Factional Warfare; the clash of empires, the eternal conflict; the empyrean age; the spinning of buttons in tech one Frigates.
Factional Warfare (FW) is a lot of things, but FW is mostly recognised for the ongoing struggle over low-sec systems between the four Empires. It has exciting unique mechanics that lets players fight for the “sovereignty” of low-sec systems and gain all sorts of fancy bonuses.
High-sec is an altogether different story, though. High-sec gates are patrolled by the (not so) fierce Navy NPCs at all times, ready to smash down any enemy of the state; a player of the opposite faction. This blog is about combatting exactly that; FW Highsec PVP.
To put into context, FW is divided into two parties: Caldari and Amarr VS Gallente and Minmatar. I.e., a Caldari militia pilot that would enter Gallente and Minmatar high-sec space gets hunted down by the NPCs. Similar CONCORD and the Custom Officers, the higher you go, the more fierce the NPCs react. Though the NPCs will never warp scramble a player, they will use all other ewar at their disposal to disable you. Starting with webs, up to Energy neuts and ECM.
This is where high-sec dwelling gets tricky. 0.5 high-sec systems are relatively easy to deal with: a ship with a half decent local-tank can easy hold itself against the NPCs. You will deal with two webbing Frigates and two sensor-damping Cruiser (that will respawn immediately upon destruction), but as long as you got enough Sensor boosters and are just sitting (read: camping) on a gate, it is not a problem. A few hundred DPS tank is enough to keep the Cruiser damage at bay, which is quite easily achievable on a T3 Cruiser or a BS.
People have been doing this for many years, camping enemy high-sec 0.5 traffic lanes, and have been doing quite successfully. The only problem is that local-tanking the NPC damage is only really doable in 0.5 system. As with 0.6 system and beyond the incoming damage is much much hazardous. Whereas two cruisers and two frigates are no problem in 0.5, a 0.6 system spawns an Energy neuting Battleship which makes local-tanking nearly impossible, not to speak of the extra incoming DPS. 0.7 and 0.8 systems spawns more Battleships, and 1.0 you will even face ECM. Again, all this means that camping in high-sec was more or less “restricted” to 0.5 systems only.
But this did not stop us. As members of the Gallente militia, our ultimate goal is to camp Jita, the economic heart of EVE. Of course, Jita is surrounded by high level security systems, and Jita itself is a 0.9 system too. Our gate camping Arty Lokis wouldn’t stand a chance against the Navy police. There had to be another way.
Thankfully, the Navy AI is miraculously unintelligent. It is true that the NPC would follow the player around the system wherever it warps, and respawn as soon as it gets destroyed. But we found one loophole: drones. Drones are not players, drones are just ... drones, but will get aggression from other AI nonetheless. As I said, this bit of AI in incredible unintelligent, but also very persistent. What we discovered is that when you deploy a combat drone in space, the Navy NPC will focus its fire on that drone as soon as you’ve left grid. It is then programmed to destroy the drone and then warp back to the player (wherever he is in the system). What’s the loophole? Make sure that drone never gets destroyed. As long as the NPCs have the drone targeted and is still alive they will never turn away from it. This means that the player ship is now completely free to travel across the system without being hunted by the NPCs.
But how to execute this in practice. We’ve tried several things. We realised the alpha damage from NPC Battleships can be quite hefty so we looked at the drones with the most hitpoints; Navy Curators. And we needed enough Remote Repping power to keep it alive; RR Apocs and Nestors. As predicted our plan worked out quite alright in 0.5 and 0.6 systems, we would deploy a Curator drone on a safespot or close to a POS forcefield and have it repaired by neutral RR while the Lokis could then happily move around the gates. But two issues arose: one, the neutral RR ships would get a Suspect flag for aiding other characters in a high-sec war. And two, despite Navy Curators having the highest armor hitpoints, they would still get alpha’d by the NPCs in 0.7 and higher.
It is important to note that each militia pilot gets an individual spawn for that character, but if you had multiple characters on grid (with thus multiple spawns), all the NPCs would eventually focus fire on only one militia drone, regardless who’s drone it is. One drone could take aggro for multiple militia characters. Enter the Rattlesnake.
The Rattlesnake has got a ridiculous 275% (!) bonus to sentry drone hitpoints. To spare you the math; a Rattlensnake’s Navy Curator with a helping rig would get an astonishing 13.500 armor hitpoints. To put in perspective, an Megathron Battleship has the base stats of merely 6.500 armor hitpoints! 13.5k hitpoints, plus the RR power of the Nestor turned out to be enough to tank even multiple 0.8 system Battleship spawns! Another key element is that the Rattlesnake itself would be sitting idle on a station and not actually engaging any Wartargets, this means that the RR ships will never get a suspect timer either.
But for what price? To run this trick you need a bare minimum of two FW pilots, plus one Neutral RR pilot for every DPS/camp ship. But to play it properly, with three guys, we use about 10 characters doing various jobs, four of them belonging to the Gallente militia:
“If we could just harness this power and use it for our own personal gain, there'd be no stopping us.” - George Costanza
Thankfully, the Navy AI is miraculously unintelligent. It is true that the NPC would follow the player around the system wherever it warps, and respawn as soon as it gets destroyed. But we found one loophole: drones. Drones are not players, drones are just ... drones, but will get aggression from other AI nonetheless. As I said, this bit of AI in incredible unintelligent, but also very persistent. What we discovered is that when you deploy a combat drone in space, the Navy NPC will focus its fire on that drone as soon as you’ve left grid. It is then programmed to destroy the drone and then warp back to the player (wherever he is in the system). What’s the loophole? Make sure that drone never gets destroyed. As long as the NPCs have the drone targeted and is still alive they will never turn away from it. This means that the player ship is now completely free to travel across the system without being hunted by the NPCs.
But how to execute this in practice. We’ve tried several things. We realised the alpha damage from NPC Battleships can be quite hefty so we looked at the drones with the most hitpoints; Navy Curators. And we needed enough Remote Repping power to keep it alive; RR Apocs and Nestors. As predicted our plan worked out quite alright in 0.5 and 0.6 systems, we would deploy a Curator drone on a safespot or close to a POS forcefield and have it repaired by neutral RR while the Lokis could then happily move around the gates. But two issues arose: one, the neutral RR ships would get a Suspect flag for aiding other characters in a high-sec war. And two, despite Navy Curators having the highest armor hitpoints, they would still get alpha’d by the NPCs in 0.7 and higher.
It is important to note that each militia pilot gets an individual spawn for that character, but if you had multiple characters on grid (with thus multiple spawns), all the NPCs would eventually focus fire on only one militia drone, regardless who’s drone it is. One drone could take aggro for multiple militia characters. Enter the Rattlesnake.
The Rattlesnake has got a ridiculous 275% (!) bonus to sentry drone hitpoints. To spare you the math; a Rattlensnake’s Navy Curator with a helping rig would get an astonishing 13.500 armor hitpoints. To put in perspective, an Megathron Battleship has the base stats of merely 6.500 armor hitpoints! 13.5k hitpoints, plus the RR power of the Nestor turned out to be enough to tank even multiple 0.8 system Battleship spawns! Another key element is that the Rattlesnake itself would be sitting idle on a station and not actually engaging any Wartargets, this means that the RR ships will never get a suspect timer either.
But for what price? To run this trick you need a bare minimum of two FW pilots, plus one Neutral RR pilot for every DPS/camp ship. But to play it properly, with three guys, we use about 10 characters doing various jobs, four of them belonging to the Gallente militia:
- A passive local-tanked Rattlesnake in militia
- Camping Lokis in militia
- Neutral RR (Nestor) for every Loki (+one Loki means +one spawn to tank)
- Eyes on as many gates as possible Warfare fleet links
- Quite possibly backup Logi’s on standby
- Seinfeld
“If we could just harness this power and use it for our own personal gain, there'd be no stopping us.” - George Costanza
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