The community in Eve Online has been at war for months now. World War Bee, as players refer to it, has seen a mercenary-led faction called the Moneybadger Coalition move against one of the game's largest player-led organizations, called The Imperium, in a bid to drive them from the Northern part of the map. After weeks of bloody battles, including the most deadly engagement in the game's 13-year history, World War Bee appears to be over.

But while the Moneybadger Coalition (MBC) is claiming victory and beginning to decamp, The Imperium's fleets remain largely intact. Polygon reached out to some key figures in Eve, including a player known as "The Mittani" — the leader of The Imperium — to learn more.

"The Imperium is dead," Mark "Seleene" Heard told Polygon on Skype late last week. "The bad guys are gone."

Heard, a long-time Eve player and formerly an employee of developer CCP, started out jovial, then quickly became serious. "Well, not necessarily gone. The very short version is that all of The Imperium’s former territory is gone. It’s been taken by all the various entities of the MBC."

A quick look at the community-run Eve sovereignty map confirms that, indeed, all of the pale blue sectors in the Northwest have vanished and been replaced by a rainbow of colors representing some of the key members of the MBC.

But Heard warns that the history of Eve Online is littered with false victories, and what is needed now are other players to occupy and defend this hard-won territory in the North. Many of the people Polygon interviewed said it's a great time for new players to enter the game, as sought-after "nullsec" territory at the edge of the map is up for grabs for the first time in years.

But while Moneybadger succeeded in steamrolling through a large swath of the game world, it had trouble cornering The Imperium's fleets and forcing them to fight. We spoke with Killah Bee, fleet commander for Pandemic Legion — one of Eve's most infamous and powerful mercenary groups, and among the vanguard of the MBC's battle fleet — to see if he could characterize how the fighting went.

In short, he said there wasn't much of a fight at all.

"We all didn’t expect it to go this fast," Killah Bee said. "We had been expecting to have multiple major battles. We had been expecting to be grinding and fighting over single regions for weeks and weeks. But instead, what happened is, we pretty much had one big fight over each region ... and after we won that fight, The Imperium just decided to completely fold and withdraw."

Massive new player-made units, called Citadels, were introduced into Eve Online in the final weeks of World War Bee. The Moneybadger Coalition has deployed multiple Citadels in an attempt to hedge The Imperium's fleets in, but both sides admit that the attempted blockade has been broken several times already.

But why would The Imperium turn tail and run? After all, it had come up with some novel ways to exploit the territory it maintained sovereignty over. Why give that all up?

The answer lies in what makes Eve Online so unique among other MMOs. Everything in the game — every ship, every space station and every single round fired in combat — has to be manufactured by players. When it's destroyed, it's lost for good. So instead of standing and fighting with the MBC, The Imperium simply withdrew, ceding territory and income to the Moneybadgers but preserving its fleets — and its warchest.

"According to our enemies, anything I tell you will be a lie and spin." - The Mittani

The Imperium's leader, Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco, told Polygon that his strategic withdrawal was all part of a larger strategy based loosely on one employed by Roman dictator Fabius Maximus during the Second Punic War.

"According to our enemies," Gianturco said during a recent Skype interview, "anything I tell you will be a lie and spin. But what we’ve been saying in our fireside chats and our public statements for some time now is that we’ve been executing a Fabian strategy. This apparently makes certain people on the opposite side extremely angry. We have preserved all of our capital and super capital assets. We evacuated all of our territory months ago. We’ve withdrawn into a central location and have been watching the enemy commence to in-fight amongst each other, which they’ve already been doing. ... They keep trying to declare victory every weekend or thereabouts, banging pots and pans at us trying to convince our guys ... that we’re done."

Is Eve's gambling problem putting the game at risk? As Polygon reported in April, Eve's World War Bee has been bankrolled almost entirely by one man, who goes by the handle "Lenny Kravitz2." He's been spending literally trillions of in-game currency to fund several large mercenary factions in their war against The Imperium. Kravitz's income is, by and large, generated by the proceeds of a casino called I Want ISK that accepts wagers with Eve currency. It's a style of metagame that is tolerated by developers at CCP. But Alex "The Mittani" Gianturco takes issue with the concept, claiming that these casinos are largely unregulated. It's entirely possible, he says, that some percentage of their customer base are minors, children who would otherwise not be allowed to sit at a craps table in Las Vegas. More troubling, Gianturco said, are the strategic implications. How do you bring the guns of a virtual warfleet to bear on a website? Put simply, you can't. "A casino is something that exists completely outside of the game," Gianturco said. "The vast pool of its funding comes from people who are addicts. So the only counter to this process is to create your own casino. ... In terms of play and counter-play, you essentially have an arms race of entities within Eve, and within other games that have potentially similar issues, to find and exploit as many people who suffer from gambling addiction as possible in order to counteract this unattackable source of funding." Reached for comment, Kravitz said that the majority of Eve's playerbase is of legal age and that individuals need to "take personal responsibility and not gamble if it is illegal" where they live. He turned the argument back on Gianturco, pointing out that The Mittani's own efforts to create a viable casino inside Eve crumbled not long ago. "The method used in obtaining the [in-game currency] to hire so many groups is similar to crowd sourcing," Kravitz said. "Many players play on I Want ISK and they themselves helped fund the war. ... So it is because of the community support that I Want ISK was able to keep its lights on, and I was able to continue to fund the war. Without them, this would not have been possible."

Many of The Imperium's forces, which numbers close to 15,000 player accounts by some reports, are camped in and around a system called Saranen. Far to the south of the territory they once occupied, it's also a "lowsec" system partially controlled by non-player characters in-game. As such, it's unable to be effectively blockaded, and its infrastructure cannot be destroyed by other players.

Saranen essentially gives The Imperium's forces a kind of safe haven, a fortress inside which Gianturco is simply waiting for his enemies to get bored and drift apart.

Pandemic Legion, whose involvement in World War Bee has been funded almost entirely by an in-game casino, tells us its contract is almost up. It'll be leaving the front lines soon to travel to its summer territories and prepare for the Alliance Tournament, a kind of annual Olympic Games inside the world of Eve Online.

"Pandemic Legion is known for being one of the strongest teams since the tournament started," Killah Bee said. "We’re now at Alliance Tournament 14. We’ve always been one of the favorites to win the AT. We’ve won four or five times now, which is pretty big.

"Pandemic Legion usually gets a lot weaker during the tournament phase, which is why we usually pick a place we like for the summer and we prepare for the tournament and then play there. Then we go back toward the start of winter, back to doing contracts."

Pandemic Legion's departure, and the reported vacuum left by The Imperium's withdrawal, seem to indicate that there will be ample opportunity for Gianturco to lead his people into the North once more. But, The Mittani told us, he will be unlikely to try and hold territory on the scale he once did.

"One of the things that’s important to note here," Gianturco said, "is that the people you’ve been speaking to, [like] Killah Bee from Pandemic Legion ... are never interested in holding territory. They do not hold sovereignty. They do not have anything to do with it. They do not stay in places that can be conquered.

"I don’t think you will see us ever rebuilding The Imperium on the same foundation as it was before, because we believe that we’ve found a way to enjoy the benefits of the sovereignty system, and not actually suffer any of the risks, in the same way that Pandemic Legion has. In many ways we’re becoming much more like the very enemies that came to destroy us, which will be amusing."