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Phase One: Sustained Adversity

This is both the most obvious and the least well understood phase of the cascade. Adversity can take many forms, all of which amount to "bad things happening". An alliance whose towers are being sieged by an enemy force is experiencing adversity. So is an alliance whose ratters and miners are being ganked, or whose jump bridges are being camped or disabled, or who loses a capital fleet in a dramatic fashion. When thinking about adversity, commanders often assume that massive, crushing loss is the most effective way to send an alliance into a cascade. Taking out a capital fleet or a titan is the most commonly-cited method of sending an alliance down the tubes. It is also completely, utterly wrong.

Psychology has shown that humans have an incredible capacity to cope with great tragedy and personal adversity. When asked if they could imagine life as a paraplegic or after suffering some other sort of horrific event, most respondents confidently assert that it would devastate them and leave them permanently adrift. Yet in practice, victims of awful fate swiftly recover their 'set point' of personal happiness. If the ability to mentally cope with great loss did not exist, the species would have certainly died out by now. In alliance terms, collective 'great tragedies' are terribly ineffective at sending an alliance into a cascade. Innumerable Titans have been destroyed, capital fleets wiped out with shocking ease, and these events do not reliably correlate with cascade. It is true that a major loss can have an impact, but only as part of a larger context of sustained adversity.

Why is this? Loss in isolation is something that people are wired to rationalize away. A titan loss can be written off to pilot error, lag, or the fault of the pilot lighting the titan's cyno field. The loss of a capital fleet becomes a one-time affair, the error of a bad fc, or made irrelevant by proclaiming it 'already replaced'. Despite this, people continue to assert that if only a titan or a capital massacre can be achieved, the enemy will surely cascade. This is because of the inherent flaws in human prospection; we're terrible at imagining how we and others will emotionally react to events in the future, so we imagine how we would react to a titan loss, come up with 'Oh god, that would be horrible, I'd be completely demoralized,' and assume that our enemies would react the same way. Wrong!

Some examples: Band of Brothers lost several capital fleets in laughably one-sided battles as well as multiple titans through its history, yet these 'major losses' did not dent them. Nor did having all of their sovereignty removed by a spy in their ranks. In cases where BoB gave up and failed, such as the fight for DG- in Detorid and the Querious campaign, it was after a long period of sustained attrition and many small failures, rather than major losses. Goonswarm has lost more capital fleets in embarrassing ways than I can count, including losing our first titan. In the first invasion of Delve in early 2008, Red Alliance lost a titan but this did not impact their participation in the offensive at all. In fact, the whole coalition suffered what remains one of the largest losses in EVE history (before the disbanding and purging of BoB) during the attack on a BoB CSAA in F-T. Not only did the whole coalition lose 100+ capitals in order to destroy the CSAA, the CSAA was completely empty! Yet no failure cascades ensued.

Rather than relying on shocking incidents, adversity must be sustained and mundane to the point of being banal. Regular fleet losses, regular ganks, the boring stuff which no one bothers to report which still sucks. Unglamorous, everyday loss. A war which takes place in intense bursts does put an alliance at risk of cascade. In Feythabolis and Esoteria, RED.Overlord, Against All Authorities and Stain Empire launched attacks on Goonswarm stations at an extremely slow pace. A station would be attacked and captured, but then there would be weeks of time before a new attack occurred. Because the adversity was not sustained in time, even though Goonswarm was undeniably losing stations, the process had little impact. Had those losses been part of a nonstop campaign of conquest, things would have been very different.

Adversity must also be inescapable. If an assault only impacts one system at a time, and there is very little hostile activity elsewhere within the victim alliance's territory, there is no great risk of cascade. Pilots can choose to put themselves at danger or avoid it at will, so they feel little pressure to change their views of their alliance. This is one advantage of having a geographically large empire; it is difficult for an enemy to put inescapable pressure on your pilots until you have lost more space. Smaller alliances with little territory are often rapidly crushed because it is simple for a hostile force to ensure that every pilot in the victim alliance is under pressure at all times. Empire does not count as an escape; not only do attacking alliances often declare war on their intended victims, a pilot hiding in Empire is not a pilot fighting for his alliance's territory in nullsec.