Alliance Structure: What Works, and What Doesn't

[Banlish]

Funny enough after the isk making guides are done I was going to go into what to do and what not to do with alliances. Guess it can't hurt to put some of it out there early, but a lot of people in this thread are making some really good points. I might repeat some of what they've said in some replies but I'm not trying to steal anyone's thunder.



Senates/Councils
1. Do not ever get councils, senates or 'command' groups. Read that sentence every day you are making your alliance command structure and you will do better then 90% of alliances out there.

I've seen every fucking example under the sun, and councils and senates make everything fail and fail HARD. FLA ran under this (free lancer alliance for the long ago people here) and it was a giant cluster fuck, the only thing they could agree on ever was that their military leader IN MY CORP should be kicked because he wouldn't run everything by them every day. Oh and btw, this was DURING the heaviest sieging of their space. So we gave them the finger and left, something like 40% of the pvpers in the alliance ended up in my corp after that and FLA collapsed a few weeks later. They were angry as HELL that the military guy wasn't making massive forum posts, votes and sending them EVE mails about everything he did every two minutes. Fuck councils.

I've seen alliance after alliance try to make councils work, and unless the majority of the council is online for 6+ hours per day it won't work. So avoid it.

2. CEO's/Corp leaders
CEO's should be given a way to help out and advise, like a leadership forum but the leadership of the alliance has to be invested in a few (2 to 3 for most alliances) leaders that are given full power to act, if they royally fuck up and the majority don't trust them then ditch em. People who refuse to listen to anyone else when making blatant mistakes or running their fleets like garbage (losing a few capitals every few days is a great example). Don't ignore the CEO's and corp leaders, some of them have been in other alliances before and have good experience you can learn from and use. But don't have votes for everything under the sun, just listen to em and if one leader starts ignoring everything and becoming a asshole have a chat with him or ditch him if he's crossing the line to often.

Remember CEO's and corp leaders are leading their corp, and I've found it almost IMPOSSIBLE for a CEO to be both a CEO and an ALLIANCE LEADER at the same time. It literally turns into one or the other being neglected and there are too many people in game not willing to give up power in their corp to directors so you'll see many sub 30 man corps running a 500 man alliance and wonder why.

3. Jobs
Running an alliance is a job, when it gets over 1,200 members it's almost a full time job. But hey, know the best thing about it being a job? You can hire MORE PEOPLE TO HELP YOU! Don't be afraid to get multi people in multi positions and when they burn out or stop doing their job fire their asses. I've seen alliance after alliance have 10 people in a single position like rental guy, but only 3 of them every logged in, the other 7 were listed as contacts but never did anything. Fire those people and make sure people know before you setup the position that it's a task/job position and not reflecting on how the alliance treats them personally.

To often people take it mega personally if you appoint someone new, they get butthurt, , then emo and then leave. That's because people started treating them like the second coming of christ in the job. IT. IS. A. JOB. and everyone is replaceable in A JOB. If not, then it wasn't a job, it was a cult and that's just fucked up man.

4. Too many cooks spoils the broth.
This almost falls under councils but the more corps you have, the more bullshit you will have to deal with. Many alliances in the past have tried to avoid this by only taking 100+ member corps, and that really is a good method to use. However most people don't want to merge their corps and most people are utterly terrible at recruiting. Combine the two together and the average size corp in most alliances rounds out at around 40 to 60 members, since about 2/3rds are alts most of em are >20 member corps. Each has their own leader, their own need for a corp office, their own need for a personal system to rat make isk in, they want their own moon reaction, etc etc. Find a good recruiter and avoid the small terrible corps that can't figure this stuff out or be prepared to deal with many needs that could be fixed by a few large corps.

5. Logistics
Treat your logistics pilots like fucking gold, reward them here and there and make sure their not burning out. The pvpers in an alliance are what hold the line, if they have to pay extreme margins to build a new ship they get pissed, it can be fucking deadly to have a single part off your market where your alliance doctrines don't work at all at a critical fight. Get a few logistics people, usually a few from every corp that the corp itself will cover their mistakes if they thief you results in some good pilots and not anyone they can just drag off the street. Logistics people will make your pvpers better by having more and cheaper ships to fly, fuel where and when needed and infrastruture parts to make the space you have better. Get good ones and you can beat a majority of alliances out there.

6. Get MANY FC's not one.
There are many alliances that have had great potential but horrible FC's, don't let that happen to you. If no one is 'grown' or 'groomed' in your alliance to FC, then consider merging your entire alliance into one that is. To many times I've seen a really good FC never let other FC's even take a try at things, this is a massive mistake. FCing is a JOB and it's probably one of the toughest there is in game, but it's STILL a job. Get as many FC's as you can, just make sure they don't fight over leading DURING fleets and things will go well for you. And don't let them get into dick waving contests with each other over who gets to lead a fleet, because in a big ass war against a GOOD enemy your FC's will be called primary often and having dozens will mean your fleet is still being lead instead of being shattered after they breach your coms and find out who the FC's are to put them high on the target calling list.

7. Timezones
Unless your alliance is ONLY in a specific time zone try to make your leaders, job fillers and FC's to repeat their positions in multi time zones. Have a rental guy? good, have 3 and make one Euro, one US and one AUS. Now people almost always have someone online or coming online SOON to deal with whatever problems, questions or fuck ups have occurred. More people means the work load is spread out and don't be afraid to ask others to HELP with work if one TZ guy is getting overloaded too much. This isn't like real life work, where if you ask for help they consider you not able to do your job and fire your ass. Get helpers and get shit done so you can PLAY THE GAME. If not you'll LEAVE THE GAME.

8. Moon/outpost shit
Don't EVER let one corp of people control everything, UNLESS it's like 1,000 people. To many times I've seen one corp running all the high end moons in an alliance, they get pissed and suddenly all the moons people fought over are out of alliance and in another within a single day. Outposts should be in a holding corp, not all of them, but a majority so not everyone can lose access if a critical corp decides to leave. Don't allow corps to put down 'for profit' outposts without notice, some corps think that they come first, then their directors and THEN the alliance their in. That's bullshit, leadership should be informed about an outpost and if they say no, IT MEANS FUCKING NO. Some space in the game is setup where an outpost is setup to bring the alliance income from a constellation, but a corp could dump down a refinery in the best system and capture some of that income. For example: http://evemaps.dotlan.net/map/Insmother/0-YMZM#sec Notice how 3AE is in the middle and has a refinery in the dead center of the constellation, yet at the back there is another refinery in MOCW. That is an example of a corp sniping some of the profits for themselves. (note I have no fucking clue if this happened in Solar Fleet, it's just an example constellation)

9. Ship replacement
This falls under logistics, but make sure ships that are replaced are EXACTLY fit correctly and allow some variation that doesn't make the PVPers call you fucking retarded for now allowing. For example, someone decides to use faction level gear on their battleship, still replace the hull as if it had tech 2 on it but don't disallow it being reimbursed because he had better gear on it. If someone is flying around in tech 1 gear on a ship when tech 2 is required, yes, that person would be denied and told to fit correctly. Basically have the people that do your reimbursements have a few brain cells to ram together compared to people the follow a system to strictly and just anger your pilots.

10. Don't fear mergers, embrace them!
If it isn't clear, mergers are a GOOD thing many times, yes there are very bad mergers but if you know what to look out for you can easily turn a medium alliance into a large one and maybe even into a super power if mergers were done more often. Often an alliance leader or leaders will reject a merger out of hand because they don't want things to change, they don't want to deal with other leaders or worst yet they simply don't want to lose power. There are SHIT TONS of >300 man alliances out there that if they all merged together might have a damn shot at getting something accomplished, but a few people at the top won't even consider the idea. Because hey, they know that if they simply just give it more time eventually a 500+ man super heavy corp will join them and they'll become a true contender! Bullshit. Mergers are great tools if you consider it a TOOL and don't go into it blind. If you have your eyes open and stay really involved a merger can make you into a true power. Never reject them and if their being done for the right reasons try to go for it.

Examples since I KNOW mergers are a touchy subject. Before anyone says 'But Banlish, that's bullshit your talking hypothetically, you don't UNDERSTAND, a merger could leave us high and dry!' I say your absolutely right, so let me tell you about the merger I not only handled but started myself.

(super condensed version)
I was brought back to 'save AtlasDOT' I knew as a DOT alliance trying to live up to the orginal the alliance was doomed before it was even formed. As such I was asked to 'fix things' I went to the closest neighbor I had in that case Cascade Imminent and took the alliance leader aside. We talked very frankly about the prospects of a merger, the good and bad of both alliances, the goals of each, the space we held and all that. After a few hours we knew it was a possiblity, over the next two weeks the merger went off and there were of course hiccups. Not every corp wanted to merge into a new alliance, some were angry, some were sad, others fell apart and left. There was a bit of thefts and bad feelings too, but that's because it's a GAME and people got emotionally invested in some of the SPACE we held over the group of people. All in all it worked out very well, at the time. A dying entity was put to rest and the local alliances were made better. Nulli, FAIL and ROL all gained corps from the merger despite FAIL gaining the majority. It wasn't the best merger by FAR, but it did work out and all corps have done better since.

11. Don't get too many alliances
Please don't fall into the problem of having the MAIN alliance, the TRAINING alliance, the RENTAL alliance, the LOGISTICS alliance, the EMPIRE alliance, the WORMHOLE alliance, the NPC SPACE alliance and the super cap only alliance. Obviously I'm going overboard with the example but don't go nuts unless you have dozens and dozens of good corps and tons of territory, I've seen 100 man groups make 3 alliances before they've even gotten their first 0.0 system. Don't do that, please don't do that.


This post is obviously for alliances in general and not just Grims specific alliance. I hope TASHA does well, it's a good example of some ultra large newbie (not NOOB DAMMIT there's a DIFFERENCE) corps that are doing things right.


Fun fact. I offered FAIL to contact this group and was told "they're too new, they won't do anything good." I think I might have been right and I'm glad they've proven that you don't have to have a ton of experience and skill points to effect 0.0.

[Diotima Saraki]

Fuck corp CEOs, the source of 9 years of alliance failures in nullsec.

One man in charge at the top. Your only job is to make big decisions, solve spats, and shuffle people around as they get burntout, jobs, girlfriends, etc. Depending on how advanced your alliance is and your timezone coverage, I would have as many deputies as needed who can make decisions in my stead when I`m not around. I doubt youd ever need or want more than 2 or 3.

I disagree.

Many new alliances are not dominated by a single corporation and didn't have time yet to develop a strong integrative alliance culture of their own - they are still new, nobody really knows if they will succeed and every member corporation is hedging their bets to some extent. That's not an ideal situation but it is how reality often works out.

Now you have a bunch of guys in "alliance leadership" whose ultimate goal is to make the corporations dissolve fully into the alliance identity and you have a bunch of corp CEOs whose goals are to stay relevant and make sure that their corporation will survive the eventual collapse of the alliance mostly unharmed.

So alliance leadership starts to send out orders like "train for this", "sign up for that", "get rid off your corporation voicecomms", "get more of your members on jabber", "listen to our military director", ... and nothing happens.

Why does nothing happen? because nobody reads alliance mails and the corporation CEOs don't have a strong interest in losing their members and their influence to the alliance - and who is to blame them for putting the interest of their corporation first as long as the alliance has not demonstrated yet that it is indeed viable?

Your corp CEOs won't vocally disagree with you if they are not on board with your plans, they will just ignore the parts of your ideas they don't agree with and their members - who have stayed with the corporation for a much longer time than the corp is in your alliance and who probably have seen a fair amount of alliances fail in their time - will notice that and behave accordingly.

In the end the only way to get anything done is to realize that the corporation CEOs are the sergeants of your alliance and that you absolutely need their support if you as an alliance officer want to get through to your membership - otherwise none of the grand plans you and your fellow alliance directors dream up will actually happen down on the ground level and you will eventually have a very rough awakening when you realize that all your orders for the past few months were never fully implemented as nobody on corp level felt the necessity to enforce them.

As things get done and trust in the alliance leadership increases you will be able to gradually move closer towards the "alliance first, corporations don't exist" model but unless your alliance is dominated by one very strong corporation from the start (which in my experience most new alliances aren't, they are a collection of many roughly equally sized corporations from a variety of backgrounds) you won't be able to ignore your corporation CEOs for quite some time.


(my impression is that especially people who have played a very long time in GSF or TEST - both alliances which are basically just an extension of a single dominant corporation - tend to heavily underestimate the difficulties in getting an alliance that is made up of more equally-sized corporations (each with their own background & prior history) to commit to a similar level of cultural and organizational integration; integration is something you have to build, not something you can mandate)

[Elendar]

I think Grath and Mittens have pretty much stated everything that needs to be said in this thread.

Are there actually any large alliances (not pets) left with councils etc or have alliances without councils killed them all off now?

[Elendar]

In the end the only way to get anything done is to realize that the corporation CEOs are the sergeants of your alliance and that you absolutely need their support if you as an alliance officer want to get through to your membership - otherwise none of the grand plans you and your fellow alliance directors dream up will actually happen down on the ground level and you will eventually have a very rough awakening when you realize that all your orders for the past few months were never fully implemented as nobody on corp level felt the necessity to enforce them.

I completely disagree with this, corp CEOs have little impact on people getting involved or not, if you have this issue its because your shiny new alliance leadership is too busy making grand plans not getting out there and DOING. Its down to individual members if they get involved with the alliance, for this to happen there have to be things going on that directly entertain them during gameplay. Your CEO buying into a fancy plan or not has very little to do with if you go on today's fleet or not.

Any alliance that starts off with corp CEOs feeling they are entitled to decide what parts of the alliance operations their members will get involved in is doomed from the outset.

[Rer]

Any alliance that starts off with corp CEOs feeling they are entitled to decide what parts of the alliance operations their members will get involved in is doomed from the outset.

Confirming this part without a doubt, tried it, doesn't work.

[islador]

I've read through the thread and I only see one thing missing: Be wary of the rich. In EVE, rich players tend to get used to having their money speak for them. In a young alliance, money is always a problem. One welp'd 20 man fleet? 1 to 4 billion isk. A basic moongo setup? 4 to 20b to get the ball rolling. A seeded market? 15 to 25 billion isk. A station? 18 to 25b (not counting upgrades). A single dead nyx? 25-30b (current WTS on EVE-o) A titan? 80-110b (current WTS on EVE-o). Sure, a rich CEO or random fuck can help with these things, be it seeding the market, buying and building a station, or contributing isk to a titan fund, or what have you; the problem is, rich people tend to want something in return. Influence, or direct control over what they're investing in, or in the case of the much famed puppetmaster, cover for his botting legions.

Be wary of the rich, don't sell your alliance.

[Grim]

Horus already tried to worm his way into leadership of 99%/Tribal Band. Luckily enough people were aware of his background to make leadership aware and send him packing.

[Bowkers]

I've applied with my alt for a leadership role, please to accept...

[Grim]

I've applied with my alt for a leadership role, please to accept...

You forgot the part about money. Send me a few bil "for the alliance" and I will put you in charge of POS management right away!

Seriously, we need someone to manage our towers, we are fucking terrible at it.

[Bowkers]

I can actually do this for you. But I won't.

[true]

Alliance is all about "small council" of likeminded people in charge. If they are competent too - you will win EVE.

[Wildside]

think it all depends on the goal of the alliance/its playerbase. I only been in pvp "l33t" focused alliances since my few mothns in eve , and my experince beeing in those is keeping the pvpers happy is the most important factor, and their biggest nemesis beeing fcs drunk on hubris beeing totaly delusional about their importance and all talk but no action, dramaqueens and emo snowflakes without skin. if you can controll those snowflakes and shutdown any drama right away you have come a long way. then add objective and content and you got the ball rolling. reimburstment and sharing of wealth is rly 2nd priorty, as long as those wannabie "l33t" pvpers accually got something to shoot at they are happy , specially if you avoid loosing too much expensive stuff(capitals and supercaps) while your at it. And try to deligate workload, fcs have a tendency to grow into leadership/dictatorlike figures that try to do everything themself and thus burn out/steal all your shit when they do so, every 12 mothns or so.
Also try to shutdown any sort of my corp is bether than your corp drama(if of serious type).

[Squint]

If I may add something. Make sure the players have something to do, keep them busy. When they sit doing nothing, they start moaning and causing dissent. Best alliance I ever been in had action from login to logoff, even during "peace times". Worst alliance ever was sitting around waiting for an FC to logon (I was not allowed to start fleets as I was not an "authorised" FC). Best alliance ever had a very charismatic leader that was on TS all the time chatting & getting things done. Worst alliance, I am not even sure who the CEO was.

[islador]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I have questions along it's lines that have yet to be answered. I am currently in the process of setting up an alliance and I am curious to hear about methods of low level alliance income. Moons are difficult to acquire with small numbers and young pilots. Corp dues tend to chase away smaller corps who can provide members but perhaps not strong financials. POCOs while more within reach offer small and less then static income. Is there anything I am missing, or is it really just a matter of getting as many little things as you can and holding onto it as long as possible?

[Quesa]

Mining is always good income as well as corp plex's.

[Midori Tsu]

Moons are difficult to acquire with small numbers and young pilots.

Find some cobalt moons, their common and they put out like 200m a month.

[Grath]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I have questions along it's lines that have yet to be answered. I am currently in the process of setting up an alliance and I am curious to hear about methods of low level alliance income. Moons are difficult to acquire with small numbers and young pilots. Corp dues tend to chase away smaller corps who can provide members but perhaps not strong financials. POCOs while more within reach offer small and less then static income. Is there anything I am missing, or is it really just a matter of getting as many little things as you can and holding onto it as long as possible?

First decide exactly what you need money for.

Is it office rentals for corps in stations? That should be handled at the corp level through corp taxes

Is it for things like ammo and drones? This is something that can also be handled at the corp level through taxes.


This list can go on and on, and I can't think of a lot of things that a starter alliance would need massive funding for other than a good SRP, which will of course be really hard at first. The best thing you can do for your starter alliance is to give the line members a shot at making money, and then tax them directly. The corps can then pay into the alliance if something like SRP is the goal. You could pick up a few really low end moons and start there, learn what size tower to put up to minimize overhead and maximize profit and feed the alliance coffers with those.

As far as POCO's those are going to be the target of the newer alliances, before sieging a Poco try and do some homework and find out who owns it so you don't waste your time shooting an inanimate object only to later find out that its a SOLAR Fleet holding corp or some silly shit like that. Find out what planets will make you the best profit within your ability to siege them and then gobble up as many as you can.

Basically you'll start at the line member when you're small and work up from there, you should aim to fill yourself with corps that will fit into that idea and move on, as has been stated if you're the 'Decider' they'll need to get along with EVERYTHING you decide, as you wont want to say "Ok corp tax should be set to 10%, 5% of that comes to the alliance for replacements and fuel coss" and then find out one of your CEO's is like "no we're not going to do that".

[BDJ]

Sorry to necro this thread, but I have questions along it's lines that have yet to be answered. I am currently in the process of setting up an alliance and I am curious to hear about methods of low level alliance income. Moons are difficult to acquire with small numbers and young pilots. Corp dues tend to chase away smaller corps who can provide members but perhaps not strong financials. POCOs while more within reach offer small and less then static income. Is there anything I am missing, or is it really just a matter of getting as many little things as you can and holding onto it as long as possible?

As someone who has seen quite a few different alliance structures, most of which failed horribly under the weight of their own management, everything that has been stated in this thread is what makes things work. Currently I'm running around with a renting alliance and you'd think with over a thousand members they'd figure out how to pay for rent.

As has been stated - Figure out how much money you'll need. Where I'm at systems are being rented at around 1-4 bil isk per system per month, depending on what's there. Generally renting is done by the constellation due to sov mechanics. For two constellations, we're working on needing about 33bil isk a month. Just starting off, you'll probably need far less then that, probably around 10-15 or so depending. The 33 bil is going for mostly rental fees, plus Concord fees and maintaining sov structures and the like.

Sources of revenue are pretty wide spread. Dues, as you've stated, are probably the worst idea ever seeing as the amount of other alliances that have "no dues" or are "due-free" so you're just going to lose potential players, aka "slaves," to these other groups. Passively: PI and Moon Mining are probably a good starting point. In a more stable space, ratting anoms per individual member can make quite a lot of isk; which can then be filtered to the Alliance through taxes. Seeding a marketplace can also bring in the big money, if you have the starting capital.

I'm not really sure what the POCO return is, but from what I've heard its less then stellar unless you're in an amazing PI haven. You're better off Moon Mining or doing your own PI tax-free, especially out in 0.0 where those sorts of resources are in abundance. I would shy away from rapid expansive growth and trying to take more systems then you need. Once you're rolling in isk, or every belt/anom has 5 people in it at any given time, then you're probably set to expand.

A good CEO meeting once in a while where you lay out the law will help give the alliance direction and purpose. Beat out any naysayers. If they don't like the direction, tell them to make their own alliance and be done with it. Don't let the power go to your head though. There are times to ask for and take advice from the CEOs, but don't let them constantly drive the ship, otherwise you'll be out of a job.

I'd also suggest quickly breaking down any divisive corporation relationships. Everyone doesn't have to get along, and if you look at an alliance, such as PL, internally none of them get along; but externally they're a unified group. TEST, Goonswarm and on an even more Macro-level CFC and HBC all have these traits of being unified when it matters. Any sort of internal elitism should be trampled out while fostering elitism over external entities, especially early on. If you and your alliance don't view yourselves as the best things in EVE, people won't want to join, and others already in the alliance will look for greener pastures sooner or later.

Overall though, if you're just a start-up alliance. I'd kick it in high-sec/low-sec for a while. Learn to work as a group, do Incursions or something. Let everyone build up some buffer isk before setting off into 0.0. Once you get a pretty good core of corporations that you know and trust, others will cling to you like magnets, especially if you're effective at what you do and exude smugness.