A harsh reality:
Our probe expert Sobach kept watch on the carriers from his cloaked covert ops frigate. He tracked them to a cosmic anomaly, where the four enemy battleships were engaging the Sleepers. Things seemed to be going well for them until they warped their carriers in. Warping a carrier into these cosmic anomalies causes six additional advanced Sleeper battleships to spawn. When combined with the existing spawn, the damage output can be enough to break a capital ship's tank. Seeing that they had gotten in way over their heads and would soon be in trouble, the harsh realities of EVE came flooding back to me. I began thinking of ways to screw them over, to put the final nail in their coffins and hopefully make some ISK in the process.
Assuming their tanks relied on remote repairers, we theorised that a few ECM ships could target-jam carriers and so remove their ability to repair themselves. The Sleepers would then kill them for us and we could attempt to abscond with the loot. While we debated action, Sobach reported that all hell was breaking loose in the cosmic anomaly. The carriers weren't able to tank the extra Sleepers and the convoy's battleships were being vapourised one at a time. By some miracle of chance, the three carriers survived and warped out of the cosmic anomaly. The battleship fleet accompanying them were torn to pieces and their pilots were strewn about the system in escape pods.
"Operation Bastard":
Realising that these people were inexperienced, we formulated a new and much more evil plan for how to screw them over - a plan we labeled "Operation Bastard". While the enemy prepared to regroup and get their backup battleships from the carrier ship bays, we launched combat scanner probes and began searching for them. One by one we got a lock on the escape pods, using a heavy interdictor's area effect warp disruption field to hold them in place while we killed them. With several of their battleship pilots dead and waking up in their clone bays in empire space, the convoy was a bust and the enemy's morale was in the pan. All that was left to deal with was a covert ops ship and three carriers, all of which were cloaked at safe locations in the system.
Phase two of "Operation Bastard" kicked off as I announced in local that we would be willing to "lend a hand" by buying their trapped carriers off them. For significantly below market price, of course. Knowing their only other option was self-destructing, I offered to pay a little more than they would gain from insurance. After much negotiation, one carrier pilot opted for the easy way out and sold his Archon to us for 1 billion ISK. It came fully equipped with fighters, capital modules, an expensive rigged blockade runner, a battleship and a cargo hold full of goodies. A very profitable deal for us, and a little bit better than self-destructing for the seller. The other carrier pilots opted to continue waiting for a wormhole they can escape through but we have no plans to let that happen. In the event that a wormhole big enough for them to escape appears, we will manually collapse it to keep them trapped. It's only a matter of time before they choose to sell or our patience draws thin.
Final thoughts:
Conflict, negotiation, deceit, tactics and outright subterfuge. It may sound like the plot to some kind of a bizarre sci-fi soap opera but it's just another week for our little corporation in EVE Online.
Brendan "Nyphur" Drain is an early veteran of EVE Online and writer of the weekly EVE Evolved column here at massively.com. The column covers anything and everything relating to EVE Online, from in-depth guides to speculative opinion pieces. If you want to message him, send him an e-mail at brendan.drain AT weblogsinc DOT com.
