The Venal War (2022): Thirty Men and a Cursed Region

The Venal War (2022): Thirty Men and a Cursed Region

Some EVE wars matter because of how big they were. This one matters because of how small it was. In January 2022 the largest power sphere in the north declared war on roughly thirty men. It then spent five weeks failing to kill one of their structures, escalated to a supercapital and titan fleet to finally finish the job, and got mocked for it by its own line members. B0SS Alliance lost a staging Fortizar and won almost everything else: the timers, the killboards on most nights, the narrative, and - months later - a hundred billion ISK in "reparations" out of the enemy leader's own wallet. The whole thing happened in Venal, a region that has been eating other people's ambition for twenty years.

The curse of Venal

Venal is NPC-nullsec: the home of the Guristas pirate cabal, a region nobody owns because nobody can. There is no sovereignty to capture and no station to take - the in-game stations belong to the Guristas, so any group living there can always dock up and wait out an invader. That is the first thing to understand about this war, because it is why a thirty-man alliance could not actually be evicted no matter how many ships its enemies brought.

It is also a region with a long reputation for swallowing the people who try to organise it. In October 2003 the New Venal Alliance and the Northern Alliance fought over the region for five weeks; the war ended only when Taggart Transdimensional's founding CEO Ragnar resigned and his successor Gunny P called a ceasefire. Years later, near the end of December 2010, Pandemic Legion and the Northern Coalition fought one of the era's great supercapital battles at Y-W1Q3 over Venal's Technetium moons - at least 126 super-capitals on grid, around a thousand pilots, eight titans dead, and the Northern Coalition holding the field. Even in the quieter moon-mining renter years the pattern held: in April 2017 a Triglavian Naval Expeditionary Force tower in Venal lost its first dysprosium moon when a defender fumbled the stront reload under a 500-strong batphone of Guardians of the Galaxy and Pandemic Horde. The region has a way of producing five-week wars, humbled empires, and ambitions that come apart at the worst possible moment. In 2022 it produced all three again.

Thirty men in a Guristas region

By 2019 a small English-speaking community had taken root in Venal - traders building a market hub at 6NJ8-V, ratters learning the Guristas diamond-rat standings, and a recently restarted alliance that kept to itself with few if any blues. That was B0SS Alliance - Brotherhood of Spacers - and over the next two years they made the region home. They were never big. By their own account they ran about thirty core players, living off blops drops, small-gang roams and the occasional fleet fight, and enjoying what NPC nullsec had to offer.

What turned a quiet content alliance into the protagonist of a war was Fraternity. Through 2021, while the rest of nullsec was consumed by the great southern war, the Chinese-timezone alliance Fraternity - FRT, often called "the Chinese," though Venal residents were careful to note that what mattered was the timezone, not the nationality - overran the pocket and anchored the Winter Coalition's reach into it. Its structures saturated the region; B0SS pilots described waking to dozens of fresh structure timers a day and being outnumbered something like twenty to one for most of the clock. B0SS answered with a guerilla campaign - hundreds of timers contested in a month, constant entosising of Fraternity renter space, and a celebrated defence of a Fortizar against long odds - until Fraternity came to the table and signed a peace treaty. Venal was already churnimg before its most famous war even started.

Glass Venal

On 21 January 2022, Northern Coalition. and Pandemic Legion announced a campaign to "Glass Venal." The reason was never made clear to the people on the receiving end; weeks in, B0SS's leadership still had no word from NC. or PL on a motive. That first evening the attackers used their move-op numbers, around three hundred pilots, to reinforce the B0SS staging Fortizar and anchor a forward Astrahus off its grid.

B0SS did not roll over. On the opening day they bridged onto an NC. and PL carrier operation that was reinforcing one of their other fortizars, caught a tackled Thanatos as the carriers withdrew, and then traded blows with a Winter Coalition Sacrilege fleet on a gate in Z3U-. They drew first blood and made a point of it. When B0SS moved on the forward Astrahus the next day, the attackers escalated hard - calling in Fraternity, TEST, Slyce and others for something like seven hundred pilots - and B0SS stood down. But on the following timer, when the attackers' Muninns finally began shooting the fort, B0SS undocked its battleship doctrine and allied carriers cynoed in from VOLTA; NC. warped off rather than take the fight, and the structure repaired.

That set the pattern. The asymmetry was enormous and B0SS hammered it relentlessly: hundreds of active pilots in Northern Coalition., Pandemic Legion and TEST against an alliance whose all-time peak was around a hundred and fifty. As the B0SS second-in-command spongyguy24 put it, this was "a leadership group of nearly 50 attacking a leadership group of 3." Even so, the attackers were not a clean coalition. Pandemic Horde - Gobbins's alliance - sat the early weeks out, and the contingent that did show earned a mocking nickname, POOH, for PanFam Operating Outside of Horde. Fraternity was still bound by its treaty and at first only shielded other people's structures from behind it. Participation was contested even among the named attackers: a Slyce pilot denied being there at all, and TEST was said to have formed dozens of pilots without ever bridging them into the early fights. The defenders, for their part, were no pure underdogs - VOLTA, WE FORM BL0B, Rote Kapelle and a recurring Brave batphone were a constant presence, and the attackers never tired of pointing it out. Both sides, honestly, blobbed.

The fort that would not die

The grind ran through February, timer after timer, and B0SS kept winning the ones that mattered. They held an Astrahus armor timer in their fallback system on 13 February and the staging Fortizar's armor timer on Valentine's Day. At a minor Astrahus on 16 February, VOLTA's Lokis nearly wiped the attacking Ferox fleet and B0SS dreadnoughts finished it; they beat back shield timers on the 17th and the 21st. They lost some too, badly, when their intel failed. By B0SS's own tally they had won well over half the war's objectives - 41 of 96 timers, they reckoned, had gone PAPI's way - and the whole-war damage came to only about a hundred billion ISK in structures and destroyed capitals, the scale of a skirmish rather than the trillions of a real bloc war.

What B0SS could not lose was the propaganda war, and the attackers admitted it. A four-part reddit write-up turned the campaign into a genuine cultural artefact, and a Northern Coalition. newbro conceded in his own retrospective that B0SS simply had the better story - an underdog, and a marketing team that made the most of it. The centrepiece was a Downfall parody, "Vince Draken receives his daily Venal war report," that cast the Northern Coalition. leader in the bunker scene; commenters were calling the war over long before the fort fell.

The one card left for the attackers was Fraternity. The treaty was supposed to hold until a reset in March, but with the campaign stalemated, Fraternity's leader Noraus turned up shooting anyway. Fraternity had broken the peace and, in the phrase that became the second chapter's title, "assumed direct control" - the heavy lifting the rest of the attack had not managed on its own.

PAPI's First Successful War

By late February the attackers stopped pretending it was only for content. B0SS narrated the escalation as a slow reveal - deathclones, then supers, then Horde itself, until PAPI was doing whatever it took to win against an opponent a fraction of its size. On 24 February, after VOLTA phoned in The Initiative. - an Imperium alliance, fighting here on the defenders' side - Gobbins finally committed Pandemic Horde and some two hundred Muninns to a fight B0SS already reckoned lost. On 27 February the staging Fortizar at QHJ-FW died. A Northern Coalition. pilot watching from a cheap Jackdaw read off the swarm that killed it - hundreds of Rokhs and Thanatoses, Muninns and Eagles, Nyxes and Onyxes, "and of course the Titans who came at the end to collect the killmail." The titans, by a participant's own admission, were dropped at the last minute purely to get onto the killmails.

The closing write-up titled the whole thing perfectly: "PAPI's First Successful War." The joke told itself. This was the same PanFam sphere that had besieged the Imperium in World War Bee 2 the year before and lost, ground down to the M2-XFE titan slaughter and then thrown into reverse. Now it had needed five weeks and most of a bloc to dislodge thirty men from a region nobody could even own. The attackers' own people felt it: one former Northern Coalition. pilot admitted the deployment had started as fun content and curdled, once TEST, Slyce, Fraternity and Horde were dragged in, into "just another big blue donut." Reddit was harsher, and the sharpest line tied the affair back to the war PAPI had actually lost - that for all the supers it was willing to drop on thirty men in NPC Venal, it never "had the balls to do this in 1DQ."

Aftermath: the curse reasserts itself

B0SS did what NPC-nullsec residents always do: they fell back. With the Fortizar gone they made the short hop three systems over to the unassailable NPC station at PF-QHK and carried on. Nobody had been evicted.

Then the curse paid out. In September 2022 a B0SS-linked player ran a con worthy of EVE's hall of fame. Posing as Brave leadership, he convinced Noraus that Brave's sovereignty was about to collapse and that Fraternity could seize the space for a price, paid up front. When his own forgeries in Gimp and Microsoft Paint fell short, he hired a young Fiverr photo editor in Bangladesh named Sharmin to fake convincing wallet and character screenshots, and routed the whole deal through the trusted neutral Chribba as escrow - precisely because Noraus could not be relied on to keep his word. The first hundred-billion-ISK installment came through Chribba; when the promised collapse never happened, the second was refunded but the first was gone for good. The scammer handed the entire sum to B0SS's ship-replacement program, reasoning that he had no real need for the ISK and that Fraternity had always owed B0SS for what it did in Venal. Fraternity had, in effect, paid B0SS reparations for the war - and would spend the months after dying to ships its own leader's stolen ISK had bought.

The war, in any case, was less an ending than a habit. B0SS stayed, Fraternity kept coming, and Venal kept producing the same lopsided spectacles for the same reasons. In December 2022 a single B0SS Fortizar in the region pulled more than 3,700 pilots into a seven-hour fight: Fraternity and Pandemic Horde brought capitals to break the timer, an Imperium fleet turned up to third-party for the defenders once again, a Hel supercarrier burned, and B0SS held the structure. The names and the numbers changed; the pattern did not.

The Venal War belongs to no leaderboard. It killed no titans worth remembering and moved no front line. But it is one of EVE's purest demonstrations of a few enduring truths: that NPC-nullsec underdogs can bloody a superpower; that a war can be won on reddit even while it is lost on grid; that the coalition which besieged an empire in 2021 could be made to look ridiculous evicting thirty men a year later; and that Venal, true to two decades of form, eats the ambition of whoever marches in to glass it.