[AAR] The Last Stand of Innuendo

[Archemide]

Welcome to my AAR of the last fight in Innuendo. This isn't going to be about the overall eviction, as that topic is above my pay grade.

Now, I figure many people just want to see the video, so here's a few disclaimers about it first:

1. This was my first time using OBS on this computer. I had my PTT button set for desktop audio, not my computer's audio. This means you get to hear the wonderful sound of me typing and speaking, but not the chat from the rest of the fleet.
2. Comms are not always kept to Uni's PG standard. I did my best, but there were some...frustrations that I didn't catch in time. Children be warned, mute the video.
3. At a couple points, I mention OpFor stole our second defense fleet--this was inaccurate. See below for further details.
4. The recording is incomplete, as I was podded out before the fight ended.

If anyone has a more complete recording, you are, of course, welcome to post it.

Without further ado:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hejrpf3S8Fk



So, now to the actual analysis.

First off, as you've probably heard, the primary defense fleet was stolen by OpFor. However, through the donations of many WHC members and some reserves that were not stolen, we were able to build a secondary defense fleet. This was largely SBC, though we had a number of Feroxes ready. SBC certainly wouldn't be ideal into the enemy composition, as they would just kite us out, but it at least gave us something. The first mistake I made was assuming that all the fits would be pretty standard. Many of the Command Ships, for some reason, didn't have a prop mod fit. I'm not sure why (I'm not aware of any propless Command Ships in Uni's doctrines), but I should've confirmed the fits, and I didn't. Otherwise, ship handouts went mostly fine. Once everyone in the fleet had ships, I dumped the remaining fits in the general hangar. The idea was that people could reship (or if we were lucky, new people joining the defense) by themselves. Now, we know OpFor had spies in Uni, so they could've stolen said ships. So putting them there was probably a mistake. I didn't want to waste a pilot to sit docked handing out ships though. Maybe I could've had someone stuck out of the hole ready to contract ships over? That probably would've been the safest option. However, a random manager saw the ships in the general hangar, and for some reason decided to ignore the decision and plans of SFC and the CCs, and instructed someone to eject these ships. As such, we had no doctrine reships available for the rest of the fight.

Second, we had no bookmarks on grid. I'm not sure if none ever existed, or I couldn't get in touch with the right people to gain access to them. We require a bookmark grid for blue structures, I'm not sure why we don't require the same for Uni structures.

Third, Caps are strong. Like, really strong. I'm sure many of you know this intellectually, I know I did, but I wasn't really thinking about it. This was, after all, my first time FC'ing with friendly caps. I ran the fleet as a 'okay I'm gonna run the subcaps as a normal fleet and hope the cap pilots know what they're doing.' I'd call this my biggest mistake in this fight, and it was made repeatedly. Their logi could not hold against HAW dreads, and their dps could not break a single FAX. Playing to these strengths would've made the fleet ultimately more successful.

For example, we took the fight on the hull timer for the Fortizar. Now Fortizars have a very large grid. This let the enemy easily kite outside the range of our caps. We had to choose whether to leave our caps behind and try to fight them, or let them sit out of range and attack the Fortizar. Had we, instead, forced them to roll the hole on Saturday, and then warped our defense fleet, with caps, to the new hole, we would've been in a much better situation. We could've easily popped and podded their rollers, at the very least, and potentially regained hole control to get additional pilots in.

I'm not gonna play-by-play the whole fight, though there are plenty of instances of me doing stupid things. There's countless instances of me using the wrong ammo, or making unclear calls. In my defense, I'd been on 12+ hours every day of the eviction and my brain was pretty jelly. I still wish I had done better. There are, however, a few moments I will talk about.

1. The early spy squad warping. When you know the enemy has spies, turn off freemove before you undock. Thank goodness no one actually died to that.

2. In general, I should've been picking off the command destroyers more. Booshes are annoying, and they're significantly less tanky than the cruisers. Also, generally, having everyone only lock the primary/secondary lets the enemy know who to rep. Had we all locked up and sent our drones at random targets, it would've created a small degree of confusion in that. When the enemy is multiboxing 4 accounts each, that can create an edge.

3. When we warped onto the Vargur--that was obvious bait. But if the FC wasn't an idiot we had warped the caps with us, again, they would've been in a world of hurt. 3 HAW dreads, with huggin support to web them down, and a FAX to keep everyone alive, would've shredded them. Instead, your dumb FC called for the caps to stop their ships. Why? What good were the caps doing sitting on the undock? And calling 'prop on' right before I warp us out certainly prevented people from warping.

4. When the can with our reships popped--once again, had we put the caps on it, they would've been in trouble. Like, this is the biggest repeat lesson when I look at this. Had we been moving our caps around, it would've easily created zones they could not mess around with. We could've (somewhat) protected the reships and had our reinforcements form up in a semblance of doctrine. I did eventually try to charge the caps in, too late, without sufficient support.



Thank you to everyone who came out, and I'm glad to have flown with you. I do wish I could've done better running it, and hopefully some of you can learn from this, for if you're ever running a similar fight (though, hopefully, we don't have to deal with a WHC eviction for a very long time).

[Jalxan]

Speaking as the manager on the other side of that situation, I can provide some badly needed context. I'm also going to provide some behind the scenes details that explains what was going on.

Mandalore and I had been working on a plan to eliminate as many University assets as possible, to prevent them from dropping after the expected fall of The Rock. At the time the fight had started, we had been at it for the better part of 3-4 hours. But it wasn't as simple as this; while we were gathering the dumped assets from active members within WHC, as well as assets within Uni hangars, I was using a Uni Buyback freighter to dump out less valuable stuff, and filling it with more valuable stuff. This un-pack, re-pack, drop, sort, stack, drop, sort, stack, was taking both Mandalore and I's entire concentration. Originally, the freighter was packed with about 5b-10b worth of assets, but by the time I was done, it was packed to the brim with a mind-blowing 80b worth of assets, of which were later safelogged in-situ and later evacuated a few days ago.

While this was going on, I was additionally entrusted by Devalt of the task to scuttle the remainder of the capital fleet after Lonez/White was unfortunately caught outside during one of his self-destruction attempts. After I failed at doing a test run on an alt using one of my own battleships, I elected to hold onto them until near the end, because i wanted to see if 1) I could find pilots to safelog them instead of dumping them, or 2) Failing that, use Mandalore's strategy to scuttle them in space. After reaching out, I was able to secure two pilots, of which I had to load some of their stuff onto said capital ships, and both pilots graciously injected to make it happen. It was during this conversation that *I* realized that I could likewise inject, and that led to me doing a mad dash to find three volunteers to hold my Orcas (thanks again to the three of you!), so I could dedicate my remaining four alts to holding the Buyback Freighter, and 3 capital ships, for a total of 5.

I was quite literally finishing the injections (and fighting with the payment screen) when the timer was about 2 minutes away from expiring. At this point I had already taken steps to scuttle two remaining capitals, and getting this highly unusual wallet entry:

2023.12.17 19:45 Insurance 226,768,638 ISK 456,876,466 ISK Insurance paid by EVE Central Bank to Seventh Millenium covering loss of a Thanatos
2023.12.17 19:44 Insurance 226,768,638 ISK 230,107,827 ISK Insurance paid by EVE Central Bank to Seventh Millenium covering loss of a Thanatos

So, with everything going on, I was still throwing ships into the newly assembled and fitted capitals, and set them up as suitcases as best as possible. I threw every available DST into their Ship Maintenance Bays loaded with the brim with charges (billions of ISK worth), and repackaging as many items and ships as I could to literally save what I could.

But at this point, the battle was on, so we had to make a choice. The FC's had not spoken to us much about our efforts. I did tell them that I would be willing to hold onto the very last minute with the assembled ships we had (and some of these ended up in SMB's, which is how some of them were handed out). But at that point, Mandalore and I had to make a judgment call; we hadn't heard that there were any successful attempts at capsules getting in, nor that they had broken their hole control to focus on the base. We were, in essence, in a bubble, while the FC Team was in their own bubble.

So we made the call.

And, because Murphy's Law, no less than 2-3 minutes later, we were notified that 30-ish pilots were able to get in and were looking for ships.

At that point, what's done was done; I spam-pinged Mandalore to log back in to check for any remaining contracts (there were), try to throw together a kitchen sink (he did), and we all save logged with about 7% left on structure.

Mandalore and I spoke about the situation at length. Do we regret our actions? No. Are we upset at the FC's for not letting us know sooner? No. This was an incredibly difficult defence under the most difficult of circumstances, where judgment calls had to be made with the best information we had at the time.

I know you and the other FC Team members were extremely busy, while also trying to stay alive (since death meant literal death in an engagement sense), while trying to adapt to sub-optimal circumstances with sub-optimal ships with capital assets that we are not accustomed to lead or support. You did a damn fine job handling that fight, and I really, really wish it worked out.

I also wish I had hesitated just a few minutes longer, but the beauty of hindsight is that we can see it 20/20. But we lack 20/20 vision when predicting the future; we also knew that it would take about 60 seconds for the Fortizar to blow up any can we ejected, and if we failed to blow it up (which is highly likely during the fight itself as the gunner has more important targets to shoot), all those assets would be ripe for the pickings. Could everyone done better with communication? Absolutely! With Mandalore and I specifically, we were focusing so hard that we couldn't really move channels nor listen to crosstalk since we were literally making decisions on assets on the fly. But at the same time, I know you were all-hands-on-deck. Perhaps either of us should have organized a liaison at some point. Perhaps we should have sat down and actually discussed the upcoming fleet strategy as if we were actively a part of the fleet itself, so we would have an idea of what to expect (and, if we did, I apologize if I forgot; at that point I had 8 hours of sleep in 3 days).

[EDIT: After a quick chat with Archemide, he refreshed my memory that we did, in fact, discuss the defence fleet, and how it was to be used. As mentioned, I had only 8 hours of sleep in 3 days, and I was working non-stop practically from shield timer to fleet. I'm thinking about it, and I think what happened was that, between extreme exhaustion, extreme hyperfocus, extreme pressure due to time, extreme demands (destroying assets, destroying the cap fleet, finding cap and Orca pilots, etc, etc), and previous expectations, my brain was like "Okay, save the defence fleet until there is no more chance of it being destroyed before its capture," while the actual expectation was to leave said fleet alone. I didn't have the luxury of sleep or time, and I also, unfortunately, didn't have the ability to step away because of the work that had to be done. It was a nightmare. For my part of it I apologize]

We have many lessons to learn from this battle, but the one thing I'll say is that I'm damn proud of each and every one of you who stood up and helped defend the Wormhole Community to its last. Archemide, I hate that this situation put you in that difficult spot, and I know you're furious about it. But the way you handled yourself despite that massive blow... you should feel proud, I'm proud of you, I'm proud of all of you, and I personally believe you deserve the Order of Ivy League for your efforts, and The EVE University Medal of Valor for the others. I hope you all get it.

[KPYTOE KOPOBO]

Archemide did an awesome job given the time and resources pressure, the sense of camaraderie and brotherhood was phenomenal, would participate again 10/10. Not pointing fingers or blaming anyone, just my thoughts to make next defense better.

Now, chiming in as a cap pilot participating in the defense, focusing on caps specifically, and what I would like to see changed for WHC 2.0. Using HAW dreads for C2 defense is viable and effective. There were few issues that hindered our effort in Innu, that must be taken into account for the WHC#2

- Types of caps. Beggars can't be choosers, but I'd highly prefer to have Phoenixes (Navy) instead of Naglafars for home defense. Something to think about for WHC#2
- Caps were not effective this time because of several issues:
a) No bookmarks around the structure. This was a totally unexpected surprise for me, and is a major reason why we lost that fight. Keeping caps at undock was ineffective as attackers were out of effective range like 95% of the time. The few times where I could warp around and anticipate them were good.
b) No coordination between caps/structure gunner/fleet. This should have been practiced in advance. Having coordinated ability to:
- pre-warp the dreads,
- point/web/paint from the structure, web/paint from the fleet
- blap
would be a game changer.
c) Caps eat through the ammo and charges. Having few trucks with cap boosters/stront/ammo for resupply is a must.
d) Caps need light support to get rid of enemy bubblers.
- I disagree that caps are an eviction magnet. Their cost (~6b a head) is nothing compared to possible loot after the eviction (1T+) and is comparable to marauder value, and any group large enough to challenge properly fielded caps in a C2 is definitely able to do it for the loot only as well.
- We definitely could use, and should have used, caps earlier to disrupt hole control even at risk of losing them. EUni being extremely reactive and postponing actions played a great role in the event.

Again, not blaming anyone for anything.

[Duke Bosch]

I think a big part of the lack of training from the cap might have to with the fact that, as far as I'm aware, the UNI's stand has always been there are no caps. At least that's what I've heard when I was in NSC. I imagine the same goes for WHC. Now that was some years ago so I might be wrong about this stance.

Obviously there are other places to practice with this stuff, but that will be another investement in materials. And I imagine SiSi could've been nice for that. But that seems to be suspended indefinitly

[Shandir]

A noob's perspective:
It was good fun to get to participate in the defense, despite the loss and any shortcomings, it was a fantastic community event to join in on, and is the largest PvP fleet action I've ever been part of.

Overall, I was very glad to participate, so while I'm going to spend many more words on some of the problems, the pluses do significantly outweigh them.
Apologies for the novella. tl;dr: gf gf

Pluses
------
Got some valuable structure defense/large scale PvP experience, some WH mechanics experience, and some NS travel experience.
Learned about Thera.
Got a kill!
Was able to participate in a few small, meaningful ways. Joined in the battle but to limited success, but also assisted in reshipping.


Deltas
------
Problem: Combat comms were not great at times. While instructions for players in the primary PvP fits were clear and good, as a newer player in a kitchen-sink fit (what was handed to me), default instructions put me out of my range, and within enemy fleet range. Attempts to close got me destroyed.
Recommendation: If the fleet has multiple conflicting doctrines participating, we need someone to take ownership of each doctrine and provide leadership, perhaps the primary FC, but maybe a secondary FC. Perhaps even two fleets cooperating and communicating but with different comms. Also, if the plan is for one doctrine (or kitchen sink group) to be 'figure it out yourself', that needs to be made clear and reiterated often, preferably with experienced pilots offering guidance somewhere. I think we were shipping our least experienced pilots out with the least guidance, as they arrived last and got the kitchen sink fits.

Problem: Some of the travel fleet organization was demotivating. The 3-4 hour long travel fleet attempt that had us racing through low, null, and wh space to try to get through before the hole was rolled was actually great fun. Even when we ran into smartbombs and almost all of us were destroyed and podded.
However there were two standout moments that I think likely hurt motivation and participation.
First, in the initial travel fleet, players who were "comfortable in wormholes" were prioritized for shipping out, this left a large number of pilots sitting in Thera with little information and less to do. Also, "comfortable in wormholes" was not defined. Later travel shows that most players would have been fine joining in here, and in fact might have gotten in, as one of the first travel fleets was a success.
Recommendation: If there will be a lengthy delay in some groups of pilots being allowed to participate, those pilots should be formed at a relevant time, rather than spinning in station unnecessarily.
Recommendation 2: There seemed to be some organizational limitation in how many squads we could send at once, due to the availability of the bookmarks and Pathfinder access. We should examine how we can balance OpSec vs effectiveness in unusual circumstances like this. Perhaps we should have created a temporary shared bookmarks folder with only the minimum necessary contents that was shared more freely to anyone with moderate trustability.

Second, and more jarringly, a later travel fleet was heading in, and stragglers were *specifically* instructed that they could follow and catch up. In truth, the fleet was far enough ahead and close enough to the destination that stragglers would be close but not able to catch up in time, and the fleet was then disbanded with stragglers being informed after a bit that they had to find their way home instead. In the case of myself and at least one other pilot, we spent 20-30m flying out to Turnur, 5-10m trying to figure out what was going on, and then 20-30m getting back home - all for no reason. When asked for clarification, the answer given was the deception was necessary for OpSec, but no explanation as to why.
Recommendation: I'd love someone to explain the OpSec logic here. While we are certainly concerned about spies knowing exactly where our fleets are, and how many pilots are attempting to enter, this information was already leaked by allowing the stragglers to join fleet and comms. The enemy already knows which holes we're flying to, because they're already there. Being told that the fleet is closed and stragglers should wait for another is fine, and safeguards more intel. Being told that it's likely we wouldn't be able to catch up and join in is fine, and lets us make an informed decision. Either having a pilot lag behind to assist the stragglers, or sharing the WH bookmark after the fleet is through, or even telling stragglers to bring their own probes so they can find the WH on their own when they reach the system - all of those would be fine. But the specific strategy taken doesn't seem to gain any OpSec benefit, and disrespects the time and effort of the pilots who are going out of their way to help. Perhaps I'm missing something that makes this make a lot more sense.



Open Questions
-------------------
Q) Why weren't we able to contest hole control? Did their fleet on-hole have significantly more strength at all times than we could contest? Particularly if we priorized the hole-rollers?
Q) How do structure defenses work? I see people talking about specific targeting with structure weapons - I thought it was all automated. Is this something students can access on any of our structures to see the interface? If not, is there a wiki page explaining it?
Q) What, specifically, happened to allow the primary defense fleet to be stolen? What could have been done differently (with the full benefit of hindsight) to prevent this? Was the thief very trusted, or was our primary defense fleet available to untrusted pilots? I can see the advantage in future of having a director-only access limitation on a fullly prepped defense fleet, or splitting it up into several chunks with little permission overlap.
Q) Did we, perhaps, put too much emphasis on denying the enemy "nice killmails" at the cost of limiting our defensive abilities?
Q) Similarly, the emphasis on denying loot (though this one is *much* more understandable as it provides a much more tangible benefit to the enemy) seemed to take up a lot of attention from people who could have been coordinating using that loot for defense.
Q) What *should* the kitchen sink pilots have been doing with the short range ships they were given? With the time now to consider tactics, how would we best have been able to contribute, so that next time, we can be more effective? My assumption was we should have been given close-range warp-ins to be able to immediately apply damage and avoid having to make a deadly approach. Probably should have been warping in groups to minimize being primaried.
Q) We ran out of Large Projectile Ammo partway through the fight - what happened with this? It left us with many ships which could have applied heavy damage at relevant ranges which were unable to participate.
Q) I hear that we do try to keep the loot stored in WHC to a reasonable limit, and that we regularly cycled the structures to clear out idle player's loot. Is the value that we had left in the structure unusually high despite that, or is this the expected value for an active WHC? Could we do more to make it less work to deny loot, and less loot to need to deny?
Q) For a large part of the battle, we had a resupply point in open space that was effectively unguarded afaik, and it was from a destroyed structure, so a known location - how did we not get jumped at that location by enemy pilots preventing our side from reshipping/securing ships for later retrieval
Q) Is it possible to have enough freighters and freighter pilots on-site that we could safe-log all assets, and drip-rescue them over the course of the next several weeks? The enemy benefits from knowing we have to defend on a specific timer, but they cannot, and (since we were later able to rescue assets) did not have the capability to maintain hole control indefinitely. Similarly, once the caps were determined to no longer be able to swing the fight, could we not have safe logged those, and held them offline until they could be moved out (a more difficult rescue, due to right-size holes not being guaranteed)

[Archemide]

I'll try to answer your questions and concerns as best as I can:

Kitchen Sink: Unfortunately, due to the aforementioned loss of our primary and secondary defense fleet, everyone had different ranges. We still want everyone to shoot the same thing, to maximize the chance of killing it, but everyone has different ranges they need to be at. You were, fundamentally, the FC of your fleet of one to determine range. This is, of course, a far from ideal scenario.

Travel Fleet:
When the initial ping went out, I wasn't expecting as large of a response as we got. In under an hour, we had over 80 people online trying to get in, if memory serves. We were trying to use smaller groups to avoid spiking the system. If the enemy saw 30 people enter a system, it'd be a clear sign to them to close the hole. We prioritized 'people comfortable in wormholes,' as they'd be more comfortable overall, not just for the combat fleet. If we wanted to try to roll the enemy out, or contest hole control, scan down chains, etc, they'd be better than the average newbro. However, that left a lot of downtime for everyone else. I agree that time here could've been better spent, and we should figure out a better way to handle this if it occurs again.

The Second Travel Fleet:
We went into a different wormhole with a C2 static and tried to roll into Innuendo. However, we didn't want OpFor to get alts in the wormhole to smartbomb us if we got lucky, or roll our rollers out, or any other shenanigans. We intentionally closed the K-space static after we got people in, so no one could follow. Agreed that it was a bit unclear on who could and couldn't catch up though.




Q) Why weren't we able to contest hole control? Did their fleet on-hole have significantly more strength at all times than we could contest? Particularly if we priorized the hole-rollers?

With subcaps, they had significantly more strength. We had ~30 people in the hole, iirc, whereas they had 60 legions. Caps could've, and should've, made a difference, but that was my mistake.

Q) How do structure defenses work? I see people talking about specific targeting with structure weapons - I thought it was all automated. Is this something students can access on any of our structures to see the interface? If not, is there a wiki page explaining it?

You can man them, and they have modules just like ships do. I'm not sure about a wiki page.

Q) What, specifically, happened to allow the primary defense fleet to be stolen? What could have been done differently (with the full benefit of hindsight) to prevent this? Was the thief very trusted, or was our primary defense fleet available to untrusted pilots? I can see the advantage in future of having a director-only access limitation on a fullly prepped defense fleet, or splitting it up into several chunks with little permission overlap.

No comment, as we can't confirm the specific person that stole them for 100%, and it's outside the scope of this AAR.

Q) Did we, perhaps, put too much emphasis on denying the enemy "nice killmails" at the cost of limiting our defensive abilities?

Had the secondary defense fleet not been ejected, we would've had something like 80+ reships available. Its loss was obviously a massive blow. See Jalxan's post above for further details on this.

Q) Similarly, the emphasis on denying loot (though this one is *much* more understandable as it provides a much more tangible benefit to the enemy) seemed to take up a lot of attention from people who could have been coordinating using that loot for defense.

Again, we'd scraped the usable defense ships already, but the secondary defense fleet was ejected.

Q) What *should* the kitchen sink pilots have been doing with the short range ships they were given? With the time now to consider tactics, how would we best have been able to contribute, so that next time, we can be more effective? My assumption was we should have been given close-range warp-ins to be able to immediately apply damage and avoid having to make a deadly approach. Probably should have been warping in groups to minimize being primaried.

To be honest, there weren't a lot of good options once you were stuck in kitchen sink. Squadwarps for groups of close range ships would've worked better though.

Q) We ran out of Large Projectile Ammo partway through the fight - what happened with this? It left us with many ships which could have applied heavy damage at relevant ranges which were unable to participate.

I was podded out of the fight at this point, so I'm not sure what happened here.

Q) I hear that we do try to keep the loot stored in WHC to a reasonable limit, and that we regularly cycled the structures to clear out idle player's loot. Is the value that we had left in the structure unusually high despite that, or is this the expected value for an active WHC? Could we do more to make it less work to deny loot, and less loot to need to deny?

This is a bit out of scope for this AAR, and above my paygrade. WHC CCs will have a better perspective on this, and it may be covered in the director's AAR.

Q) For a large part of the battle, we had a resupply point in open space that was effectively unguarded afaik, and it was from a destroyed structure, so a known location - how did we not get jumped at that location by enemy pilots preventing our side from reshipping/securing ships for later retrieval

Again, was podded out, so someone else will have to help here.

Q) Is it possible to have enough freighters and freighter pilots on-site that we could safe-log all assets, and drip-rescue them over the course of the next several weeks? The enemy benefits from knowing we have to defend on a specific timer, but they cannot, and (since we were later able to rescue assets) did not have the capability to maintain hole control indefinitely. Similarly, once the caps were determined to no longer be able to swing the fight, could we not have safe logged those, and held them offline until they could be moved out (a more difficult rescue, due to right-size holes not being guaranteed)


Again, a bit out of scope of the AAR, but based on the volume of assets in the hole, having enough freighters to safe it all up isn't practical. Some work likely needs to come from minimizing how much people keep in a wormhole. And I would 100% rather have our caps go down swinging rather than hide them up. Keep in mind, you cannot take caps in or out of any wormhole smaller than a C5.