Rich Stanton has been playing player-driven space MMO Eve Online – read parts one and two here. In this third and final part, Rich joins a corporation and goes to war.

In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma an idealistic young Italian called Fabrice del Dongo runs off to join Napoleon’s army, and ends up at the Battle of Waterloo. He gets bonked on the head, sees soldiers running around, shoots a retreating opponent, and gets stabbed in the leg by one of his own side. The whole thing’s a mess, Fabrice has no idea what’s going on, and he returns to Parma broke and dejected, wondering if he really was at Waterloo. By the end of the novel he’s an old man, and spoken of with reverence as one of Napoleon’s key captains.

Reader – when Brave liberated the HED-GP system, I was one of their key captains.

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“OK guys I wantcha to align to Vard annnd… warp. That gate is green on land.”

Our FC – Fleet Commander – takes EVE very seriously indeed. This is great because I have no idea what I’m doing. The soothing computerised voice of the ship fills my ears: “Warp drive active.” I arrive out of warp and, per the FC’s instructions, jump through the waiting Stargate.

“I got three purples, four, OK we’re all here.” The FC’s taking care of his newbie charges, babying us through the basics. Our scout is already in this system, checking out the various instances we can warp to for anything interesting. His reedy voice fills comms: “Not much on d-scan, oh waitaminnit I got… a Merlin and a Slicer in the open?”

“Guys how brave are we feelin’?” The FC doesn’t wait for an answer, and starts to jump the fleet while barking at the scout. “Let’s go! Get in there and scram ’em, I want webs!”

I watch our warp drives activate one-by-one, as space begins to shift around the fleet. I double-check my keyboard hand’s position. My throat tightens. Time to die.

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Rich Stanton has been playing EVE Online. In the first of a three-part diary series, he explains the tools and apps he uses to make sure he never wastes a minute of valuable space time.

It is often said, and not without justification, that EVE Online is more of a spreadsheet simulator than a space game. At the very core of this magnificent creation are the spaceships, and shooting from them are not lasers and missiles but tables and text; endless columns of statistics that nestle in your monitor’s corners and burst forth with inelegant bravado. For everything in EVE Online, and this game is as dense as a concrete fruitcake, there is an explanation that leads in multiple other directions. This bewitching and bamboozling universe swallows unwary players whole.

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