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Everything you need to know about EVE Online: Havoc
J
Julian Benson
With the release of the new EVE Online expansion Havoc, you can join either the Angel Cartel or Guristas factions and earn loyalty points by embracing criminality across the galaxy of New Eden. You can cash in those rewards for a range of new, powerful ships that will aid you in your skull and crossbones-y ways.
However, the most significant impact of this pirate-focused expansion is developer CCP threading these anarchic pilots into the game’s existing faction warfare.
Causing a ruckus
In 2022’s Uprising expansion, two warzones formed in New Eden. In one region of these star systems, the Amarr and Minmatar militias battle for control, and in the other, the Caldari and Gallente armies are locked in conflict. These faction wars are never-ending tugs-of-war where players aligned to the different militias earn points and rewards for savaging each other in open warfare, as well as seizing and defending territory. Havoc adds pirates to the mix to make things more complicated and dangerous for everyone.
Pirates don’t participate in the actual tug-of-war; instead, individual systems become the target of pirate corruption. From an initial Insurgency, where pirates create a Forward Operating Base in one of the warzone’s systems, corruption spreads to neighboring regions as pirate players commit crimes in the contested space. When enough areas become corrupted, the initial target system becomes weakened and available for capture by either militia battling in that warzone.
In this way, pirates can shake up the stagnant frontlines of Faction Warfare. Minmatar players may see one of their safe systems become the target of pirate attack, for example, and race to defend it from the spreading corruption. If they don’t suppress the chaos, they will see their space become vulnerable to an Amarr capture.
As systems become more corrupted, pirates can revel in the chaos. They will receive more significant loot drops from PvP kills, and technologies usually outlawed in low-sec systems will become available. For instance, interdiction bubbles, usually only available in null-sec, become available, allowing you to get even more PvP kills by disabling a target’s warp drive, which traps them beneath your assault.
The long arm of the war
It’s not all wins for the pirates, though. During an Insurgency, militia-aligned players can fight to impose law and order on a system, which suppresses corruption. When a player launches an attack on another player in low-sec, they earn themselves criminal status; if a militia player kills criminals and collects their bounties, they will earn suppression points.
The higher the suppression score of a system, the more players earn for bounties. Plus, key system infrastructure, like gates and stations, will receive additional security with upgraded sentry guns. If a militia pushes enough of the threatened systems to maximum suppression, the pirates’ Forward Operating Base will become susceptible to attack. With the base destroyed, the militia will retain control of the system, preventing it from becoming vulnerable to capture.
Flying the flag
While the idea of being a pirate may be attractive enough to sign up with the Angel Cartel or Guristas, for those of us needing a bit more motivation, CCP has released a slew of new ships available to faction members. With these new heavily-armed ships, you’ll have an edge when getting those PvP kills in Insurgency regions.
Gurista players have access to the Mamba-class destroyer and the Alligator-class battlecruiser. Both of these vessels can be loaded up with missile batteries and come loaded with drone boat bonuses and shield resistances, making for a pair of tough ships that can dish out significant damage at a distance.
Angel Cartel members can get the Mekubal-class destroyer and Khizriel-class battlecruiser. These vessels focus on maneuverability, thanks to warp bonuses and their high top speeds. You’ll need to earn Loyalty Points to pick them up from the faction store, so get out there and cause some mayhem.
The real star of the new ships, however, is the long-awaited Azariel Titan. CCP first revealed the ship back in 2017. Back then, it was just a piece of concept art, but players have been calling for it to make its way into New Eden ever since.
This vast Angel Cartel titan is built for speed and high damage. As an Angel Cartel ship, it has boosts to its warp speed and damage-per-second. This means it’s perfect for rapidly increasing one side’s power in a firefight, warping in and barraging the enemy before warping away again before it can get outgunned.
Let slip the spreadsheets of war
Havoc isn’t all space doubloons and peglegs; one of the less-glitzy additions is a significant set of quality-of-life improvements for the players who run EVE Online’s corporations.
Corporations are EVE’s equivalent of guilds. In recent years, CCP has been giving these groups more organizational powers, providing leaders with means of motivating and directing their members. A significant tool added in this year’s Viridian expansion was Corporation Projects. These player-created missions effectively let corp leaders help towards the group’s goals en masse. If they wanted to build a titan, for instance, they can create a shopping list of items they need, and members can contribute to that goal by crafting, buying, or stealing the resources required.
However, the corporation projects still had a lot of admin involved. Once players completed a project, leaders had to pay what was owed to each member manually. That will no longer be the case in Havoc, which takes away a major administrative headache.
The new expansion also brings a stack of new project types. Leaders can now reward members for scanning cosmic signatures, capturing and defending territory in faction warfare, destroying other players in PvP, manufacturing specific items, and repairing their allies’ ships.
It may not sound like much, but there are all tools to make players play together better and with more direction. One criticism of EVE, particularly for new players, is that with so many possible ways to spend your time in the galactic sandbox, it can be hard to know what to do next. These corporation projects give players a little nudge toward productive ways to while away the hours in New Eden.
So, whether you choose to join one of the new pirate factions and fly the New Eden equivalent of the Jolly Roger, or to instead take up arms against them in faction warfare, there is a great deal to check out in the Havoc expansion. But even if you want to leave all those battles to the PvP players, the quality of life enhancements to Corporation Projects are likely to have a big impact on your day-to-day play in EVE Online.
EVE Online is available on the Epic Games Store.