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< 2008.05.05 >      < 2008.05.17 >      < check back later >
Nyphur talks about:
Empyrean Age: How to set up your own militia


As I'm sure you know, there will be official militias for faction warfare that individuals can join. These will be NPC corps that are part of the war and which people with sufficient (+0.5 or more) faction standings can join. Something that a lot of people have glossed over is the fact that since corps can sign up, players are being given the opportunity right now to organise and set up their own militia before the patch. I fully intend to convert my little corp into a fully-functional player militia for the Gallente Federation and I know a lot of you are having similar ideas but just aren't sure of how to handle the details.


What IS a militia?:
A militia is, in the widest sense, just a group of organised people of varying degrees of skill banding together and fighting for the same cause. With faction warfare in EVE, you can consider a militia to be any corp which is signing up with a faction and whose main purpose is fighting in the war. I'm sure a lot of current corps will be signing up and some of their members will take part but what separates a militia from any other corp is that a militia's sole purpose is the war effort. I forsee a lot of new militias starting up once the patch hits. Setting up your own corp is relatively simple but setting up a working militia might not seem so easy.

Since you want to let a lot of players join, you'll need to have the rules, activity and infrastructure in place to support members engaging in faction warfare. You'll also need the experience to guide your corp's warfare efforts and the time to spend scheduling pvp outings. You want to help support people's pvp costs without giving away all your isk and that can be tricky. The type of militia I will describe in this post is one which uses disposable ships to minimise the cost of PvP and remain as self-sustaining as possible.

This type of militia will concentrate on gang based pvp and the bigger the gangs you can form, the better. In addition, the use of disposable ships means that people with absolutely no pvp experience can get stuck right into pvp and start learning to fight without costing a lot. This patch is meant to be PvP for everyone and that includes four year old mission-running veterans who have never pvp'd before in their life. And don't let ANYONE tell you that a dozen cruisers isn't something to shit your pants at, especially since you can enter battle areas that are limited to cruisers and below.


The rules:
Let's start with some ground rules that every militia should have:
  • People can't join the corp unless they have +1.0 standing to the faction the militia is loyal to. This is to stop corp standings dropping below the 0.5 mark and getting the corp booted out of the war effort.
  • Anyone whose standings drop below 1.0 will be removed from the corp.
  • Anyone destroying another corpmate's ship will also be ejected from the corp.
  • Anyone with factory access has to leave other people's jobs alone, even if they're ready and awaiting delivery.
This is by no means a definitive list of rules that your militia corp should operate under. These are just the very basic requirements that are needed to keep your corp in the war effort and keep everything running vaguely smoothly. You should add to this list as you go along and learn of new circumstances you hadn't considered.


Recruiting:
Now obviously you shouldn't just hire any old eejit into the corp, not least of all because members of a corp are able to attack each other and hiring someone without doing a background check could cause a few headaches when someone loses a mining barge or hauler. I haven't used the in-game recruitment tools to actually recruit but I believe you can filter out characters with less than a few million skillpoints to eliminate new characters applying. Other more subtle signs of an alt are low or slightly negative security status and a lack of negative standings with major pirate factions like the blood raiders. If you want to include new characters, that's also fine and is entirely up to you. Many players will be making new alts just for faction warfare but remember that a new character, alt or otherwise, has almost nothing to lose by screwing you over.

My general advice for recruiting is recruit slowly and be bloody ruthless with rule-breakers. If someone destroys a corpmate's ship, which you can see in the corporate ship losses screen somewhere, kick them out without a second thought. It's alright to give people the benefit of the doubt but if you have proof of someone being a disruptive influence in the corp by attacking members or hoarding from the equipment hanger, don't hesitate to boot them out. Don't give anyone a second chance, if they really appreciated what your corp was offering them in the way of pvp support then they shouldn't have screwed up the first time. Just remember that there are a dozen more pilots where he came from. One thing I expect with Empyrean Age is that there will be no shortage of new pvp pilots.


Operating the militia:

If you intend to run your own militia, you're going to have to look at it as a business and examine the costs and feasibility of your plan of operation. Your militia will need a significant isk injection to get started and depending on the rewards for faction warfare and your policies on looting, you're probably going to lose isk over time by running the corp. What I'll do now is give a basic operational framework which creates a self-sustaining militia with as high economic feasibility as possible without screwing over the PvP side. The first step is setting up and that means establishing some corp offices on the border zones. You should aim to have one main office that's inside high security space and is close to the action. Additional resupply depots with ammo and spare ships located inside the contested areas are also very good ideas but as these areas are lowsec, they probably won't see as much use as your highsec office.


How to set up your main office:
  • Buy blueprint originals (researched if possible) for all frigates, cruisers and modules.
  • Establish an office somewhere and lock all of the blueprints down in one of its hangars.
  • Purchase enough minerals to build a couple of each ship type that you know will be popular in PvP e.g. Thorax, Maller, Punisher, Tristan
  • Build a stock of ships and keep it in a private corp hanger.
  • Build or buy a small stock of T1 or cheap named modules and put it in a private corp hanger. Periodically top this up.
  • Give some corp members access to the blueprints hanger and factory roles. As the blueprints are locked down, they can't be taken out. They can only be researched or built from. This is a way of letting members build their own gear if they want to pvp on their own time. Remember that factory roles that allow someone to build from the corp hangar also allow them to cancel people's build orders, so don't just give this role to everyone.
If you want your corp to use battleships, you have a number of choices. Either you could buy blueprint copies and build from those or you could buy an original blueprint and build from that. The original blueprint will be expensive but has the advantage that instead of building from it, you can copy it to make dozens of 1-run bpcs to build from later. This even allows you to throw bpcs into the public blueprints hanger for players who want to build their own battleships.


General operation method:
Now you've got your office ready and you're ready to start up your militia. The general operation should be as follows:
  • When a PvP gang op is forming up, a director or officer member will hand out ships to members from the private ships hanger. You want to corp-insure these by assembling them in your own hanger, putting them back in the corp hanger and then opening the insurance window. That way, the insurance isk is paid into the corp wallet when the ship is destroyed.
  • Either prefit the ships for players or let players fit them out themselves from the equipment hangar. As many of them will be new to PvP, using prefit ships is a good idea.
  • If players want to upgrade their ships to use rigs or Tech 2/named modules, they have to pay for the upgrades out of their own wallet and the corp won't reimburse for their loss. The same goes for Tech 2 ships.
  • Insurance payouts into the corp wallet along with a moderately high corporate tax rate will be used by directors to buy minerals with which to build new ships. Left overs will be used to buy some named or tech 2 modules.
You can probably see how this helps the pvpers already. Militia members essentially get free ships and basic fittings for PvP ops and the more trusted of them get access to BPOs with which to build their own ships with their own minerals. The actual cost to run this kind of setup is very low and the barrier for entry is therefore very low. Militia members can choose to spend nothing on their ships or to go mad and bring a 500m fitted command ship if they want, the amount of isk they spend is entirely up to them.


Corp liabilities:
I did throw the word "sustainable" out there earlier and I'd like to show that this setup is actually self-sustaining in terms of cashflow, or close to it. Using the basic model of 100% insured tech 1 ships with tech 1 fittings, each ship loss costs the corporation the insurance signup cost (30% of npc base ship price), the price of the modules (should be quite low) and the difference between the mineral cost of the ship and the insurance payout (practically nothing due to how the market works). In the case of battleship losses, this can be expected to be around 30m for a tier 1 ship, which is fairly large compared to the loss for frigates and cruisers. This is why I concentrated mainly on frigates and cruisers in this design. Losing a cruiser should cost between 3m and 5m depending on which tier it is and losing a frigate or destroyer could run costs so low as to be insignificant.

Even with costs lowered significantly, it's still possible to go further with your pennypinching. Several named items have a lower than usual refine rate and exist on the market in oversupply. This makes their cost lower than the standard tech 1 versions are to build. Make sure to check the market for cheap named alternatives to modules when stocking up your equipment hangar. Cost-saving measures will only get you so far, though, and probably the best source of isk to cover losses will be a reasonable automatic corporation tax on npc bounties and mission payouts. Considering the infrastructure you'll be putting in place to help pilots, they shouldn't mind paying up to 25% tax. It should be clear by now that running a corp like this is not going to be a moneymaker without significant alternative plans such as ransoming pilots or turning over all loot from kills to the corp. If you want to make a militia corp that people find fun to be in, you're probably going to be spending some isk to keep it going and keep it interesting and fun for all the members.


How to handle varying skillsets:
Because not everyone can use every module, it's important to manage the ship setups so that everyone has a ship they can use on every op. For that reason, you need to have a list of standardised ship setups with a list of skill requirements to use them. Keep it handy in corp mail and try to cover the whole range of player skill levels. Remember, that new guy who hasn't broken a million skillpoints yet can fly a frigate with guns and a warp disruptor within a day. Make sure the newer players know that they should set their training goals to match those from one of the standardised ship setups and make sure that everyone is aware of which setups they are trained to use.


Keeping it rewarding:
We've heard that Faction Warfare is going to feature some kind of rank system but as the head of your very own militia group, it's also important that you personally reward your troops for a job well done. You can implement your own rank system or just reward troops with bonuses and hangar access. Here are a few quick ideas on how to reward your troops and keep them motivated:
  • Prizes for members with the best stats each week
  • Upgrades for pilots who survive a conflict where they took part in a kill. e.g. Tech 2 fittings or rigs
  • Tech 2 frigates for pilots that can use them and prove themselves to be good tacklers.
  • The option to use a battleship can be given to pilots with the appropriate skills who consistentlyperform well.
  • Access to the blueprints hanger and factory roles can be given to pilots who prove themselves trustworthy over time. Remember the blueprints are still locked down so they can't take them.
The idea behind most of these reward schemes is to distribute resources effectively. You don't give T2 fittings and rigs to the pilot that gets his battleship blown up every day, you give it to the guy that gets stuck right into pvp and still manages to survive. In the same vein, you don't want to give a battleship to the guy that can't keep a cruiser alive and doesn't have the proper support skills trained up.

Another issue when it comes to reward is whether or not you allow members to keep the spoils of war for themselves. I say let them keep what they can grab and encourage them to use the isk from selling it to buy better modules for their favourite pvp ship type. Perhaps one of your members just made a nice kill in his Dominix and made off with a stack of T2 modules as loot - why not just let him keep them and encourage him to sell the modules to buy some tech 2 drones or named armour plates?


Tactics:
I'm not posting possible tactics as they could help the enemy. I will say that I've been in some pretty successful throwaway gangs in my time and while people always die, we've had some amazing kills. A pack of throwaway ships I was in once had a couple of frigates and a cruiser but we managed to take down a nighthawk through sheer tactics and most of us even survived the attack. Let me just say that solo PvP has become something of a rich man's game but in gang pvp battles are won mostly on the merit of the selection and execution of tactics and the numbers of pilots involved rather than the quality of the ship and modules.

Think about this for a moment... if you get a HAC kill but in the process lose 20 disposable cruisers, you've only lost around 60-100m total in insurance fees and module costs but have dealt over 100m in the ship kill and modules. In the field of gang pvp, the highest rate of efficiency in isk-per-effectiveness is found in disposable ship gangs. They can consistently fight above their weight not in quality but in cost and for sustainable instant-action pvp, I believe that's the way to go. Disposable gangs require a decent size to really dominate the field but they're excellent fun, you don't have to worry about being blown up and you can lose a dozen ships before your wallet really feels it.

-- Nyphur










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