The Tribute War: Invasion falters and CO2 rampage in Malpais

Please note this article covered events in the Tribute region between the 26th of September until the morning of the 29th of September. The events of Thursday the 29th onward will be covered in the next article as reports and information are still being collated.

Earlier in the week the battle lines for the war were drawn with Northern Coalition. and PanFam (Made up of Pandemic Horde, Waffles, and Pandemic Legion) vs the home forces of Circle of Two and their Allies Test Alliance Please Ignore and The OOS. While there was plenty of speculation in the last article of who else might be getting involved, other than one or two smaller 3rd party entities the fighting has remained mostly between these two main groups.

Map of Tribute showing the three systems reinforced as of the 26th of September by the invading forces

As the first timers began to roll round the invaders immediately started running into problems as CO2 put up a fierce defence of their home region. During the dates of the the 27th of September up until the early hours of the 29th there were a number of initial skirmishes which for the most part has put the invading forces on the back foot losing an estimated 22bn ISK vs the defenders 9bn. This included Cerberus cruiser whelp by Northern Collation which made up over 15bn ISK of the total losses.  You can see a full summary of all the known skirmishes on the blog ‘Game Of Sov’ here. The table used to calculate the battles can also be found here.

By the time the 27th came to a close the invaders had made no progress in the sov war after CO2 and allies managed to defend all but one timer; the iHub for the system of UMI-KK captured by Northern Coalition. At time of writing this ihub is still hotly contested.

But during this lul in the sov contest interesting tactics began to emerge. Realising that the invaders were being unsuccessful in the sovereignty contest and CO2 realising that it would be almost impossible to face Northern Coalition and friends in a face on fight with their super-capital fleet easily within jump range of the contested systems they changed tact. GigX, the lead fleet commander of CO2 took a task force out to Malpais to attack the renter alliances there of which help fund PanFam and began entosising the region, by the end of the night 80 structures had been attacked and had been made vulnerable. The majority of which were systems that were especially vulnerable due to low activity and reduced defence multipliers.

With the bulk of the CO2 fleet two regions away, Pandemic Horde and Northern Coalition took the opportunity to launch an attack of their own. The attackers managed to make 17 structures vulnerable and took down a couple of high value moon mining towers before falling back to Pure Blind after the CO2 task force returned.

And so we close out the 28th with a the single iHub captured by Northern Coalition. due to come out of reinforce on the evening of the 29th. This and following events will be covered in the next article.

Previous articles in this series can be found below:

28th September – War In Tribute: More Alliances Take Sides
27th September – NC. deploys towards Tribute and begin hostilities against CO2

Big thank you to Boomer Nakrar and all his hard work on his blog ‘Game Of Sov‘ without which this analysis of the war wouldn’t exist.

Are you involved in this war? Do you have a story you want to share? Get in touch with Tiberius StarGazer in game or @TiberiusStarGaz on twitter.

Feature image from reddit posted by Drodax