Winters: Cycle 258: Cycle 257 roundup: Operation Masochistic Opossum

Operation Masochistic Opossum ...or It Ain't Necessarily So

These last few cycles have been eventful for Winters. In cycle 253 we cheekily prepared the system of Diegakul - a heavily weaponised expansion that would cost us 41 CC, but also cost Aisling Duval 112 CC and Arissa Lavigny-Duval 18 CC - overall a very tasty win for the Federation. The expansion triggers were against us at 10659 vs 6938, but we took advantage of a preoccupied Empire and some strong PVP support to keep our haulers moving and safe, and managed to secure it by a very narrow margin of 3439% to 3431%, around 852 merits in the lead - barely more than a single Type-9 load!

Then in cycle 255, Winters did it again, expanding to Hez Pef, costing her 14 CC but taking 69 CC from Aisling Duval. Nice!

Incensed by this effrontery, the Imperials brutally attacked Winters in cycle 256, driving her into a deep turmoil with 13 systems on the list for potential revolt, including both Hez Pef and Diegakul.

They followed this up in cycle 257 with continued assaults, driving home their advantage. Despite desperate fortification attempts by Winters pilots, the might of the Empire could not be stopped, and Winters lost all but one of the systems in turmoil. A defeated Winters now faces the task of rebuilding the tatters of her once-mighty power, thoroughly demoralised, with her pilots out-gunned and her leadership out-manoeuvred.

At least - that's how the Imps will spin it. But let me tell you what really happened, because there's a little more lurking under the surface of PowerPlay than first meets the eye.

Where it all began

We actually need to go a little further back to a similar-looking turmoil of Winters in cycle 234 that was named Operation Cold Turkey by the Imperials. This turmoil saw Winters losing 14 systems, and it was mostly as it appeared on the face of things. Winters CC had been chipped away by multiple weaponised expansions from Torval, and then a big push by the Imperials saw her deep in turmoil. Although we tried to control which systems were lost and which retained, we were taken somewhat by surprise, and a very strong 5th Column worked hard fortifying all our bad systems, ensuring that only good systems went into turmoil. (see addendum on the role of 5C during turmoils). Please note we do not intend any suggestion that this particular turmoil was underhanded in any way - the Imperials did what Imperials do, and they beat us fairly with a big effort, and the 5C action to prevent us losing any bad systems was plausibly opportunistic mischief rather than collusion.

The cycle after this big loss Winters had no CC to prepare systems with, but the following cycle, it was back to the task of rebuilding, although since this was around the end of the year, festivities kept commander participation low. Winters had 810 CC to spend on preparing a system, and we picked Velnians, a good high-profit expansion system. It only cost around 130 CC to take from preparation to expansion, so leadership instructed our pilots to vote tactically for consolidation so that just that one system went through preparation, giving the rest of the CC to our undermining defence. This is a routine all powers are familiar with, and we have good systems for tracking who is doing what with consolidation/preparation votes, and everything was going well.

In the very last hour of the weekly PowerPlay cycle, our consolidation suddenly dropped from 70% (one system prepared) to 40% (four systems prepared). Even with low Winters commander turnout due to the holidays, we calculate this must have taken over 200 votes cast. Since each commander can have at most 5 votes, this means that at least 40 commanders, each pledged to Winters for at least 16 weeks to earn 5 votes, all voted for preparation within the last hour of the cycle. This is a clear sign of a very large, well-organised, long-term 5th-Column presence.

We shall leave moot the speculation of who this particular group of 5th Columnists really is - you can find much argument about it on Reddit. But it's worth noting that to vote this strongly in cycle 237, they must have pledged to Winters no later than cycle 221, so checking the history logs may prove useful.

So why would 5C vote us down to 41% consolidation? Because at that level four systems go through to expansion. The top system was still Winters-chosen Velnians with 41,000 merits hauled to it. But as well as some late voting, some late hauling by 5C put three systems clearly ahead of the usual bunch of random systems, with about 10,000 merits hauled each. The systems were Marahli, Montovici, and Grovii. All three have the distinctive characteristics of a 5C-chosen system - they are ferocious lossmakers (losing around 50 CC per cycle), they are relatively close to our HQ of Rhea, and they have expansion triggers that are massively in favour of expansion (5:2 or 3:1). This means that if they do go through preparation to expansion, they are almost impossible to stop - a very small hauling effort by 5C is enough to fight off any helpful allies trying to oppose these absolute turds.

The only other way to avoid these terrible expansions going through is to self-turmoil. In this, the power undermines its own systems (see the addendum on "Red Team" for how this works), which lowers the CC enough that the power cannot afford the expansions and they fail. If you do it right the power doesn't even go into turmoil (since expansion costs are handled first), but sometimes the power will be in turmoil with one or two systems on the list, which is usually easy to fortify out of without loss. Self-turmoils, especially ones to avoid 5C expansions, are sadly fairly routine PowerPlay activities, and every power does them.

However, Winters had just been in a big turmoil and had already lost 14 systems. This reduced her overheads dramatically, giving her a large CC surplus, making a second turmoil very difficult. 5th Column may be scum, but they know how the game works, and they scouted diligently, saw Winters trying for a self-turmoil, and responded with large fortification efforts, defeating the attempt at self-turmoil, and also taking all three terrible systems through expansion, together costing not just the unprofitable systems but also the increased overheads, for a total loss of around 400 CC per cycle.

Well this is a fine mess

Winters now had a problem. She'd lost a lot of profitable systems, and just been handed some real stinkers. Leadership ran a whole bunch of spreadsheet sims (we have sims coming out of our ears!) and with the large 5C presence watching our every move, we realised that there was no hope for a useful self-turmoil to shed those systems at that time. All that would have happened is that we’d get a few systems on the turmoil list, but because 5C fortifies all the bad ones we want to get rid of, the only systems that will actually go into turmoil are the good profitable systems. So we’d just go in a small cycle - take a few systems, turmoil, lose these systems again, and end up back where we started.

The alternative was to do what we've always done - haul our way out of the problem by just ignoring it, eating the costs, and returning to our re-expansion. The problem is that as a power expands, the overheads grow, so that each system becomes quadratically more expensive than the previous one, until you hit the magic point of 55 systems, at which point the cost per-system drops dramatically (see addendum). Looking at the systems that were available, and the ones we could plausibly remove from our enemies, it did not seem like Winters could actually get to 55 systems. Although there were plenty of profitable systems out there, they were not profitable enough to overcome the rising overheads and the burden of the existing bad systems, and Winters would simply run out of CC to use for expansion somewhere around the 50-system mark. Being five short doesn't sound a lot, but the cost of those last five is really high - it was just impossible in Winters' state at the time.

What was needed was a really big turmoil to get rid of those systems close to HQ - which would take the power down to the smallest it had ever been in four years. And that requires a lot of undermining, and that means we needed some help. But where are we going to find that much firepower to undermine Winters? Who really really likes shooting at us? Well… we could ask the elephant in the room - let’s get the Imperials to help! So we had to goad the Imperials into hating us even more, and giving them a vested interest in us losing as many systems as possible. So we started to poke them with the pointy stick of weaponised expansions.

The other part of the strategy was to abandon consolidation as a tactic. For many cycles Winters had refined the management of our consolidation vote to finesse our way around 5C. Unfortunately what actually happened was those 40+ commanders were sitting there waiting for their votes to mature, and then in cycle 238 they brute-forced the vote down. There is no real defence against this, and there is also no way to spot when it will happen, since they can (and did) vote with less than an hour left in the cycle.

The solution was to reply with our own version of brute force - hauling! We would ignore the consolidation vote, assume that we would always have four (or more!) preparations whether or not 5C actually voted that cycle, and Deal With It. This takes a combination of brute force - hauling enough to enough good preparation targets to make sure no bad ones creep into the list - and subtlety in our other activities. We had to develop quite a few leadership and management techniques to deal with the complexity - sometimes leadership can feel like a second job.

Execution, execution, execution

Over the next twenty cycles, Winters carefully chose preparations to focus on good targets, squeezing out the 5C bad ones with sheer hauling force. Sometimes the good targets were systems we actively wanted to expand to, but if not they were systems that even if they went to expansion would almost certainly fail. The best systems for this are distant weaponised systems - because they are weaponised we knew the Imperials would fight them - and because they are distant and so have terrible expansion triggers, the Imperials would easily defeat them even if 5C do try to haul to them. This is not a new tactic, and the Empire has the same problem, and the same solution. So each side has had this pattern of "safe preps" that looked like extremely aggressive assaults on enemy territory, but that both sides knew had no chance of success, and was just there to soak up excess CC, and to give each others’ pilots something fun to shoot at. All very honorable and civilised. Oh what a lovely war!

We also played the usual PowerPlay battles of hauling to our expansions while fighting off the attacks of others. Each cycle 5C would fortify our bad systems, salary grinders would fortify the closest systems (hello Neche and NLTT!), and misguided randos would fortify strange systems. 5C would put 15k merits into some terrible preparations, and we'd out-haul them with a much better set of preps. Every now and then 5C would do a serious push for some awful system they particularly liked, but because you can't "snipe" preps for very much, we'd see it coming and push back in time for cycle tick. All the while, Winters was steadily expanding in a carefully-chosen pattern of systems, and watching like hawks for an Imperial attack.

Finally, in cycle 253 the time was right to seal the deal. We started a sustained effort to take some of the nastiest most aggressive weaponised systems we could. They had always been there, but they're hard to take, and they'd be opposed well by the Imperials. But now was the time - haul for glory, Winters! We combined it with strong undermining and near-turmoils of the Imperials to divert their efforts away from direct opposition, and we managed to grab first Diegakul and then Hez Pef. And this is where we meet back with the original naive narrative.

The game’s afoot!

Incensed, the Imperials did what they had to do - get these systems away from us. They observed that Winters was in a precarious situation - she had expanded too much, her overheads were rising, and her fortification had become slack, and each cycle she barely seemed to have enough CC to avoid turmoil. They did their calculations, the timing was right, and they were sure that they could remove these weaponised systems that hurt Imperial income so badly. They launched their attack!

This was exactly what Winters had been watching for and trying to provoke. The Imperials called it Operation Lockdown. We called it Operation Masochistic Opossum - we’d play dead and ask them to kick us harder.

And indeed that is what happened. The Imperials hit hard and undermined many systems - they hit profitable ones in an effort to hurt Winters CC and drive her into turmoil, and also the unprofitable but weaponised systems to try to remove them from Winters control and stop them draining Imperial CC.

Meanwhile the 5th Column did what they always do - they fortified all the simple (non-weaponised) lossmakers to prevent them being lost - we observed that the first two systems to hit 100% fortification were Uteran and Marahli - neither very close to Rhea, or easy to haul to, or strategically vital, but they are both massive lossmakers. There is no reason anybody legitimately pledged to Winters would ever fortify these systems - they are clearly marked as lossmakers in GalNet, they are not at all convenient to get to for randos who just want the merits, and they’re not easy to fortify - Marahli’s station is 2400Ls from the sun! The only people who would ever want to fortify those systems are 5th Columnists who are trying to force Winters to not shed these abysmal systems during a turmoil.

This is exactly what we assumed they would do - what we had planned for. Our Red Team and allies sprang into action, helping the Imperials undermine not just the vulnerable systems, but nearly ALL the systems. Meanwhile our information systems kicked into overdrive begging people not to fortify - we WANTED to be in turmoil, and as deeply as possible, so that we didn't just shed the obvious weaponised bait that we had hung out, but so that we would go deeper and also lose the terrible loss-making junk that 5C had foisted upon us. In addition, undermining extra systems would force the 5C to fortify those - if a system is left undermined and not cancelled, it is almost certain to be turmoiled. The more stress we can put on the 5C’s hauling capacity where we can control it, the less damage they can do where we can’t.

Although we were asking people not to fortify, we knew it was probably a lost cause. But hey - no harm in trying. Pragmatically, we couldn’t rely on a strategic selective fort+UM. Instead we assumed we would end each cycle with a nearly complete cancellation - every system fully fortified and fully undermined. Since there is no way to "un-fortify" or “un-undermine” a system once it's hit 100%, this is the most "stable" state for a power - if you plan for that state, you can achieve it, and nobody can stop you - all it takes is hard work and a huge number of merits in both undermining and fortification. But with able assistance from the Imperials and the 5C, we managed it!

Reckoning and aftermath

And thus the maths of the game inexorably did what we knew it would, and we have now managed to shed a whole bunch of systems. Some we rather liked - but that's OK, we can get them back - we're Winters - we're GOOD at expanding and taking territory - we've been doing it for years and we'll carry on doing it. But other systems we are very very happy to see the back of - and those were the real goal. Because the well-kept secret of Elite PowerPlay is that expanding is easy, but getting rid of systems is very difficult, and getting rid of bad systems when you have a vigilant and significant 5C presence constantly breathing down your neck is nearly impossible. And yet - we did it.

The systems we shed, and their profit/loss at full overhead:


 * Mbambiva: +47 CC, contested 22 CC with Patreus, 6 CC with Mahon
 * HIP 38747: +36 CC
 * BD-01 1707: +18 CC
 * HIP 50489: +3 CC, contested 20 CC with Duval
 * HIP 47002: +2 CC
 * Pancienses: -17 CC, contested 63 CC with Torval
 * Panorua: -18 CC, contested 56 CC with Duval, 10 CC with Torval
 * Hez Pef: -40 CC, contested 69 CC with Duval
 * Grovii: -52 CC
 * Montovici: -57 CC
 * Rho Cancri: -54 CC, contested 18 CC with Mahon, 22 CC with Hudson
 * Diegakul: -67 CC, contested 112 CC with Duval, 18 CC with ALD

Losing Grovii, Montovici and Rho Cancri was the real target of this 20-cycle-long operation - everything else was either weaponised bait, or can be retaken.

A huge congratulations to everybody on the Winters team. To the planning team for building the models, making the plans, and holding faith that this might actually work. To the group secretaries who had to coordinate complex sets of actions, run covert sniping activities, build wings to oppose enemy expansions, and feed the spreadsheets with data. To our allies - both inside the Federation and outside - who helped us with manpower and intelligence. In particular The Alliance under Prime Minister Mahon put in a fantastic effort to neutralise the activities of the 5th Column and free Rho Cancri. To our allied PMFs who had to put up with some apparently bizarre activities with only the assurance that "trust us, we know what we're doing" - well, hopefully things become a little clearer now. And of course to our hauling, BGS and combat pilots who were often confused, but always willing. We're sorry we sometimes made no sense to them - this game leads to some very odd actions even at the best of times, but when there's a Cunning Secret Plan afoot it can really get confusing. And of course to the Imperials, who played their parts perfectly, even though we forgot to give them the script.

We would also like to say a huge thank you to our longer-serving veteran commanders who have seen Winters go up and down and up and down in the tables, and still stuck with it, offering advice, stepping up to lead, confident that we'd get through it with honour and dignity, playing the game the way it should be played - in Open, for Winters - without the underhand tactics that many of our enemies employed.

We've done the hard and confusing part. Now let's go do the fun part and get those systems back. Let our foes know - Winters is coming!

Article Source
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteWinters/comments/ggmg7x/cycle_257_roundup_operation_masochistic_opossum/