Originally by: BlackDog Rackh'am

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I think this was a tie. I wasn't there but it sounds like it. Heck, i know my corp could probably replace all those dreads out of our own corpwallet if we had lost them. I think we lost 2-3, so it's no big deal. That's the case with others too.

Infact, i have personal experience of the way D2 treats their dreads ever since the wars in XZH and Tribute, so much that they have worked a lot to make sure they can spam capitals efficiently and non-stop to not even care.

That's adapting and overcoming all right. If you lose a lot of dreads there are 2 ways to stay in the fight. You either stop losing them or outproducing the opponent, as has been proven in recent military history.

The US used tanks that were horribly inferior to German designs in WWII, just because they could roll them out non-stop and at that point it's just a matter of pointing all the guns to the same target.

The Russians were the ones who mastered the terribly costly ways of human wave assaults and despite their initial material and tactical shortcomings, they managed to hold out long enough to get better equipment and tactics and win.

Before someone starts telling me that i can't draw parallels to RL, i think that a persistent world of a game like EvE with so many varied aspects is the single most applicable game for such parallels.

A mere half a century ago, a war was fought between two sides...one that was leaner, meaner, better equipped, trained and led and another one, that was lacking in all of the above but had the determination and the capacity to rearm,regroup and stay in the fight. The ones who were considered as most probable candidates for victory were the ones who lost in the end, because they were slowly but surely worn out. There is only so much a superior tactician can do with normal numbers against an inexaustible by comparison tide of enemies.

Of course, we don't have permanent death of characters in EvE, isk is hardly a factor in EvE war as has been proven again, so what is the defining commodity? I'd say it's time. Morale could be too, but in EvE morale is also mostly tied to time spent versus outcomes accomplished. It's the amount of manhours any power block can field that matters in the end and manhours=characters x playing time per character.

If BoB has 200 die hard players that play for 5 hours a day and D2 has 500 casual players that play 2 hours per day, then they both account for 1000 manhours. At the time being, i would hazzard a guess that the coalition's manhour potential is way higher than BoB's.

This time commodity can be brought to bear either by improving in combat, having solid material replacement infrastrucrture, or a mix of both, but as long as the coalition groups are willing to stick to the job at hand the situation is not looking favorable for BoB, it's simple mathematics.

The most efficient way for BoB to reverse this is to take away their enemy's manhours, so they must either limit the number of enemy players or reduce their will to play the game.

Now all this is something they have known for a long time, maybe even mastered, whenever they have taken on superior numbers. This is where the use for propaganda, personal attacks and character assasination comes in. To make the enemy to want out of the conflict, even if they have more than adequate chances of winning. Their victories are more than solid logistics, planning and tactical genius. They are socially engineered as well, but good propaganda use doesn't necessitate lies. It necessitates credibility in the eye of the casual observer, something however that was wiped away during the recent scandal. And that is why the current conflict is so interesting to watch, because social engineering probably won't cut it this time.

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