Brave joined the Goons?

[Mara_Anni_Myn]

I am new to null sec politics. I saw the state of the goonion and the most recent meta show and was wondering:
Did the brave alliance just join the goons?

Could someone explain the situation to me?

[Gerard_Amatin]

Goons allied themselves with Brave.

They are still separate entities though, neither of them joined the other, except that they now are fighting on the same side in what is assumed to become the next large null sec war.

Null sec politics has three large blocs, consisting of WinterCo, PanFam and the Imperium, as well as some smaller groups.

Here’s a nice map:

Let me start the story end of the year '21.

I’ve been part of Brave for many years now and we just had a long war of Everyone else versus the Imperium behind us, which the Imperium won, so everyone else moved back to where their home was. Except as Brave our home was no more, so we had crashed on the couch of Fraternity (WinterCo) in Geminate to recover from that war for a short time.

Anyway, end of '21 Brave set everyone else to neutral (first time that happened for me, we’d never been without allies before) and tried to stand on their own feet in Pure Blind by taking some systems.

Lots of fun, we fought Banderlogs, Blob, many other small groups that were all in Pure Blind and we had small scale skirmishes all the time.

But then, about 8 months ago, Fraternity declared war on Volta and GTC to take their space. Brave, who did not want to see Fraternity take away the other small groups from the area and destroy the fun we had with plenty of neighbours to shoot, stood with Volta and GTC and formed a new temporary coalition to hold back Fraternity. B2 is the new name that you see on the sov map.

Even though WinterCo is a formidable force, due to the strong presence of the new coalition that did not let Fraternity take them one by one, and also due to timezone differences (Fraternity is mainly strong in China TZ and the other groups more in EUTZ and USTZ) the war progressed barely.

Fraternity paid various groups to increase their fighting chance outside CNTZ, for example they promised what was left of TEST space, paid a SIG from PanFam to fight for them as well as other groups I saw show up to fight for FRT over time, but didn’t make much progress anyway in those 8 months. They took a couple of systems in Pure Blind.

More recently the ‘third partying’ meme from PanFam’s SIG drew attention (they pretended to be a third party but were in fact helping FRT) and a little later their leader Gobbins pinged their alliance this (leaked) message

saying that “Main Horde will stay out the conflict for now, unless Goons are showing up or even pre-ping to a timer”.

This of course is a very tempting offer of content for Goons who have not had large combat action since the end of WWB2 (or like the Goons like to call it, Beeitnam).

In conclusion, a large part of null sec is already or is about to get involved in a fight in the North between:

• WinterCo backed by a SIG and the threat of full Panfam on one side

against

• the coalition of B2 (Brave and Blob, Volta as well as some other small groups living in the North like Banderlogs), strengthened by the people from FIRE who fled the south to crash on the couch of B2

I guess the Imperium (Goons and Init) felt left out and wanted to join in on the war, and they have no fond memories of PanFam or WinterCo since the last war, and have no interest in seeing the other main blocs grow even more.

As a Brave member I’m glad to see them on the battlefield this time as ally.

[Mara_Anni_Myn]

Thank you for the reply!

[Wyk_Bathana]

perfect summary Gerard
and, as an Init member, i hope we will shoot FRT and Horde soon together
if you see some logi rep coming from a blue fleet it will be me

[Geo_Eclipse_Oksaras]

As a former init member, do lots of damage

[Xuxe_Xu]

ITT: