Guerrilla Warfare

  
When I get a spare moment I like reading about Eve. Of course, Eve for myself is in large part about wormholes. One of my the blogs I enjoy reading most is Invading Your Hole by Longinius Spear. As a short introduction, he is the former leader of a corporation named Semper Ubi Sub Ubi, which was a smaller corp that entered wormholes last year, and created the Down the Pipe podcast. The blog had up until recently been interesting as a window into some of the smaller, newer organizations that are out there, and how they operate and find content. I caught up with Longinius’ writing and was inspired by what he has been up to the last few weeks. Let me explain. Asymmetrical warfare in video games is something by which I have always been intrigued. Simply by design, this has mostly taken the place of numerical superiority. In a game like World of Warcraft things like gear can also be considered, but the premise is basically thus: against a superior opponent, how much variance is there in the outcome of a fight? Is it possible for strategy and tactics to play an enormous role in the outcome, or is the outcome dependent on something else?

  In the above video, one excellent player is able to defeat three. Outcomes like this give tension and excitement to the players, and especially in a game that simulates war, these kinds of results are critical to keeping an audience engaged. In this case, the audience is the entire player base, as well as extraneous media. That is why I am excited at the prospect described in that blog. Longinius has taken a much more literal type of asymmetrical warfare and decided to see how far it can be pushed. He lives out of a cloaky orca inside the home wormhole of a large alliance, bombs wrecks, kills haulers, and generally is a pain. This is certainly a way for small entities to effect large ones, and it is dependent on strategy and tactics. Longinius himself admits he isn’t the best bomber pilot, and messes up once or twice. There is the obvious question about how much effect it is possible to have on an entity a hundred times your size, and perhaps there is a point to be made. Whatever the outcome, it is certain that he is having an effect, even if it is a small one. It is asymmetric warfare at it’s most basic, where a single pilot can be a pain for a large alliance. Expanding these options can only yield more interaction between Eve players, at every level of the game. Critically, this will centre around making an alliance’s territory more tangible. What intrigues me so much about this situation is how unique it is, even in Eve. It’s impossible to have this type of effect in any other area of space, because of how easy it is for a nullsec or lowsec resident to just go make money or get kills somewhere else. For wormholers, you open up these fantastic options of guerilla warfare because you know where they live, and their game is all about where they live. For guerilla warfare to be effective, there needs to be a definitive place where the alliance exists, which is a nebulous concept in most areas of Eve. The missing piece of the puzzle is the difficulty to engage in guerilla style military engagements, even if it is possible to slap around the line members. This is part of the focus I would like to see -allowing solo and small gang pilots to have more of an option to really be the hidden hornet’s nest in the homes of anyone larger than them; not just harming pilots, but being able to hit military targets and assets in a meaningful way. If that happens, I bet Longinius will be the first one to cheer.
Tags: asymmetrical warfare, joran, WH, wormholes

About the author

Joran Jackson

Joran has a new twitter account. Follow him @SyncheofGames. When he's not writing about games he's probably playing them.