Introduction
It has been a long time since faction wars was launched by CCP. In a nutshell, faction wars is the Gallente and Minmattar vs the Ammar and Caldari. For a long time the Gallente were devastating the Caldari in faction wars, but upon my return to the militia I discovered that almost the entire Tama->Old Man Star pipe was...caldari!
So what happened? How did the Gallente fall from their complete and total tactical and technological superiority? Well, that's what this article will explore.
Gallente Guns
From the start, the gallente have a lot going for them. First of all, they are naturally better at close range combat as wells as logistics. Let's be honest, armor tanking is superior to shield tanking. If you have ever been in a POS siege or a titan attack, its only armor repping because the armor won't heal itself automatically.
Missile Nerf
Missiles are not as formidable as they used to be. They are not a terrible weapon, and have several strengths such as the ability to fire at many ranges with the same ammunition and an almost guaranteed hit (only breaks when dealing with interceptors, the fastest crows for example) at a reduced damage output. Unfortionately, this reduced damage of missiles has made it harder for the average caldari mission runner to pvp. This made a massive DPS inbalance between the Gallente and Caldari.
"Our Drones will Block out the Sun"
The gallente depend on drones.......a lot of drones......So many drones that it can nearly crash a server node in lo sec. When these drones are released, the ensuing lag storm will not only eat all performance from the battle, but from the entire system. However, once assigned to a target drones automatically attack the next aggressing target, so they work independent of lag under the proper conditions.
FOOM (Dead Parrot Shoppe)
FOOM is a corporation that used to drift in and out of faction wars on the gallente side. They used to run the highly (if briefly) successful alliance Bruce that controlled all of Fountain. Therefore, when they applied their talents to faction wars (which was dominated by noobs) they were spectacular.
Moar Plexing!
The gallente have always done more plexing than the other factions. The gallente had a complete tactical superiority in both the pvp and pve aspects of faction wars. They used to open plexes all the time. Unfortionately, the caldari did not want to plex for the most part. This created a "PVE Gap".
So What Happened?
How did they fall from this faction wars grace? The first thing that changes was FOOM. FOOM was not content to faction pvp forever, and they drifted back to their cove in 0.0 to slumber and feed. This equalized the monetary and skill playing fields of everyone on both sides.
Next, CCP actually made drone models non-mandatory to render. Since drones are now simply damage in this situation, this reduced lag immensely. Now that the PC can skip the rendering step for these tiny specs of models; and therefore the process of scaling down the model with distance; lag was reduced.
Then, we have more PVE on the part of the Caldari. In my recent visit to the militia, I saw a lot more people interested in plexing than last time. This also seems to coincide nicely with the fact that all those former gallente systems are now caldari! Gallente still plex, but defensives are working nicely at closing them off.
Those noobs mentioned before have become more experienced. We have better FCs now, and the weird ones seem to all be gone. In short, people know how to fly their ship now.
More recently, missiles got a slight buff with the renovated stealth bombers. Now all the stealth bomber people are useful in a fleet.
Well, it's been an interesting turn of events that is not done developing. The Gallente lost their grip, and so can the Caldari.
