The HERO War (2014): When the Newbies Came for Providence

The HERO War (2014): When the Newbies Came for Providence

In the summer of 2014 two of EVE Online's most beloved underdogs went to war with each other. On one side stood Provi-Bloc, the open-door holder coalition that ran the friendliest patch of null-security space in the game under Not Red Don't Shoot, an army of role-players who would rather welcome a neutral than kill one. On the other stood HERO, a coalition of more than fourteen thousand rookies built around Brave Collective, an organisation so young and so cheerfully chaotic that it had named itself, only half-joking, the Hopefully Effective Rookie Organization. They shared a border. For two months they fought over seven systems in northern Catch, and the war that followed became the one Providence still tells stories about: the war it nearly lost, and then won, without giving up the thing that made it worth defending.

Two underdogs collide

HERO was announced on 2 March 2014 by Brave Collective's CEO Lychton Kondur in a State of the Alliance address, joining EVE's established blocs as what EVE News24 called the game's fifth coalition, alongside the CFC, N3, the Russian Stain Wagon and Provi-Bloc itself. It bundled Brave together with TEST, Nexus Fleet and Spaceship Samurai, a 14,151-pilot coalition at launch, and Kondur signed off the founding letter with three words: "It's time for war."

HERO formed because Brave had outgrown its home. Founded in 2013, it had ballooned out of its lowsec base in the Placid region and needed somewhere to put a coalition's worth of new players. The answer was Catch, the harsh null-sec region south of Providence, and HERO was contracted to settle it by driving out the Russian remnants who had been squatting there. That ambition put it shoulder to shoulder with Provi-Bloc, the Curatores Veritatis Alliance-led holder coalition that ran Providence and claimed the northern Catch pocket as part of a "Greater Providence." Provi-Bloc was the old-school side: CVA at its head, with Sev3rance, The Fourth District, The Volition Cult, Yulai Federation and Silent Infinity among its members, all of it run on Not Red Don't Shoot, the doctrine that welcomes neutrals rather than killing them on sight.

The two coalitions were a study in contrast - a swarm of rookies versus an order of role-players - and they shared a long border, HERO in Catch and Provi in Providence. That alone put them at odds. It got worse when HERO picked up a former Provi-Bloc alliance, Of Sound Mind, which had seceded from the coalition over differences with CVA's leadership. Now the newbies had a grudge and a guide. The fuse was laid; it only needed a spark.

A broken deal, then the Stain Wagon

The casus belli was a deal, and which side broke it first depends entirely on who you ask. Back in March 2014, when the Russian alliance Darkness of Despair collapsed, Provi-Bloc had let HERO take northern Catch unopposed and even hand it its first station system, ERVK-P, on one condition: HERO would cede ERVK-P back to Provi when the campaign ended. HERO never did. From there the accounts diverge, and EVE News24's own war coverage carried both framings in a single paragraph. Provi said HERO reneged on the ERVK-P handback and began hitting Provi's outlying systems with help from Northern Coalition. HERO maintained that Provi broke the deal first by attacking a HERO sovereignty-grinding fleet in Catch. Whoever struck the first blow, by August the two were openly at war.

The first kinetic spark came on 29 July, when Brave fleet commander Blue Ice flew into UL-7I8, noticed the system had no defensive sovereignty structures, and dropped Sovereignty Blockade Units on it purely to goad CVA into a fight. He was, by his own account, bored and looking for content. He found it.

What followed put Provi in a hole fast. Outmatched in straight fights against HERO's sheer numbers, Provi-Bloc reached for the one card it had always sworn it would keep in its hand: it called in help. On 2 September it set blue standings toward the Russian Stain Wagon coalition - Against ALL Authorities, Red Alliance and the rest of the old guard who held southern Catch - to secure station access and a second fleet. CoreBloodBrothers, the Volition Cult fleet commander who served as Provi's main FC, confirmed the partnership in a statement originally given in Dutch and translated by EVE News24's Bobmon. Rumours of ISK changing hands, he said, were true: "The isk paid was a total of 3.5bil which I personally gave to Elazar Keon (Stainwagon Coalition leader) for reimbursement as gesture for their help." Provi agreed to help Stain retake Catch in exchange. The HERO-side blog The Daily Welp dubbed the new partnership "ProviRus," and not kindly.

The newbies take their seven systems

HERO's war machine was its doctrine. In early August it unveiled a tech-two cruiser fleet built around the Eagle, christened the "Freedom Fleet," supported by Scimitar logistics and a tail of cheaper Moa and Caracal variants that newer pilots could fly. The Eagle was a serious sov-warfare ship, and some inside the coalition worried aloud that a T2-cruiser doctrine strayed from HERO's newbie roots; the FCs answered that the Moa and Caracal would still do the day-to-day work and that the Eagle was simply the fleet that could win the big timers. They were right. Through August, HERO took system after system: 7MD-S1 fell on 14 August, UL-7I8 on 21 August, and S25C-K on 28 August.

S25C-K was the war's first set-piece. More than six hundred pilots crowded the system. Provi-Bloc set up on the BR-N97 gate with a hundred-and-eighty-ship battleship fleet, expecting HERO to jump straight into it. Instead HERO bridged in as three fleets - a hundred and forty Brave in mixed Moa, Eagle and Ferox hulls, a hundred and ten Unthinkables Tengus that landed at range, and forty TEST Ishtars - two hundred and ninety pilots in all. A sixty-strong Pandemic Legion Proteus wing tried to intervene for Provi at the height of the fight and was brushed aside. Time Dilation climbed past sixty percent, more than three hundred ships died for roughly forty-eight billion ISK, and Provi-Bloc, in The Daily Welp's words, was "completely decimated."

The defining battle of the early war came three weeks later. On 21 September the BR-N97 station's armour timer drew everyone in, and the fighting spilled into neighbouring IS-R7P until the system held one thousand one hundred and seventy-five pilots. Provi fielded a two-hundred-ship sentry battleship and battlecruiser fleet plus seventy Stain Wagon Tengus; HERO and Northern Coalition. answered with a hundred and seventy Eagles and two hundred Tengus, with a hundred Pandemic Legion strategic cruisers picking off targets. Then the server gave out. Time Dilation hit nineteen percent before the node buckled, the system's population halved to six hundred and thirty-eight in a single disconnect, and Provi lost an Archon carrier and a wave of ships whose pilots were offline when they died. Five hundred and forty-five ships were destroyed for ninety-six billion ISK - and yet Provi held BR-N97 and stopped HERO cold at IS-R7P. A week later, on 28 September, Provi's sixty-two-ship Prophecy fleet tried to retake 7MD-S1 against HERO's hundred-and-fifty Eagles and Moas and failed; HERO conceded the field to a Pandemic Legion third party but kept the system.

S25C-K reignites: a pyrrhic October

A Sansha incursion in the NNLX-K constellation forced a roughly week-long truce in early October, freezing the front while both sides dealt with the invaders. When the guns came back, the fighting turned on S25C-K. On 12 October Provi-Bloc ambushed HERO on the BR-N97 gate with a hundred Zealots and a few Augoror Navy cruisers against HERO's hundred and twenty Cerberus and Caracal hulls and thirty Ishtars. Provi held beautifully, "losing one ship for every five or six their enemies lost," and HERO retreated to a tower to wait for reinforcements. While Provi reinforced the infrastructure hub, Pandemic Legion dropped a whole Mothership squadron on the HERO capital group, killed a Moros dreadnought, and the rest of HERO's caps scrambled clear. Provi recaptured the system. The butcher's bill ran forty-four billion ISK and three hundred and seventy ships for Provi against twenty-two billion and two hundred and fifty ships for HERO - a Provi win on the field that cost it more than it cost the loser.

The next day, 13 October, HERO lost CNC-4V not to Provi but to its own bookkeeping: a sovereignty-transfer alt corporation ran out of ISK to pay its sov bills while the managing pilot was away from the keyboard, and the system dropped into Stain Wagon hands before HERO, TEST and Northern Coalition. could grab it back. EVE News24's editor riverini flagged the whole S25C-K episode as a war story rather than a clean after-action report, complete with Blue Ice's tactical commentary: HERO's Caracal brawl wing failed, switched to heavy-missile Caracals, lost one dreadnought out of a capital group of around twenty-five, and the system flickered through Unclaimed as Pandemic Legion drifted in and out. It was a pyrrhic stretch for both sides - fields and territorial-claim units won at a cost that bought no decisive advantage.

The Tengu turnaround

Through September and October the war quietly changed shape, because Provi-Bloc changed. Its fleet numbers, which had started the war at a thin eighty to ninety pilots a call, climbed as the campaign dragged on, and Provi retired the aging Prophecy sentry doctrine for a Tengu one. The exact size of a Provi Tengu fleet depended on the fight: a seventy-strong Tengu wing recaptured S25C-K, while the systems lost back in August were retaken by fleets running a hundred and twenty to a hundred and seventy hulls. Either way, the doctrine that had been pushed off its own gates in August was now the doctrine doing the pushing.

On 17 and 18 October Provi came for 7MD-S1, the first system it had lost. A hundred and seventy Provi Tengus met a hundred and twenty HERO Eagles, and this time it was HERO's logistics dying "four a minute" until, with Pandemic Legion piling in, HERO disengaged and Provi took the infrastructure hub. The very next day Provi went after UL-7I8, the last system HERO had grabbed at the war's start. The four-hour fight pitted a hundred and twenty Provi Tengus against a hundred and forty HERO Eagles and twenty TEST Ishtars; two hundred and nineteen ships died, and Provi, realising HERO could not dispute the field, ignored the elusive Eagle fleet and ground down the territorial-claim unit instead. Both retaken systems were handed to Evictus., which took its first sovereignty as part of Provi-Bloc.

By 19 October the recovery was complete enough to be loud about. Yulai Federation, one of Provi-Bloc's core members, released a propaganda video in which CoreBloodBrothers declared that the war on HERO "would never end," that Provi would keep roaming HERO space month on month, and that his people were "having some of the best content of their lives." It was the verbatim line the war would be remembered by, and even betwen the bravado there was a real claim underneath it: an open-door coalition outnumbered and on the back foot in August had, two months later, turned the war around without abandoning a single one of its principles.

The peace deal

The end came not from a battle but from a patch. Late on the night of 26 October, with the Phoebe expansion looming, Lychton Kondur dispatched a mail headed "HERO Coalition - PROVIDENCE SKIRMISH UPDATE" to the executors of HERO's alliances (the mail is timestamped 27 October 2014). Phoebe was about to introduce jump fatigue and slash capital jump ranges, mechanics that would make a long, capital-supported campaign across the far reaches of Catch untenable for both sides. "As we prepare for Phoebe changes," Kondur wrote, "we have had to take a hard look at our current strategic objectives." Effective immediately, all hostilities against Provi-Bloc sovereignty ceased.

The terms restored the pre-war border. HERO would no longer contest the seven northern-Catch systems and declared them "rightful property of Providence": 7MD-S1, S25C-K, BR-N97, IS-R7P, UL-7I8, G-AOTH and ERVK-P. The one concession HERO kept was ERVK-P itself, which it would continue to use as a "Freeport" system open to its pilots. The two coalitions agreed to remain standing-neutral, to exercise a "good neighbor policy" and unite against common enemies, to settle any future violations diplomatically, and to keep a secure diplomatic channel open against spies. The war that had started with a broken handshake over ERVK-P ended with HERO ceding everything but ERVK-P - and keeping that one as a doorway rather than a prize.

Best content of their lives

"Best content of their lives" became the war's epitaph, and it cemented Provi-Bloc as EVE's beloved-underdog content hub for years afterward. The deeper legacy was a vindication of Not Red Don't Shoot under fire. Provi had been invaded by a numerically superior coalition and had held its open-door region by out-organising the attacker - switching doctrines on the fly and calling the Russian banners - rather than by closing the door or compromising the principle that made Providence Providence. The doctrine the 2010 war had ruled a dinosaur had been tested by fire again, and this time it came out the other side.

HERO's own story curdled afterward. Once it was free of the Provi war, Pandemic Legion, no longer needed as an occasional ally, decided to move against HERO directly. The fights between them grew increasingly savage, and by 2015 the rookie coalition would fragment into the post-Phoebe Phoebe Freeport Republic. But in the autumn of 2014 the verdict on the HERO War was clear: the newbies had come for Providence, taken seven systems off it in a month, and given it back two months later - and Providence, having very nearly lost, had instead found the best content of its life.