I wanted to write an article discussing the merits and demerits of ‘timer rollbacks’, however, the more I wrote the more I think I really need to lay out the mechanics in depth of how systems are captured currently.

How do you flip a system in factional warfare? Let me explain.



The first concept to understand is ‘Victory Points’. Whenever *any* FW plex is captured or defended, 20 Victory points is added or removed from the systems contested status respectively. When a system has reached 3000 Victory Points, the Ihub will become vulnerable. It is possible to increase a system’s victory points above 3000, doing so is advantageous and often called ‘buffer plexes or buffer plexing’, if the system drops below 3000 Victory Points, even while the Ihub is being assaulted it will go back to invulnerable. It is not possible to drop a system below 0 victory points.

You can see the current victory points of all systems in eve by using the ESI link alternatively for the less technical minded, Dotlan has great victory point graphs that you can use to view the progress of a system, scrolling down to the bottom will display 2 graphs. In the game itself it does not display victory points, it only uses a % readout. Each Plex is worth 0.66% on this, with the game rounding up.

The Ihub itself has 7.5 million Shield and 7.5 million Armor hitpoints, both of which need to be depleted to 0 for the system to fall, it will from then on be ‘lost’ and flip to the opposing faction the next downtime, no further progress can made on the system until it flips at downtime. When a system flips, it will set at 0 victory points and stable for the militia that captured it. The Ihub has 0% resists.

3000 Victory points at 20 VP per plex means that 150 plexes will need to be captured at minimum to take a system from stable to vulnerable, We already went over how all plexes are worth the same victory points, this is true regardless of size or regardless of the type of plex.



Each system in Factional Warfare space contains a Novice, Small, Medium and Large Outpost, these plexes should always be present in the system, unless they have been captured, in which case, they will respawn 30 minutes after they were last captured. These plexes I refer to as ‘static’ plexes. In addition to these, there may be extra plexes present, which I refer to as ‘Dynamic’ Plexes, these plexes are not guaranteed in system, and will respawn elsewhere in the warzone when they are captured, the name of these plexes are Installation, Facility, Stronghold and Compound of various sizes. There is absolutely no difference between these plexes even though they have different names. A Novice Outpost is identical in VP and timer and rats to a Novice Facility and for every type of plex.

Size Ships Allowed Time to Capture DPS to break rat DPS to break rat in ‘comfortable’ time Novice T1, Navy and Pirate Frigates 10 minutes 50+ 100 Small T1+T2 Destroyer Hulls, All Frigate hulls 15 minutes 100+ 200 Medium T1+T2 Cruiser Hulls, All Frigates and Destroyers 20 minutes 200+ 400 Large All Ships, Ungated 20 minutes 400+ 800

When Defensive Plexing (If your faction owns the system) you will not need to kill the rat. The rat does inconsequential amounts of DPS, it’s only purpose is to act as a DPS check, it’s main function is to force you to bring bigger ships to bigger plexes if you’re the offensive faction in the system.

It should be noted that the rats in the plexes have omni resists so it doesn’t matter what damage type you deal to them, you should always use the most damaging ammo (i.e. kinetic on hookbill etc.). All Rats have 60% to all resists on their primary tank, and 40% to all on secondary, with 0% structure resists. Therefore Minmatar and Caldari rats have 60% shield, 40% armor and 0% structure resists, and vice versa for Gallente and Amarr.



All plexes contribute the same to system contested level, despite the fact that the novice is both easier and faster to capture than other plexes. The novice is therefore the most valuable plex to control in an assault. It’s worth noting that at downtime, any existing plexes that are open are set back to the neutral position, so it’s not worth starting to capture a plex if you won’t finish it before downtime. At downtime ALL outposts respawn, even if they had been captured just before downtime, and the server comes back up before they would have respawned.

Assuming that you have total control of a system and multiple pilots who can capture multiple plexes simultaneously, how fast can a group contest a system from 0% to 100%? Assuming that there are no dynamic plexes in system or spawn in the system during the assault, and that there is a 5 minute buffer for killing rats, warping, noticing new plex etc.



Novices take 10+5 Minutes to capture, and then respawn in 30 minutes. Assuming that the server comes back up at 11:30 to be conservative. We can therefore capture 31 novice plexes per day. Or 620 victory points total from novices, or 20.6% contested per day in just novice plexes. Here are the values for the other plex types.

Plex Max Capturable Per day System % Novice 31 20.6%~ Small 28 18.6%~ Medium 25 16.6%~ Large 25 16.6%~ Total 109 72.6%~

As you can see, while all plexes are valuable to contributing to the warzone, the novice is the most advantageous to control, since it represents about 25% more victory points over time than the medium or large plex.

I hope this is useful in explaining and outlining the FW capture mechanics.