User:Uryence/FGT

Just like ships, gangs and fleets also vary wildly in their abilities and tactics. The changing "meta" of EVE and the wide variety of doctrines used by different groups in game makes any attempt to describe precise gang and fleet compositions in detail futile. This page gathers some notes on broader principles, which can help new FCs and scouts assess threats and targets.

Purpose

The most important aspect of any fleet is its purpose. Why is this group in space?

Some fleets have no higher purpose than to find fights and have fun. Such fleets are sometimes more likely to take riskier fights, because their stakes are lower.

Some fleets have no geographically-fixed objective, but do have a strategic purpose:

• a sovereign nullsec alliance might send roaming fleets into enemy territory to deny ISK-making opportunities and inflict financial and morale damage by destroying PvP and PvE targets.
• a high-sec corporation at war might send out a fleet to hunt war targets.

Some fleets have both a strategic purpose and one or more geographically-fixed objectives:

• a nullsec coalition might want to push into some specific systems, contesting the local sovereignty, destroying enemy structures and setting up their own.
• a wormhole corporation might want to take over or to defend a particular wormhole.

Fleets with a higher goal are less likely to take fights which will put that goal at risk. So, for example, they are unlikely to pause during travel to fight an unrelated fleet simply "for the content". However, they are more likely to put their ships at risk in order to secure that goal: a fleet might accept near-total destruction in order to bring down a particular structure or defend a key asset.

A fleet's likely purpose can be guessed at from the corporations involved, from its size, from the ships involved, and from its direction and nature of travel. A small group of fast, skirmishing ships, piloted by characters from a corporation known to live in a wormhole with a nullsec static for raiding, which emerge from a wormhole and start racing to nearby ratting systems is probably a group of small-gang pilots looking for fights and content, not a strategic assault on the region.