Phreeze

Every EVE player, no matter how casual, has the desire to want to make their mark on the e-universe. Like many things in the game, it is one of the principal draws to players who for one reason or another use the game as escapism for the trivialities of modern life. In EVE, you can be a leader of capsuleers and dictate the events that shape the game, all from the comfort of your desk chair in your one bedroom loft that is being foreclosed on next week. Despite not quite falling into the fat neckbeard category of player, I too shared this desire to be an Armchair Generallisimo in space.

To lead however, you need followers, and as a young player who barely knew how to fit and fly a ship, I embarked on a comical odyssey to assemble an elite team of torp ravens and t1 drakes to conquer a region of our own.

My space comrades Xicho and Emperor Salazar had moved out to Providence during my inactivity, and joined a corp called "Bene Dominus Knights". The corporation was led by a player named Natas Ignis, and was one of the standard small corporations that lived freely in NRDS Providence during the time. Upon resubbing, I promptly joined them in the hopes of learning about null security space and its riches.

After mastering the art of what I was told was called "Ratting", I was able to start amassing a considerable amount of isk. After a few weeks , I had almost six hundred million in my wallet, and my thoughts began to turn towards using this isk to further my own space empire. While BDK was an enjoyable corporation, we didn't do much aside from rat and the occasional mining operation. I wanted to lead my own corporation of violent space jockeys that would burn down our hated enemy of Against All Authorities, who terrorized us daily with their roams: https://www.pandemic-legion.com/kill....php?id=307653

Two months after joining BDK and learning the basics of how to run a successful corporation, I founded the "Interstellar Defense Conglomerate", a poor choice in name due to its resemblance to IAC (An Alliance I did not know existed), but it was mine nonetheless. We quickly grew to almost one hundred members at our peak (http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard...hreadID=854112), and had a lively corp chat.To finance the corporation, we would set taxes to 100% on Sundays only, and have group ratting. We would make 200 mil and upwards every Sunday, enabling us to dream of how we would spend the isk on an Alliance, the requisite next step in becoming the predominant space power of the south.

In the interim, we would go on roams led by CVA or Paxton alliance against AAA, often ending in hilarious disaster as our entire fleets would be wiped out with ease. Every time such an event happened, I couldn't help thinking that I could do better.

Finally, after several months, we were ready to take the next big step: creating an alliance. Soon the "Interstellar Defense Force" was born (http://evemaps.dotlan.net/alliance/1...3/corporations), consisting of a ragtag member roster of fellow Providence corps, as well as some high security fellows looking to expand into 0.0. Our first goal was to begin to claim sovereignty in Catch, in the unclaimed systems bordering AAA and IAC space. Without consulting anyone with any authority from either of those sides, we assumed that IAC would welcome us with open arms in their fight against AAA.

We plotted and planned and gathered the materials for our first step: A large pos, a flotilla of bestowers led by one T2 hauler as the flagship (We only had one person who could fly such an advanced ship), and the hopes and dreams of a group of players that quite literally had no idea what we were doing, but were gonna go ahead and do it anyway.

We deployed our POS here: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/GE-94X. After deciding to wait a few days on actually turning on the sov claim to give our members time to move a ship there and log off, someone reported shocking news: IAC had fallen and AAA had gobbled up their space. Since none of us knew anything about the politics of the region (IAC had been crumbling for quite some time), we were surprised that our one-time assumed ally had left us alone against the terrible Russian savages of AAA. We quickly packed up our POS and scampered back to Providence with our tail between our legs, without ever having fired a shot.

Despite this uneventful non-debut on the galactic power scene, IDF was ready to own space (or so we thought), and with a new ally and new purpose, we turned our eyes to the the land of milk and honey itself as our next target and eventually home:

Cloud Ring.

Again as always, feel free to leave comments. I'm going to try and update this twice a week, wednesday and sunday. We'll see how it goes, but we've barely scratched the surface of the story so I'm stoked to keep reliving all these fun moments from my newbee days. Additionally, be sure to subscribe so that I don't have to spam the regular Kugu forums like an asshole.