The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. — Carl Sagan

Before I struck out on my own, I was a member of Of Sound Mind, a newbie-oriented alliance primarily targeted at players with 15 million or fewer skill points. One of the alliance’s goals is to provide new players with a good cross-section of the game’s available activities, so we ran alliance fleet operations, small gang roams, solo training, collective industry and mining operations, and so on; any area a new player could hope to experience we had on offer, save one.

Silence In The Deep

Wormhole space has a well-deserved reputation as a lawless abyss inhabited by silent packs of deadly hunters. The lack of Local chat means an ambush can be prepared at any moment; a dozen enemy ships, often lethal strategic cruisers, can be cloaked and lying in wait. The wormhole-generation mechanic means virtually every entity lives “next door” at least part of the time, including groups you’d really rather not run into.

Apart from the material hazards, visitors to Anoikis also have to contend with the Sleepers, a type of NPC unlike those seen anywhere in New Eden. Many sleeper ships field various forms of tackle and powerful, long-ranged energy neutralizers. Some sleeper ships also remote-repair each other, and all of them pack a powerful omni-typed punch.

The Coin Of The Realm

To match the unique difficulties, wormhole space offers unique rewards: the so-called “blue loot”, which can be sold to NPCs back in New Eden, and salvage, which is used by players to produce Tech 3 ships. Since Sleepers offer no bounties, all sleepers drop items of blue loot when killed, so that each sleeper ship has some payout.

The most famous (and by far the most glamorous) form of wormhole PvE is the capital escalation. Sleepers, again unlike other NPCs, will warp in additional heavy battleships in response to a capital ship entering their site, and these battleships drop blue loot and can be salvaged just like all other sleeper ships. Used properly, this mechanic can allow dwellers in high-class wormholes to kill up to 40 extra Sleeper battleships per anomaly, worth a minimum of several hundred million extra ISK in blue loot alone.

On The Cheap

Profitable though it is, there’s a substantial barrier to entry for capital escalations — namely, having capital pilots and the courage to use them in the depths of wormhole space. In our quest for a group PvE activity we could do in wormhole space, eventually we managed to stumble onto a fleet composition and method that worked for us, but to explain it first I’ll have to set the stage.

Home Sweet Home

Some time ago, a newly-joining corp member revealed to us that he’d previously lived in J211915, known to those of us with short attention spans as “J*”. He also revealed that he still had an alt logged off inside J* in a covert ops ship with a probe launcher fitted. Eager to explore, we had him log on and locate the static high-security exit, then jumped a combat fleet in to take a look around.

We were unsurprised to find that interlopers had moved into the wormhole. We inspected their towers carefully and decided that attacking them was beyond our capabilities, especially without support from capital ships, so we decided to try the stealthy approach and anchored a small starbase of our own. This tower, Endurance 1, would eventually withstand multiple assaults by the current inhabitants, eventually culminating in their losing an entire fleet of attack battlecruisers to a superb bombing run. This reverse was enough to make the other inhabitants sue for peace, and we formed a mutual defense pact. Conveniently, they were mostly Chinese, and we were mostly American, so we could cover each others’ timers nicely.

Taking The Plunge

J* actually has two static exits: one B274 exit to high-security space, and one Y683 exit to a class 4 wormhole. After we moved in and made peace with the other inhabitants, we quickly deduced that even two or three of us could trivially handle all the sites available in J* itself. Lured in by the promise of greater rewards, we formed a fleet of combat battlecruisers with shield logistics and jumped into our C4.

The result was a disaster. We tried several times, each time grinding through the sites slowly, each time losing at least one ship to overwhelming damage and neuting power from the Sleepers. Determined, we furiously mutated our fleet composition, switching from shield to armor in search of a heavier tank and from combat battlecruisers to attack battlecruisers for greater range and projection. Eventually, we had the key insight that a pair of armor logistics ships could effectively transversal-tank much of the Sleepers’ damage, allowing us to run sites with only two logistics instead of three.

Converging At Infinity

As we iterated, we eventually derived what seemed to be an ideal fleet composition:

A few heavily tanked armor Oracles, for heavy, long-range damage and tank alike;

A pair of Augorors using the odd Of Sound Mind standard fit, providing enough repairing power to tank even the most dangerous waves of Sleepers;

An armor cruiser (usually a Thorax or a Stabber) filling two roles: webbing and target-painting the primary, and cleaning up any frigates that managed to get too close to the Oracles;

A Maller fitted with tractor beams and salvagers, to salvage sites as we went.

Optionally a cheap battlecruiser fitted with armored warfare links and parked at a safespot to boost the repairing power of the Augorors.

The Oracles form the heart of the fleet - they anchor on their target-caller and apply damage to the primary with their tachyon beams. The Augorors form a cap chain with each other, feeding spare capacitor to the Oracles as available, and repair any damage. The anti-frigate cruiser roams freely killing frigates; the Maller tractors and salvages wrecks. Generally, we found one Maller sufficient for every four Oracles in the fleet. With this fleet, we can routinely get 75 million ISK or more per person-hour involved in running sites.

A key aspect of this fleet is that every role in it has a low SP requirement to fly. The salvage Maller and the anti-frigate cruiser can be flown with a week’s training on a fresh account, and the Augorors and Oracles require less than a month of training to fly competently. Even extremely new players can fly in this fleet as full participating members. The fleet’s also extremely cheap; we rarely have more than 500 million ISK on the field total, which is a great asset given the ever-present risk of a peaceful PvE session turning into a sudden gank.

Upping The Ante

There is a joy in danger. — Napoleon I of France

Over time, we’ve become practised enough with this fleet that we don’t run any real risk of losing ships, and running the sites begins to feel mechanical without that sense of danger. Sometimes we’ll overspawn sites by deliberately killing wave triggers to artificially raise the incoming damage, and sometimes we’ll even deliberately run sites without gang links running… but we’re left with the keen awareness that we’re deliberately handicapping ourselves. Restlessness has set in, and Class Five space beckons.