EVE Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Now it's time to start building something beyond a gleam in your eye. You have your goal, you have your chosen form of government, now you commence building your alliance. You need to have a banner for people to rally around, a shared identity that pilots will be eager to buy into. Alliances in EVE are a dime a dozen, but most never get anywhere, and this has a lot to do with their core identity; what is the reason for your alliance's being, besides taking space? The most common identity for a spaceholding alliance is an ethnic one, an aggregation of people from one linguistic group or nationality. Other identities involve communities from outside of EVE, such as forum groups (Somethingawful.com, Ars Technica) or players of other games - 'Tribes' and 'Earth and Beyond' veterans have a significant presence in 0.0. Even if the identity is purely a gimmick or a silly in-joke, it puts your nascent alliance at an advantage over those without a cohesive sense of self, because a strong alliance identity is what will help you maintain your membership in the face of the vicissitudes of war.

Alright, you have a group of corporations ready to go! You've found a character with MegaCorp Management 5, you've paid the billion-isk fee, and you've recruited under the auspices of a core identity or gimmick and everyone involved knows who and how the show is run. Time to invade, right? Wrong - now you need income. Space is only claimed with control towers, and those are expensive; a fully-fit large tower costs upwards of a billion isk counting fuel and modules. The economic structure of Empire simply doesn't have the kind of cashflow needed to maintain an alliance for any length of time, so you're going to have to suck it up and mine some moons - after killing and running off the previous owners of those moons. Welcome to 0.0!

Dysprosium and promethium are 'Rarity 64' (r64) moon minerals, and they are the foundation of an alliance economy. Compared to the other classes of harvestable moon mineral, they're stupendously valuable - the raw output of one dysprosium moon nets about 11 billion isk per month at current prices, promethium between 6 and 8 billion. By contrast, the next most valuable mineral, cadmium, brings in perhaps 400m isk per month before reactions. It is the conquest of these moons that will be the first test of whether your alliance can 'hack it' in lawless space.

To begin with, pick a region with r64s which you think you might be able to handle - ideally speaking not a fully conquerable region yet, as you don't have the income for a sovereignty war. Use the Dotlan service to choose a lowsec or NPC 0.0 territory and begin scouting the moons listed there to find a likely target; using Outer Ring as an example, you'd send a pilot in a cloaking ship to scout each of the promethium and dysprosium moons to choose one that is relatively lightly defended and held by an organization you think your alliance might be able to handle.

When you have selected a target, it's time for your first real test: engaging your capital fleet, sieging the target r64, destroying it, replacing it with your own mining tower, and then defending it. This is, in microcosm, every major skill an alliance needs to survive in conquerable 0.0, with the exception of running a cynojammer takedown. The process of trying to capture r64s will teach you where your weaknesses are as an organization and give you valuable practice in setting up and managing towers. If you succeed, you'll soon be rolling in isk; take this money and keep it secure, ideally in the wallet of the alliance leader, and begin saving it for a 'tower fund' - this is your warchest.