Life in a Wormhole Eve: Incursion Sissy #eveonline

One of the options tossed around when we first left our old system was “let’s just forget wormholes for awhile and run Incursions.” This was mildly amusing because none of us have ever done Incursions in any way, and we know next to nothing about them.

The basic idea behind Incursions in Eve is that there are randomly occurring invasion events happening all the time around New Eden, driven by Sansha’s Nation, an NPC “pirate” faction (really more of a rogue state) living on the edge of space in the accurately named Stain region. The Nation is supposed to be a utopian society “based around the exploitation of brainwashed slave labor and a small, cybernetically-enhanced elite”, so… you know… “utopian” as long as your not one of the brainwashed slaves, I guess? Anyway, the nation got curb-stomped about a hundred years back, but it survived and rebuilt until it was strong enough to launch daily attacks against any constellation in known space, at any time. (Pretty serious rebuilding success, if you ask me.)

I’ve read up on Incursions in the past (it was actually the storyline behind the Incursions that first drew me back to Eve after giving it a pass four years previous), but as they are pretty much exclusively group content (profitable activities start in the 10-man range and go up to 80-man fleets) requiring well-fit battlecruisers at a minimum, it really didn’t turn out to be something I could do when I started playing, despite the fact that that was WHY I started playing — good marketing on CCP’s part, with a shitty payoff for anyone the expansion actually lured in.

Anyway, with time on our hands and a really phenomenal string of bad connections to the c6 (and the c2, actually), we’ve decided to try out Incursions to see what the big deal is.

In order to accomplish this with a minimum of fuss, Dirk suggests that we set up a time to do it over on the Singularity server (which is inexplicably abbreviated “SiSi” by the player base). This idea provides a number of benefits:

• We don’t have to know how the ins and outs of the Incursion-running “society”. Since it’s a profitable activity that requires a lot of people to do successfully, a whole bureaucracy has sprung up around Incursions on the live server. There’s the public channel for incursion group recruiting… which no one uses. Then there’s the channels just for the Shield fleet doctrines, and another for the Armor fleet doctrines… both with notices about which incursion is being ‘primaried’ by which channel… except now people aren’t really using those channels any more, because they’re too mainstream, and all the real hipster incursion runners have their own private, invite-only channels where they organize their groups. Yeah. Screw that.
• We don’t have to have all the Incursion waves/pulls/triggers memorized, because SiSi is currently running the new version of the Incursions that is about to be released on the live server, and these new incursions don’t have ship triggers and fancy ways you can blitz through and run the sites in a few minutes; in the new Incursions the wave composition is semi-random, you kill all the bad guys (focusing on the more dangerous or annoying ones first), then more bad guys show up. Simple. Provided you do your job well, you should be fine.

So we log into SiSi with only six pilots, and head toward the nearest Incursion. Obviously, no one is running Incursions on the test server, so Sansha’s Nation is running rampant in the constellation we’ve selected, which gives us a bunch of disadvantages, not the least of which being the fact that we’re running the sites about 4 pilots below optimal fleet composition, with only two Scimitar-class logistics ships (myself and Dirk) and four DPS (CB, Shan, Em, and Si in a mix of t1 battlecruisers and t1 battleships).

Honestly? We should probably explode hilariously, but what actually happens is we run a couple sites and it’s no big deal, once we figure out which ships need to die to keep our logistics ships from getting jammed. It’s basically like fighting sleepers.

I know on the live server, our little group would never work — Incursion sites can be ‘contested’ (run by multiple gangs of pilots) with 100% of the rewards for that site going to whoever hurt the Nation the most, and we obviously aren’t going to outmatch a blinged-out fleet of 10 pilots with our ragtag band of tech1 ships and novice logistics pilots (though we could probably do quite all right by sneaking out to the largely-ignored incursions that spawn in low-sec and setting up lookouts, even if we only got paid for the ship bounties). No, I get that; we can’t fly these ships and expect to ‘beat’ the other incursion-fighting fleets.

But never let anyone tell you you can’t bring a well-fit, non-pimped hurricane into an incursion site and contribute; never let anyone tell you that ship will explode instantly. That’s just plain wrong. Yes, the fights are moderately interesting (for PvE), and the Sansha are (sadly) probably as tough as any npc PvE targets in EvE — roughly on par with Sleepers.

But that doesn’t make them impossible. Hell, for the (allegedly) 10-man sites, it doesn’t even make them that hard.

Anyway, that’s how we spend the next few hours and, once we’ve taken the measure of the Incursion sites, running them about as ‘hard’ as we can (all buffs in favor of the Nation, half-sized fleet of non-optimal ships and non-maxed pilot skill sets, with no previous Incursion experience), our curiosity is sated, and we head back to the live server to do something productive.