tl;dr: Running a small corp in a tiny alliance in the smallest, most independent coalition in EVE is fun and exciting!

We’re the Valkyries of Night, from the Of Sound Mind alliance. Our corp is a group of real life friends/family and coworkers at Google, and we’re delighted with how well it has developed since we started nearly a year ago. As with past months, we’d love to share a report of how the previous month has gone for us.

HR/numbers update

As both a corp and as our wider alliance, we love to teach new people and bring them up as bloodthirsty small gang PVPers (<30 players per side). Nearly everyone in the corp is either a newbie with under a year of experience or someone more experienced who came back to the game after a hiatus.

Corp size has stayed steady since last month. We still have about 90 characters in corp, but have gotten a few awesome newbies and trimmed a few inactive folks; in reality we’re probably still about 30-40 actual people behind keyboard. Recently, a number of people who had quit the game or gone to try out other corps returned to our alliance, bolstering our strength on top of our recruitment of newbies, and the alliance has also taken on a few refugees from other corps in Provibloc that happen to find that we are a better fit for them than their old corps. Overall, the alliance as a whole remains under 300 members, with approximately 100-120 people behind keyboard.

With increased experience and access to wealth comes an ability to fly a wider range of ships; as a result, we’re starting to fly shinier, more effective ships such as strategic cruisers in moderation, balanced with our standard core of battlecruiser sized ships as the mainstay of our fleets. The corp’s capital capability is still a bit lacking, but hopefully by next month we’ll have a few capital pilots to lend strength to coalition operations and corp logistics.

Kills for this month are above 1500, and may very well beat our monthly record of 1700 for number of kills recorded in November 2012 if they continue at this rate. Despite being the smallest alliance in our bloc at less than 300 members, we have been consistently punching well above our weight, especially when it’s considered that we run our own fleets almost exclusively and have much less experience ingame than our peers – kill counts tend to be inflated by coalition fleets since each alliance that sent a member to a coalition fleet is credited with a whole kill, even if they only sent one person and fifty people were involved in the kill. Over the past two months, we have been the first or second most active alliance in our region by number of kills and kill/death ratio, exceeding the performance of other alliances five times our size. Poetic Stanziel has a great summary of the month so far, with our corp featuring on both the top 100 most active and highest kill/death ratio corps in the entire game. Despite most members being less than a year old and despite our corp being under 100 people in size.

We were involved in a few notable high-end ganks this past month, including a 24 billion (yes, 24 BILLION) isk supercarrier covered in TheMittani.com and an awfully fit PvE carrier dropped by a kitchen sink TEST PvP gang.

Peace update

At the close of last month, we were winding up our response to two CFC deployments and one PL deployment. Since then, there has only been one major deployment into our area and Providence has largely been at peace. Because of the fact that that deployment was by a EUTZ lowsec militia alliance (Lost Obsession) and their friends, and was in the lowsec Domain/South Providence area, there was little for us to do in USTZ in North Providence. Minor cleanup of hostile structures in the Derelik/Devoid/Domain lowsec regions bordering Providence is ongoing, but has not seen a huge amount of fighting in USTZ.

In the past two weeks, Reddit’s TEST alliance deployed back to HED-GP three jumps from South Providence, giving us plenty of things to kill in USTZ as they sent roams through our space; however, overall it’s been completely dead from a strategic perspective. We’ve had a number of good 30-50 man fights against Insidious Empire and TEST by joining forces with our allies Sev3rance (-7-), and individual groups of 10-20 ships pose little threat to our defensive operations. We even have two videos this month – one from our perspective fighting outnumbered with 60 TEST vs. separate 25 -7- and 15 SOUND fleets with SOUND commanded by our alliance co-leads (waiting on upload, thanks Youtube!), and another fight of a combined -7-/SOUND fleet of 50 commanded by June against two separate TEST fleets numbering 60 in total. Overall, standing fleet operations continue to work very well. We maintain a group of active bloodthirsty PvPers who are in pvp ships and ready to pounce on any hostiles we get intel on that are coming within a system or two of the fleet’s resting position, as well as people doing PvE activities at any particular moment who have PvP ships available to reship into in event they’re needed. More on how this works later, perhaps.

The future looks a little bit less certain for Providence. With summer approaching and students getting off of school, there are a lot of itchy trigger fingers that will be looking for things to shoot. The Odyssey expansion may shake up the status quo of which moon minerals are valuable, making Providence potentially more worthwhile to conquer. And on top of that, the last remaining major powerbloc not allied with the rest (the Russian SOLAR Fleet) lost a set of decisive battles and appears to be losing space rapidly after months of putting up solid resistance by turtling and using their large buffer of territory. The three remaining powerblocs – the CFC, HBC, and N3 – are rapidly running out of targets that they are not friendly with or have a non-interference pact with (since they are NIPed with each other), and the displaced entities from that last war may be looking for a sand castle to push in and somewhere to settle. If we are conquered, we expect to make heavy use of asymmetric warfare as we have no other choice against what constitutes an overwhelming number of hostile supercarriers and titans. We are experienced black ops pilots here in SOUND, and have proven ourselves devastatingly effective in the past. Providence is only valuable because of its high population and vibrant economy, and any attempt to install renters will be non-profitable because of our ability to harass the renters until they leave and because renters do not contribute meaningfully towards a sustainable economy.

Industry update

The nanotransistor and fulleride project is solidly profitable, despite some market manipulation by those with huge amounts of ISK that are speculating on the outcome of the June Odyssey patch, and we expect to begin paying ourselves dividends soon now that we have zero outstanding debt to our suppliers and a full week of buffer of each component we use. However, with changes to moongoo supplies happening in Odyssey, we may find ourselves having to liquidate our operation (to be fair, at a huge profit over where we were several months ago), or adjust production.

The major piece of news this month is that we built an outpost in the second system we control, at a cost of approximately 22 billion ISK. We’d been needing more manufacturing lines for a long time, and now we finally have the pinnacle industrial achievement of having built a station. The overall effort took months from start to end, in terms of saving the money to buy an outpost platform someone else had manufactured but been unable to sell, mining the various components that needed to be deposited into the platform, and finally a set of highly precarious escort fleets to ensure that the station ‘egg’ could be transported across empire, into nullsec, and filled with goodies. We now have The Frontal Lobe, and The Hippocampus as our twin set of stations – after all, we are Of Sound Mind, and our logo is a brain!

Political update

Coalition-wise, there’s been a small amount of leadership churn, but overall things have been pretty stable. The temporary peace we find ourselves with means not much pressure on leadership. Some work on revising the coalition fits continues, but is behind the scenes rather than a source of drama; we’re introducing Armor HACs as a tertiary doctrine to add some variety to our fleet compositions. June is now the de-facto leader of USTZ Providence fleet command, amusingly despite having played for less than a year. USTZ is definitely in the best shape it’s ever been, in terms of ability to form solid stratop fleets and react to emergencies.

The one outstanding elephant in the room is lack of activity by some of the alliances holding sovereignty in Providence, and our sincere hope is that allies that are more active are rewarded with space instead of incumbents being allowed to sit back and contribute little to the coalition’s efforts. Time will tell whether any such a push will succeed or simply be overwhelmed by leadership inertia and risk-averseness.

On a global scale, Ali ran for the EVE-wide Council of Stellar Management, the representative body of the playerbase that works with the game developers on the future direction of the game. She is running on a platform of being independent and new; she hopes to improve the new player experience and preserve the ability of small groups of players to get things done in the game. Predictions by pundits appear to indicate a close race, with Ali likely to take the 13th or 14th spot in the 14-member CSM, or narrowly miss getting in. Results will be announced on Saturday and we’re waiting with bated breath for the results.

So, that about rounds up the past month. We hope that was an enjoyable read, and that you’ll come fly with us or bring us interesting fights (but plz no supercap armada of doom)!

–Liz (June), Colin (Rethyl), and Ellen (Ali), on behalf of V.N