Batten down your hatches with this EVE guide to preparing for war. Included are tips for getting ahead of your enemies, keeping your corporation supplied, and protecting your personal ISK-making ability.

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This is the second in a two-part series on gearing up for large-scale EVE PvP, especially in null-sec space. These tips will help you protect your ships and ISK flow, while making sure you can keep your corporation going, even when things get tough. For the first guide in this series, go here.

Pre-War Transport Of EVE Goods

6. Consolidate Regional Assets

If you are anything like me, you acquire stacks of materials all over whatever region you inhabit. Perhaps you grab items that are underpriced from the market, or nab stacks of neat stuff from hangar clearance contracts. Or maybe you just find it easier to leave ships and gear all over a region, rather than keep things consolidated in a single station. This is especially likely in the case of explorers, who must roam all over a region to run sites, and often end up leaving loot or supplies in little caches, all over the place. In any case, if things are about to get rough for your alliance, you should prepare by selling off and centralizing your goods.

This chiefly serves two purposes:

• It allows you to better utilize your available resources in the defense of your region and achievement of your corporate goals.
• If things go really badly and your alliance begins losing territory, you will be able to evacuate more easily and more effectively than if your goods were scattered throughout a region.

Some tips to reducing the amount of work involved:

• If you have things that might be worth something on the local market, do not hesitate to throw them on the market, just to have less stuff to fetch and haul.
• Though most null-sec regions do not have a very active courier contracts market, it might be worth throwing up some of your stuff on courier contracts. Even with relatively low pay, people will still pick up the contracts if they are heading that way, anyway.
• Be sure to grab the stuff from your planetary customs offices, if applicable!

Everything that you move should be put either in your corporate/alliance "capital system", or else a system that ideal for evacuation (be it near another region or even an NPC station). The idea here is that, should the worst happen, you will not need to waste time worrying about your stuff or flying all over an enemy-infested region to pick up stacks of crap.

7. Evacuate Non-Essential Goods

As critical as consolidating all of your miscellaneous goods into one area is, it is even more important to reduce your overall null-sec ISK-investment footprint in order to lower your personal stakes during a big war. This is good firstly because it keeps things in the game from stressing you out, and secondly because it means you can live to fight another day, economically.

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The key is to look at your (hopefully consolidated) gear and make some hard decisions about what is needed and what is not. Evacuating anything that would make you quit EVE if you lost it is a no-brainer. Non-critical ship blueprint originals should probably be moved to high-sec, as should tech II or capital ship component blueprints. Anything that you leave behind should be sellable at a profit, small and easily evacuated, or else necessary for your war effort. Blueprints, invention parts, ships that you aren't using, et cetera.

The idea here is that if you end up in a worst-case scenario with your goods trapped in a station, you should only suffer the minimum personal impact possible. With less at stake personally, you can spend more time fighting and less time trying to protect your personal property.

General EVE PvP And War Preparations

8. Install Jump Clones

Any stations where you have a significant amount of gear should have at least one jump clone in them. Furthermore, you should have at least one extra jump clone in the region, just to sell off stuff, once you leave. If you have a market alt character, it may as well leave a clone there. Seeding regions that are usually populated and manipulating there markets can be an extremely effective way to earn ISK, without too much ISK. This is especially true during tumultuous periods where old corporations are evacuating (and fire-sale their goods) and new corporations are moving in (in desperate need of the stuff you bought at fire-sale prices).

Many (too many) is the time that my alliance has been kicked out of an area, only to have yours truly find a silver lining in the form of stacks of EVE ISK. It's also tremendously relaxing: you're docked, the worst has already happened in that your station has been taken by your enemies. Sell some stuff, buy some stuff, put up some region-wide buy orders for tech II modules at insultingly low prices, and bounce out to another jump clone whenever you're done.

9. Batten Down The Hatches

There are many things that people, corporations, and alliances can do to harden their region against invasion.

Some ideas that may or may not apply to your particular situation:

• Avoid giving the enemy "fun" by engaging them under unfavorable circumstances. It kind of stinks, but often the best strategy for dealing with enemies is to bore them. That means no combat, no conversations, and no EVE forum posts about how much war sucks.
• Make sure that your starbases are filled with Strontium Clathrates, armed with guns full of ammunition, and hopefully fitted with some shield hardeners and electronic warfare. The goal here is to make attacking them as annoying as possible.
• If you life in null-sec, you may consider dropping some cheap Mobile Small Warp Disruptors around your living space to make movement there inconvenient. If you make some bookmarks that allow you to bypass them, so much the better. Don't forget to share them with the rest of your corporation!

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10. Research Your Enemies

As in real life wars, information is power. The more you know about your EVE Online enemies, the better you can fight them.

Some practical ideas:

• Figure out what time zone your enemies operate in, and time your customs offices, starbases, and sovereignty infrastructure to come out of reinforcement mode at a time that would be inconvenient to them. Shooting for 4am, local time usually works out.
• Look at your enemies' killboard or search for them on BattleClinic. Try to figure out what ships they use, and what tactics they seem predisposed toward. If they all fly Drakes, you know it might be best to use EM damage. If there are Nyx supercarriers appearing on their kill mails, you know to avoid random bait.
• Detective work like the tip above can really pay off. It may even reveal that your enemies are based in an area you did not expect. Are there a lot of loss mails from your enemies at a particular place, in non-PvP ships? It may be a good idea to pay them a visit.
• Check on EVE Gate or battle clinic for other organizations that might be angry at your enemies. It's entirely possible that they would be willing to cooperate against them. Find some names, hit them up with chats in-game, and see what happens.
• Finally, learn what your enemies want. Usually, they will tell you what the purpose of their aggression is, whether it is to extort EVE ISK or to take your space. Still, sometimes the concession needed can be something more palatable, like removing a guy from your corporation that has been scamming people.