
We started by anchoring 2 Astra’s on different grids, reinforced the stations, and we were able to destroy the offlined POS sticks without the hostiles trying to get them online to cause timers. Therefore we anchored our own stick that we would base out of until the Astras came online.
The first few days we were very good at keeping hole control, no major things happened, besides a few shuttle infills during slip ups from our door stoppers. During the Fortizar armor timer, Brave pilots inside the OP hole, did not try to contest us on the structure timer, instead they tried to split our fleet apart and infill more pods to the OP hole while we were busy getting that timer done. They made us warp between the grids with our slow brawling fleet, trying to not lose hole control or our rollers and with the Fortizar and Tatara timers just a few minutes apart. The triple plated Fort helped them buy time to try and keep us from stopping the repair timers. At the end of that engagement we had managed to both keep hole control and reinforce the structures to their final timers.
https://br.evetools.org/br/66510c159a5a970012559406
On Thursday, day three of the eviction operation, the circus broke loose. Brave suddenly rage formed and contested our hole control by throwing a marauder ball on the null static hole during our off timezone (https://dscan.info/v/3aee501b9668) They managed to push us off from the null static and take the holecontrol until we managed to make enough rage pings to get our team to “remote work” and come online to help. The first fight broke loose on the static hole between our ewar heavy Ikis versus Brave marauders. (https://br.evetools.org/related/31000741/202405230800)
Our rolling BS squad was on standby, ready to close the hole during the fight, but Brave’s fleet was absolutely perfect at denying our rolling ships to ever reach the hole with bubbles. While the fight was ongoing, we tried to force HICs and dictors off from the hole, but Brave was able to trickle more pods into the system. Eventually Brave disengaged and warped the remaining marauders to safety. Although we had “won” the first fight, this took us too long to achieve and Brave had gotten enough pods inside the op hole to overwhelm our fleet after a short forth and back. From this point onward the tables had turned, Brave now had enough pods inside the hole to contest our Ikitursa fleet during the structure timers. We decided to not challenge their hole control for the remainder of the day, since at the time we did not have any equipment nor pilots inside the hole to do so, as it was a workday for most of our pilots. This event forced us to pivot from our original plans of “fighting a few capitals and marauders”, to figure out how we can actually contest Brave proper fleet numbers. Brave started reinforcing all our structures and we deployed a small bombing campaign (to harass them while they were busy shooting the citadels.
This proved quite effective, even with low numbers, due to the red giant effect.
https://br.evetools.org/related/31000741/202405231000
On day four, we decided to let go of the first medium structure timer that day and focus our efforts on the second timer, as this was during a better time for the Finnish warriors from Avanto, who were the majority of our numbers. Our organization team figured that we had not enough equipment inside the hole to contest the Brave proper fleet head on and thus came up with “high risk, high reward” bombing play to get rid of some 100 odd Brave pods with one swoop. This goofy master plan was supposed to enable us to fight even with lesser numbers. But with our main FC being unavailable and a less experienced FC step up to give it a try, combined with being outnumbered by more than we had expected, we missed some of our bombing runs, got the “shitfit” logi wing tackled and lost the timer, resulting in the station to reinforce.
Reason why we were forced to commit to this play from our side was simple. We had remembered to bring MWD refits for our Ikitursas but unfortunately forgot the MWD refits for our logistic wing. Originally having been AB fit, to be a bit more agile, this proved to be a big disadvantage, when we had to anchor them on the main fleet, as we also did not have a dedicated Logi anchor available. This gave the enemy fleet the opportunity to just warp right on top of the Logi wing, which was slowly tailing behind after a try to reposition ourselves on the grid. Our bomber wing was able to coordinate some good runs and get some kills though, while a single Orthrus was harassing the enemy tackle and EWAR frigates very effectively.
After we had lost our entire logi wing squad to the unfortunate warp-in we had to disengage to cut our losses.
https://br.evetools.org/br/66510eb2c27f9500122d0b97
Day five of the operation, we reconsidered our options, now knowing how heavily outnumbered we had gotten. We decided to shift the focus to the Proteuses instead of Ikitursas so we wouldn’t have to rely on their spooling damage and increase the amount of kitey things in our fleet. On top of that, the remaining Guardians were refitted to 50MN so they would be able to catch up or run away next time. We pivoted our bombing pilots to be more in harasing role, expanded our bomber wing and some anti support Orthruses, to threaten tackle, in order to make sure there would be no frigates that could interfere with our kitey shenanigans. Brave were kind enough to not keep tight hole control, as most wormhole groups would, so restocking our hangars wasn’t too much effort. This was also supported by a C13 frighole that had spawned, allowing both sides to freely get any pods back inside via shuttles.
This eviction had been a good amount of fun until this point, even though we hadn’t achieved much yet.
As we realized how outnumbered we were, we started asking around our friend groups and contacts, who would be willing to come along and shoot some spaceships with us. One of those contacts happened to be on friendly terms with Spoopy Newbies, the corp that owned the C2 we were targeting. They made clear they wouldn’t take either side of this fight, but offered to be a mediator to get some diplomatics going. Having heard some backroom rumors that Brave were also batphoning a lot of groups, and considering calling their null allies to aid, even though they already had much superior numbers, we took this opportunity. After some discussion of options and offerings of other holes for our fleet to evict instead, we came to the agreement that in fact, both sides had a lot of fun so far and would actually like to fight this out on more even terms. We told each other we would not not batphone in the masses to prevent a Nullsec sized Ti-Di slugfest, at least Hole Control had seen enough of those in the previous not-a-wormhole-war, and didn’t feel like repeating it already.
To even out our numbers we settled on inviting our triangle friends, who were slightly aroused from our Ikitursa fleet and wanted in on the action. On top of that we also added a few more Tournament friends to the mix that we have made along the way.
On Friday, we had two overlapping timers again. First was anchoring Brave Astrahus timer and 15 minutes after it the Azbel hull timer came out - we were able to win the Azbel timer, while a really good fight between us, supported by Kybernauts, versus Brave erupted on the Astra grid. During the fight Brave managed to online the Astra but their fleet was pushed back to Fortizar while a friendly hero multiboxer held the Azbel timer paused alone.
A first major victory for us and as the loot picking from dozens of cans emerged, the Brave guys seemed to need a break, which allowed us to grab both Azbel loot and hole control for the time being and wind down, preparing for the big battle on the Fort final timer.
https://br.evetools.org/br/66510bd3c27f9500122d0b8d
The second fight of the day was a lot harder - Brave were more organized and had prepared a bomber wing of their own. The Orthruses, supported by a single Garmur, put in work and were able to keep the enemy fleet’s tackle from landing on us. Though due to good warp-ins from the enemy fleet and webs on our main anchor, brave was able to eliminate most of our logi wing and our Orthruses were getting harassed by a group of long range marauders targeting our tournament nerds, who were manually piloting and pretending this was a tournament scrim.. While our logi wing was being pressured hard without the ability to reship them, we had to switch strategies. We started kiting harder and instead of fighting the Brave fleet we decided to kite around it and just try to grind the Fortizar down. Keep defensive bubbles between our fleet and Brave in order for them to not get warp-ins on top of our fleet, while trying to focus the Fortizar, which was shooting and bombing the sentries that our Ishtar wing had deployed to keep the timer paused.
But in the end, Brave FC managed to find a good angle to get another good warp-in on top of the remains of our fleet and thus the hope of destroying the Fortizar was crushed. We kept trying to finish the Fortizar, by meming it with torpedo bombers, but due to the marauder wing harassing us a lot and our reserve of sentries almost depleted we did not succeed.
https://br.evetools.org/br/66510b669a5a970012559404
Having just come out of a fun fight with lots of GFs and good spirits in local, we reached out to the dudes from Brave directly this time, to see if we can come to an agreement to end this busy week without more blood baths. They agreed, also having had fun, according to our chat after exchanging “business cards”, and we finished the week with another hour of free brawling before going into a ceasefire to exfil.
Having killed their Azbel, we also deemed it just fair to sell them back the repackaged Azbel we had looted from their wreck, together with its core and a freighter that we scooped and wouldn’t be able to exfil from the C2 on a Discount. :spurdo:
Quote, Shattered Armer: “Azbel had a baby”
All in all, this was one of the greatest fights on Tranquility most of us who were involved ever had. Thanks a lot to Brave and everyone on the wormholer side who showed up for putting up a good fight and participating in the most active and fun eviction most of us have had so far. Brave, you have proven yourself worthy of this unique wormhole, looking forward to seeing you again for more fun fights!
Full week conclusion: https://EVEWarReport.com/?ref=8bf5eb397b65753